It’s not enough. Circling back to the clearing, I pick up the axe and go at the dead tree Aiden and I started on this afternoon. My hands throb with fresh blisters ripping open, but I don’t care. Better to hurt on the surface than deep inside.
Thunk.
Thunk.
Thunk.
A grunt leaves me with each swing. Until I can’t even hold an axe anymore, and it falls at my feet. I groan, pressing my forehead to the tree. How did I lose her? I did exactly what I promised her I wouldn’t. I made a choice that made her feel like a problem I prioritized rather than the person I love.
And “therein,” as Shakespeare says, “lies the rub.” Because I will always choose her. I will show up for her and care for her, the same way she’s shown up and cared for me—with tenderness and empathy—but until Frankie stops seeing herself as a burden, she’ll always see my choices through that lens of obligation. Meaning all I can do is hope that with some time and perspective, she’ll see things differently. Once again, I’m left waiting.
I’ve waited for her before. You think I’d be able to cope, but it’s like slowly suffocating without her, aching to know how she is and what she wants and if there’s a chance in hell she’ll finally see herself through my eyes.
Helplessness and anger possess my body. A raging cry surges through me as I yell into the woods, and lightning cracks through the sky. I jump back instinctively as the world flashes blue-white, revealing the outline of a woman down the drive to the main road. A torturous ghost of a woman.
Long hair plastered to her face, a short walking stick. She glances up and I choke when I recognize them—gold-green eyes, sun and earth, glowing in the light of the storm.
My heart jumps in my chest. “Frankie?”
She smiles, and lifts her hand in a wave.
I say her name again. And again. Then, I’m running toward her, sprinting down the muddy road, breath filling my lungs for the first time in weeks. Laughter taking over breath. She’s here. She came.
I stop, toe to toe with her as she looks up at me, shivering. Clumped dark lashes. Two curtains of wet, dark hair framing her face. “H-hi,” she says shakily.
I swallow as a tear slides down my face. “How did you get here?”
“By plane. Then Willa,” she says simply.
I glance past her shoulders and see Willa and Ry’s Subaru pull out from the main road, followed by a stream of staccato honks. Staring down at Frankie, I shake my head and blink. This can’t be real.
“Ren,” she whispers. Stepping close, she cups my cheek. I jolt at the touch, and my heart takes off inside my chest. “I’m so sorry. You loved me and I threw it in your face. It…it scared me, Zenzero. I’m not going to lie. No one’s ever loved me with no reservations.”
I stare at her as rain pours down, as a love whose magnitude and depth and strength I can barely fathom wraps around my heart and pulls me toward her.
Her eyes search mine. “What I said at the hospital, it wasn’t true. I have—I do—” On a shaky exhale, she steps closer. “I love you, Ren.”
“Frankie. I love you,” I whisper, cupping her face, so close, so soft.
“Still?” she asks warily. “Even after the past few weeks?”
“Still. Always. I’d wait lifetimes for you, Frankie. You would always be worth it.”
She peers up at me. “Ask me.”
“Ask you what?” I say dazedly.
“‘Membership is contingent upon authenticity,’” she repeats, just as I told her months ago. “‘Upon words spoken from the heart.’ Ask me what I’m prepared to say.”
I shake my head. “Frankie, you don’t have to—”
“This.” She brings her hand to rest over my heart, her eyes searching mine. “I want in. Lifelong privileges, ideally, but I’ll settle for a month-to-month trial-membership if necessary.”
“Frankie, you already have it.”
“‘Love is not love,’” she blurts, wiping rain from her eyes and blinking up at me. “‘Which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. O no! It is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.’”
“It’s cold, you’re still—”
“Please, Ren, let me tell you. Let me say what you mean to me.” She inhales roughly, then shouts through rain and thunder, a rush of wind through the trees,
“‘Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.’”
I hold her close and kiss her, then pull back enough so I can stare into those wide, deep eyes. “I love you. I always have.” Wind rushes through the trees, wraps around us, as I tuck her close, as I press a kiss to her lips and whisper, “It was always only you.”
Her cry breaks against my kiss, as I sweep her up in my arms, shielding her as best as I can from the rain. She shrieks with laughter, clutching her bag and cane tight against us, throwing her head back to the open sky. Tears of heartache become tears of joy, as the clouds break for the determined sun.
I kiss Frankie and taste hope.
31
Ren
Playlist: “Like I’m Gonna Lose You,” Meghan Trainor, John Legend
I watch firelight play on her skin, a wash of sunset watercolors. Gold and bronze, ruby shadows beneath her chin, the swell of her bare breasts. Frankie, naked on a couch dragged in front of the fire is a vision of sated beauty.
Leaning past her, I poke the fire and throw on another log. Her hand slides up my back and tangles in my hair.
“That was nice of Aiden to make himself scarce,” she says.
I laugh drily. “It was a requirement that Aiden make himself scarce.”
Which he did. He took one look at me holding Frankie, both of us sopping wet from the rain, laughing and love-drunk, hiked his bag onto his shoulder and muttered something about the airport as he walked out. I heard the tires of his rental catch on the gravel, then the noise of an engine fading in the rain. Then I tore off her clothes, set Frankie in a hot shower, and got down on my knees to show her how much I missed her.
Frankie smiles up at me. “I feel bad, but it’s best he’s not here. You are a noisy lover, Mr. Bergman.”
A blush heats my cheeks as I glare down at her playfully. “I think you mean, passionate, Ms. Zeferino.”
Her smile deepens, broken only briefly by a lingering cough that sounds much better than it did three weeks ago.
I slide my finger along her dimple. “This has tortured me many months, Francesca. Years, to be precise.”
“My dimple?” She slaps a hand over her cheek and my finger, looking self-conscious. “It’s weird I don’t have two, isn’t it? It always bugged me because my mind craves symmetry.”
“That’s why I like it. You were always so neat and exact. Then you had this lopsided dimple that I only saw when you gave a rare smile. Even if it’s an imperfection, it’s beautiful to me.”