Frenched Series Bundle (48 page)

him, my hand over my wide-open mouth, smothering a scream as my body pulsed around his for the first time. “Yes,” I breathed, the past and the present converging within me.

“Good girl. I want you to scream this time, like you wouldn’t then.”

I thought about trying to stay quiet just to defy him, but then I made the mistake of glancing down at his bare torso, at my name on his chest, at the way his abs flexed as he rocked his body into mine. Unable to stop myself, I cried out, again and again.

My head banged against the side of the car but I didn’t feel it—I felt nothing but his hot skin and hard cock, heard nothing but our gasps and cries in the falling darkness, imagined nothing but his body joined to mine until we came together and the world turned to liquid gold behind closed eyes.

Later we pulled the Amish quilt from the trunk and lay on our backs in a clearing near the orchard.

Nick’s hands were folded behind his head, and I rested my temple on his left bicep.

“What’s that one?” I pointed high above us, where stars glittered in the cloudless country night sky. “The one that looks like a W.” I tilted my head the other way. “Or maybe it’s an M.”

“That’s Cassiopeia.”

“Story, please?”

“She was beautiful, and a queen, so she had a pretty good thing going, but then she bragged that she and her daughter Andromeda were more beautiful than these other goddesses.”

“Never a good idea. Which goddesses?”

“Some sea goddesses, I think. So they went to

Poseidon, and he was pretty pissed, and said she had to sacrifice Andromeda to a sea monster to appease him.”

I gasped. “Did she?”

“She would have, but Perseus came along and saved Andromeda.”

“Perseus,” I mused. “Remind me about him.”

“He was this handsome chef with a big cock that—ow!”

I thumped him on the chest. “Come on, tell me.”

Nick rubbed his ribcage and went on. “OK, fine, although I like my version better. Perseus comes along and sees the lovely Andromeda tied to a chair at the edge of the sea, and being the awesome hero that he is, he kills the sea monster and rescues her. Cassiopeia can’t go unpunished, of course, so she gets placed in a throne in the sky, destined to spend all eternity circling the north celestial pole, half the time clinging to it so she doesn’t fall off.”

“Aha. Hard to look beautiful when you’re upside down. So what happened to Perseus and Andromeda?”

“They got married.”

I sighed. “Of course.”

“And they had nine children.”

“Yikes.”

“But she gets her own constellation too, right next to her mother’s. Right there, see?” With his right hand he drew a line across the sky.

“No.” I frowned, holding up my right hand too. “Show me.”

Taking my hand in his, he traced the outline of the stars with my finger. “See it now?”

“Yes.” Truthfully, I wasn’t sure I did, but it didn’t really matter. I just liked being here with him again, hearing the stories, and forgetting about our own lives for the moment. “And what about that one over there?” I pointed to another cluster of stars and relaxed as Nick began to talk about them, recounting for me stories his father and grandfather had told to him. After a while, I moved my head to his chest and closed my eyes, but he kept talking in a low, soothing voice, smoothing my hair back from my face and pretending not to notice the tears soaking his shirt.

#

By the time we drove back to the house, most of the cars were gone from the driveway and the parlor windows were dark. “We stayed out there too long,” I fretted. “You should have been at the party with your family.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. Noni understands.”

“What does she know?”

Nick turned the engine off. “About us?”

I nodded.

“Nothing. I mean, just that we broke up. She knows I screwed it up, though. She never let me forget it.”

That made me smile. “I love Noni.”

“She loves you too.”

“Did she want us to get back together?”

He shook his head. “No. She pretty much said it was a good thing you’d moved on because you were too good for me anyway.”

I laughed, in spite of everything. “Stop it. She adores you. Everyone does.”

“I am kind of adorable.”

I glanced at him and shrugged. “Kind of.”

With a grunt of frustration, he grabbed the back of my head and pulled my lips to his, kissing me hard. “You drive me crazy. Tell me you’ll do it forever.”

