“Josette like it?” he queried.
“Yes,” I told him.
“Valentine with you?”
“Yes.”
“What’s she say?”
“She said, ‘it’ll do.’”
There was amusement in his voice when he
replied, “So she likes it.”
“That’s my read.”
“Right. Good. I’ll look at it Sunday and
we’ll discuss your offer.”
“Excellent, darling. Now I’ll let you get
back to work.”
“Okay, sweetheart. Valentine dropping you at
my place?”
“No, her caretaker is giving Josette and me
driving lessons after this. Then he’s dropping me at your place.
Josette is making dinner for Glover at Valentine’s. Trying her hand
at her skills in the kitchen. Valentine is absenting herself. She
hasn’t shared where she’s going.”
“Not a surprise,” he muttered. “I’ll see you
when I get home then, yeah?”
“Yes, Noc.”
“Later, babe. Love you.”
“And I you, my darling.”
He rang off and I took the phone from my ear
and turned my attention again to the room in which I stood.
Yes.
Perfection.
The room was. The house was.
I was not.
Noc had started his cases and this meant he
woke us earlier. It also meant he came home later. And he even took
phone calls and worked on his laptop after getting home.
He made it clear he did not mind this. He was
enjoying his work, he made that clear too. It was not exhausting,
it was invigorating.
I liked that for him. I drank my wine and
watched the television or read a book I’d found at his house that
was quite interesting and let him do what he enjoyed. And when it
was time for me, I let him enjoy me.
Therefore, obviously, with his new job and
the satisfaction he got from it, now was not the time to bring up
whatever was festering inside him, shadowing his soul.
It was an excellent excuse.
But it was still an excuse.
I knew it.
I just didn’t know how to get past it.
* * * * *
That Sunday, Noc stood in a bedroom upstairs
in the home I was considering purchasing.
The room in which I’d made my decision just
days before and given him a call.
It was right now where a little girl slept.
Pink walls. An elephant motif. Not frilly but still girly.
Absolutely adorable.
It was the last room I allowed him to
enter.
The courtyard was lovely, elegant, private
and serene, mature plants, with a handsome, built-in grilling
apparatus I knew Noc would love (and he did).
My magic room would be a sunroom, bright and
cheery, seeming outside when it was in.
The master suite, as it was known here, was
luxurious with a separate shower and bath, both utterly divine.
And the kitchen was large and stylish, but
welcoming, making Noc’s assertion that it was the heart of the
house very true.
I liked all those things.
But I’d decided this house was the one based
on this room.
He was staring at a stuffed elephant on the
bed.
“Darling?” I called.
His eyes came directly to me.
“I love it,” he stated. “We’re offering.”
We
were offering.
He liked his house. I did too.
But this tall, stately, elegant, spacious
place was going to be our home.
I felt my throat close.
Amara would sleep there.
Right there.
I knew it just looking at him.
I felt my face get soft and I smiled.
Noc’s face didn’t get soft. The look on his
was fierce.
Even so.
He smiled back.
* * * * *
“Frannie.”
“Yes, darling.”
“Sugarlips, I’m home.”
“Yes, darling.”
Silence.
Then a shaking, “Babe.”
“Yes, darling?”
I did not see the hand that came to the
apparatus I held in my own.
What I saw on the television screen was the
action pausing.
My eyebrows shot together, I twisted my neck
to the side, bent it back and glared at Noc, who was smiling down
at me hugely.
“I was making record time!” I snapped.
“Babe,” he replied.
“Do you know how many efforts it took to
get
to that time?” I demanded to know.
“Babe,” he repeated.
“You paused me!” I continued to snap.
“Babe,” he said again, this sounding clogged,
likely due to his visible hilarity.
“I’ll never get that run back!” I groused and
did it loudly.
“Love you. Think it’s cute as all fuck you’re
Franka Drakkar and Franka Drakkar is a woman who’d be so into a
fuckin’ video game she wouldn’t even look at her man when he came
home from work. But just sayin’, I just got home from work and I
want my woman not only to look at me but greet me with a smile and
give me a kiss, my preference, with tongues, even if it messes with
her record time while it looks like she’s racing a fake race car in
a make-believe video version of Monaco.”