His plea squeezed my heart. “I can’t, Nick. I just don’t know.”

His hand loosened slightly, played in my hair. “What if…you know.” His eyes swept to my stomach. “Should we take a test?”

“I appreciate the whole
we
thing, Nick, but I don’t want you to feel like this traps us into anything, even if it’s positive.”

“I don’t feel that at all.” His eyes were steady on mine in the dark. “Not at all.”

My mouth fell open as I realized something. “You hope it’s positive, don’t you?”

“Not necessarily.” He dropped his hand from my hair to my shoulder. “But I wouldn’t think my life was over if it was. Would you?”

“Hell yes, I would.” I put my hand over my chest. “I’m not ready for it. We’re not ready for it. We have a history of rushing into things, and now we’re all fucked up, and no child deserves to be born to two people who’ve been divorced for seven years, made a sloppy mistake, and don’t even know what they want.”

“I know what I want.” His thumb brushed my cheek.

“Well, I don’t.” I looked away from his crestfallen expression. “And until I figure it out, we have to cool off.”

He took his hand off me. “OK. I understand.”

“Thank you.” I opened the car door and got out. Nick followed suit, putting a hand at the small of my back as we walked up the porch steps. I turned to him halfway up. “Nick, you have to stop touching me. Seriously. I can’t think when you do.”

He held up both hands. “OK, OK. Sorry.” We continued up the stairs. “I guess that means we can’t sleep together tonight, huh?”

“That’s exactly what that means.” It came out sharper than I intended and Nick stopped me before the screen door with a hand on my elbow.

“Are you still angry with me?” His face was solemn.

“About what?”

“Any of it. All of it.”

I closed my eyes briefly, let the question ruminate. To my surprise, I wasn’t. “No. You know what? I’m not angry anymore. And I’m sorry I snapped at you. I’m just sad and confused.”

He sighed heavily as he opened the door. “I think I liked it better when you were angry with me.”

#

Creak.

My eyes flew open as the unmistakable sound of the old springs beneath me groaned under added weight.

“Shhhh.” Nick’s scent filled my head as his warm body slid into the full-size bed behind me.

“Nick, what are you doing?” I whispered as he curled his body around mine.

“I love you,” he whispered back. “And I’m not giving up this time. Now go back to sleep.” He kissed the back of my head and tucked an arm around my stomach. “Night.”

I swallowed hard.

See? He lies
, said common sense.
He promised not to touch you. He said he’d let things cool off. He doesn’t know how to play by the rules. He’d be a terrible husband and father.

But his body was warm and cozy, his breathing deep and steady, lulling me back to sleep already.

I’d kick him out in the morning.

#

As it turned out, I didn’t get the chance to boot Nick out of my bed, because he was up before me again. I sat up and stretched, breathing in the smell of fresh coffee and---oh God, that scent! Was it…I sniffed the air like a bloodhound…Noni’s cinnamon buns?

I jumped out of bed and dressed in a navy blue romper, brushed my hair with a few frantic strokes and headed downstairs, recalling the breakfast Nick and Noni always made when we were here in the past. Huge, doughy rolls, sticky sweet with cinnamon and sugar and dripping with icing. I might have to go on another run today, but I was having one of those buns.

The aroma grew stronger at the bottom of the steps and I nearly floated into the kitchen, where Nick sat at the counter with a cup of coffee and Noni putzed around, cleaning up.

“Good morning,” she sang. “Did the noise wake you? I dropped a metal pan, and the whole house shook. My hands are a little unsteady these days.”

“Nope. It was the smell.” I inhaled, my knees twitching in excitement. “I have dreamed of this smell many times.”

“Rolls are in the oven,” Nick said. “Come sit. I went up to the attic this morning. Look what I found.” He gestured to the counter in front of him, where an old black photo album rested.
Photographs
, it said on the front cover in curly script. The leather edges were soft and frayed, and the entire thing was coming apart at the binding, time doing its best to overpower the graying white ribbon holding the pages together.