I felt instantly contrite, set the apparatus
aside and pushed myself up from his couch.
I then fitted myself in his arms, wrapping my
own around him, lifted up on my bare toes and gave him a kiss.
With tongues.
When I rocked back, both of us held on.
“Welcome home, my darling,” I said softly.
“How was your day?”
“Best part of it happened just now,” he
replied in my same tone. “Though, that isn’t strictly true since
what you gave me this morning edges it out.”
I didn’t give him anything.
In bed and with everything else, it was
always Noc doing the giving.
I melted into him.
“See you introduced yourself to the
PlayStation,” he noted.
“I didn’t. Josette did before she left in a
taxi to meet some friend of Glover’s. They’re at an establishment
that has wine and paint. I don’t understand what that means but she
reports she’s going to be drinking and painting on a canvas, even
though she’s never painted a thing in her life.”
“That’s strange,” he noted.
“I agree,” I replied. “But she seemed excited
about it.”
His arms gave me a squeeze. “Maybe you should
have gone with her.”
Was he mad?
“And missed time with you?”
That didn’t get me an arm squeeze.
That earned me another kiss, this also with
tongues, and it lasted longer.
When he lifted his head, he stated,
“Dinnertime. Past dinnertime, actually. So you got a choice. I can
throw some burgers on the grill or we can order pizza.”
I liked burgers.
But pizza beat out everything.
Except, perhaps, lobster, but Noc didn’t
offer that.
And regardless, as I glanced to his
entertainment station, I saw it was well after seven in the
evening.
He didn’t seem fatigued, but he’d left for
work before seven that morning, thus I didn’t want him cooking.
What I did want was whatever he wanted.
“You chose, darling,” I said.
“Feelin’ like a burger.”
“How can I help?” I asked.
He grinned at me stating clearly that any
help I may be able to give wouldn’t be much help at all, but he
then let me go, took my hand and guided us to the kitchen.
“When it’s time, you can get out the chips
and condiments. I’ll do the rest.”
These were things I could do.
I could also get him a beer, which I did. And
I could open my own bottle of wine, I was relatively certain (I had
watched him and a number of servants open a vast quantity of them),
which I started to try to do but was halted.
“Babe, no,” Noc muttered gently, ceasing his
endeavors of opening up a package of meat to take the wine bottle
and opener from me.
“I can pour myself wine, Noc,” I told
him.
“You snap open a beer for me, that’s sweet,
babe. But I get you your wine. Deal?”
I supposed.
Thus I also nodded.
He got me my wine leaving me nothing to do
but sit at the counter and watch him form hamburgers with his
hands.
I found this fascinating but mostly because
Noc had beautiful hands and I’d watch them do anything, including
manipulating meat.
As had become the norm, he didn’t tell me
much about his day because he wasn’t at liberty to share too much
about his cases.
We nevertheless found many things to chat
about, as we usually did. How the purchase was going with my house.
How Valentine seemed to be coming back to herself, still
melancholy, but she’d begun discussing the things I would be doing
with her and taking an interest in showing Josette and I our new
world. How I’d be going to what was referred to as a “gynecologist”
the next day to see about “birth control.” And how Circe and Dax
had not spent one evening apart since our dinner that was now a
week and a half ago.
He went out to fire up the grill and I
remained seated, ignoring the fact that it had now been a week and
a half since that evening Circe and Dax had come for dinner, and in
that week and a half I had found excuse after excuse to set aside
the fact that I had
not
found the right time or the right
way to approach Noc about my concerns.
He made this easy due to the fact he seemed
most content with absolutely everything. My being a part of his
life, in his home and bed. Spending time with Jo. Being involved in
his new cases.
You had to look to know he carried pain.
But I’d looked.
So I knew.
I just wasn’t doing a thing about it.
What I was doing was becoming quite adept at
ignoring it or making excuses that it wasn’t the right time to do
anything about it.
On that thought, his phone that he left on
the island rang just as he was walking back in from outside.
I looked to it, saw on the screen the word
Dad, then I looked to Noc, stiffening.
“Your father,” I told him.
Noc, who was always so very
Noc
,
appeared delighted his father was calling, didn’t hide this and
went right to the phone.
I was not delighted.
I was pleased he clearly enjoyed hearing from
his father.
But it was a father I would one day meet, of
this I was certain. And when I did, I would need to impress him and
even make him care for me, and this I was not certain I could
achieve.
“Hey, Dad,” Noc answered, moving to the
refrigerator.
I slid off my stool and began to gather the
detritus of meat wrappings to throw them away.
“Yeah, it’s good. Like it. Caseload is way
lighter than on the force, means more focus. Respect the men I work
for. Team’s tight too,” he stated, coming out of the fridge with a
tomato.
I pressed my lips together at the sight of
the tomato and went to the cupboard for chips.
“She’s good,” he said softly. “Lookin’
forward to you meetin’ her.”
I felt my shoulders tighten as I selected my
favorite variety of chips (one I noted was Noc’s too),
barbeque.
“What?” he asked, his voice changing.
That was to say, changing significantly.
I turned to him, chips in hand.
He had his phone to his ear but his eyes were
riveted to the tomato he’d placed on the island and he was now
unmoving.
“No, I didn’t forget,” he stated, and his
tenor was deteriorating.
I stood still and kept my attention on
him.
“Yeah, I will,” he declared, and I read his
next as interrupting his father when he carried on swiftly and
curtly, “Told you I will. So I will.” There was only but a brief
pause before, “We’ll see about it next year.” Another brief pause
and then, his voice lower, somewhat conciliatory, but still tight,
he said, “I know it means something to you, so like I said, we’ll
see about it next year.” There was a small measure of silence
before he went on, “Yeah, it’s about Frannie bein’ here and me
startin’ the job and, like I said, I’m sorry I couldn’t make it
this year but it’s the way it is.”
Slowly, I made my way to the island and
stopped, standing opposite him, finding it troubling that Noc,
always attuned to me,
always
, didn’t lift his head to watch
me do this or even when he sensed me arrive.
“I know it’s the first time I missed it, Dad,
but I got a lot goin’ on,” he continued. “Next year, we’ll see
about it. But you know I got things in my life now where it isn’t
just all about me. I’m not there for one, so it isn’t as easy for
me to be there seein’ as I’m all the way across the country. And if
I got time off, I gotta share it the way
we
wanna share it,
Franka and me, not just me makin’ the decisions.”
I was reeling from learning the information
through his conversation that it was clear Noc had already told his
father about me, but I had little time to recover.
What he’d just said quite obviously did not
go over very well with his father, and I knew this when Noc’s back
shot straight, forcing his eyes to aim away from the island.
But they stared unseeing beyond me.
“I know what it means to you. Of course I
fuckin’ know,” he growled infuriatedly, and shockingly
disrespectfully.
I stood still, silent, stunned that Noc could
sound like that at all much less aiming it at his father.
“Yeah, it’s a tough time for us all, Dad, and
I get that. I get it for you, probably now more than ever, havin’
Frannie. I get that for Dash and for Orly. What I keep tryin’ to
get
you
to get is that the way you deal with it might not be
the way we all wanna do that.” There was another moment of silence
before he declared, “Dash is like you. But Orly is like me. And not
to dig the knife in deeper, but to make my point, he’s also like
Judy.” A very brief pause before, “You get my point, you totally
get it. Don’t make me say it.”
And then there was a very long pause as I
watched, fascinated and horrified, as emotion twisted Noc’s
beautiful features. Ugly emotion. Pain so deep witnessing it
wounded
me
. My heart squeezed, my stomach lurched, and it
took everything for me not to round the island and envelope him in
my arms in the effort to absorb his pain, take it deep inside me so
it was something he’d never again feel.