I sat next to him and pulled it between us. “Is this the album you mentioned yesterday, Noni?”

“It is.” She set a cup of coffee in front of me.

Nick opened the cover. Black and white photographs were fixed to black paper pages with tiny picture corners. Wedding photos, pictures of families, religious portraits of children. We turned the pages slowly, and sometimes we laughed at a particularly dour or mischievous expression on a child, but mostly we were reverently silent, going through more than a century of his family’s history.

The first photos looked like maybe they’d been taken in the early twentieth century, but as time went on, the pages revealed less formal poses and more smiling faces. All the Lupo men had the same full mouth and strong brow, the dark hair and eyes. Nick resembled them, although he must have gotten his leanness and height from his mother’s side. Finally we came to the wedding picture of his great-grandparents, which we studied in silence for a moment.

“They’re in love, you can just tell,” I said.

“They must have been. They had eight kids.”

“You don’t have to be in love to have eight kids,” I reminded him. “Or even one kid.” Without thinking about it, my hand went to my stomach, and I glanced down at it.

Nick cleared his throat. “We found something interesting in the back. Look at this.” From the back of the album he pulled a piece of material and spread it out in front of me. It was once white cotton but had yellowed with age. “It’s a handkerchief,” Nick said. “And look.”

On the handkerchief, scrawled in what appeared to be red lipstick, were three words.

I love you.

At the bottom, in black ink, was printed,
Tiny and Joey, 29 July, 1923.

I stared at it for a moment, gooseflesh rippling down my arms. “What’s today’s date?”

“July twenty-ninth,” Nick answered. Then he leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Fucking weird, right?”

Weird?

No. Cheez Whiz was weird. Olive loaf. Haggis- and-cracked-pepper potato chips.

This was alarming as fuck.

What did it mean???

“Oh yes, that was a pretty famous family story.” Noni picked up a coffee cup with a picture of a cat on it and took a sip. “Apparently, Tiny had turned Papa Joe down, and so he’d decided to go back to Chicago. Well, wouldn’t you know, she realized she was in love with him as soon as he announced he was leaving. She shows up at his house to tell him, but he was right in the middle of cooking Sunday dinner for his family.”

I smiled, although my heart was beating in a peculiar and uneven fashion. “Really?”

“Yes,” she went on. “He was in the kitchen surrounded by his sisters. And she tried to get him to speak privately with her but he refused.”

“As he should have,” Nick put in, lifting his cup to his mouth. “Fickle women.”

“So then what?” I asked. “She wrote him a note?”

Noni laughed. “Yes, in the bathroom, with her

lipstick, on her handkerchief. Then she marched into the kitchen and handed it to him. And according to his sisters, they disappeared into the pantry downstairs for quite an inappropriate length of time.

I clapped my hands over my cheeks. “I love it! Nick, you should put the note in your restaurant too. Frame it or something. With the picture.”

“Not a bad idea.” He set his cup down. “Noni, do you think I could have it?”

Noni waved her hand. “Take the whole book. You know, I’m surprised it was just stuck in the photo album like that. It was so important to her. She must have forgotten it was there. They were married sixty- seven years, you know.”

“It’s a good thing Nick found it then. Otherwise it might have been lost to time forever.” I couldn’t get over the matching date. What did it mean?

Noni nodded, eyeing me thoughtfully. “Yes. Although, nothing is really lost forever. When a thing is meant to be found, the right person will find it. So I bet there’s a reason why that note was discovered again after all this time.”

“You mean…you think it was a sign?” I asked carefully.

Nick laughed. “You’re getting to her, Noni. Coco believes in signs. Keep going with it, please.”

I was too flustered to even hit him.

“Not a sign, necessarily. I just meant that I think it’s right Nick came across the note. That he was meant to have it.” She took another sip of coffee and winked at me over the rim of her cup.