Page 95 of Christmas in Coconut Creek

“Shit.”

“Shit,” Nat agreed.

Mateo groaned. “Frankie needs to catch a break.”

“You all keep saying that.” My curiosity, while already at an all-time high, peaked. “What happened, exactly?”

Whatever it was, they either didn’t know how I’d respond, or felt like the explanation belonged to Frankie and an invisible boundary was about to be crossed. They stared at each other until Nat nudged her boyfriend and he rapped his knuckles on the table. “The only reason I’m telling you this and not leaving it to him is because I love my best friend but he’d never say a bad word about his ex.”

A muscle in my jaw stiffened and I sucked in an anticipatory breath. “Did she cheat?”

“Cheat?” He scoffed. “Cheating is hiding a couple cards under the table. Stealing the catcher’s signs. Vanessa was fixing the whole fucking game.”

I frowned. “While you were deployed?”

“He found out after she fucked off that it started way before the crash.”

I sat up straighter. “What crash?”

Nat looked between the two of us silently and despondently. Mateo heaved a hard sigh and shifted in his chair, pushing his edible house out of the way to make room for all the eccentric hand movements that accompanied his storytelling.

“They met in North Carolina right before he got picked up for Delta. Only had a few months together before they sent his unit out to the Pacific,” Mateo explained. “But he’d already made up his mind. It’s not easy to be in a relationship in the military. Most guys aren’t doing it for love—if anything it’s benefits, security, boredom.” He shrugged. “Frankie doesn’t do shit out of boredom, Ophelia. He’s a calculated son of a bitch. He wants it, he takes it, and he does it better than anyone else.”

The tightness in my chest lessened to appreciate that with a sad smile. “She didn’t feel the same?”

“Maybe for the first few years. We were gonea lot.A fuck ton of sacrifice is made when that’s the life you choose. I don’t know how men with families do it, I really don’t. It’s lonely, it’s hard work, it’s dangerous. Days pass without taking a shower, months without seeing anyone you love. And they’re just back home, going to the grocery store, seeing a movie, meeting their friends out for dinner. The whole time, he was counting the days to get back toher.”

I swallowed a mixture of pity and jealousy that felt like nails scraping down the dry column of my throat.

“He had to have written her a hundred letters,” Mateo said. “I’m not kidding, every one of us single guys would be out wherever we were stationed, having our plates worth of ass—” Nat pinched him under the arm. “Ow, fuck. I’m telling a story, sweetheart, it’s all part of it.” He lifted her hand and kissed it.

“Let’s leave the ‘plates worth of ass’ at the table,” she remarked.

Mateo regarded me again. “As I was saying, plates worth of ass—and Pike wanted nothing to do with it. He’s loyal to a certifiable degree. She got everything he could give without abandoning the promises he made to himself for his family, and for his country. Vanessa was only ever worried about being taken care of. She was a fucking user.”

Ihatedher. I didn’t know the woman save for a photo and a story and I fucking hated her. For how she treated Frankie, and for how selfish she was to ever let him go. To be friends with him was wonderful. To be loved by him…would be incredible. I kept that to myself.

I wanted to say a million things in that moment, and all of them led a trail back to the attachment I shouldn’t have, and the feelings I needed to collar.

“How did he find out?” I asked.

“The details are his to tell.” Mateo’s knee bounced under the table and Nat soothed it with her hand. “Pike was medically discharged from Delta right before our contracts were up. It was supposed to be a cut-and-dried op, we were outside the wire, he was in the chopper, shit went sideways, evac was a fucking mess and…he crashed.Wecrashed.”

“Oh, shit.” My pulse hammered against my neck.

“Recovery took longer than Pike thought it would, but he didn’t help himself either. He didn’t think he deserved it. He blamed everything bad that happened on himself, and never took the people hesavedthat day into consideration.” I had an innate feeling that this was a conversation the two of them had had many times before. “It was ugly, O, that’s no doubt his biggest regret.”

“Vanessa didn’t stick around when he needed her to,” Nat said.

“Surgeries, recovery, physical therapy, all of it. He needed her and she didn’t step up to the plate. When the going got tough, she got going down to fucking Fayetteville to find someone to dangle shiny things in front of her again. Spoiled bitch.”

Normally I’d be averse to name calling but…spoiled fucking bitch.

“They were two complete opposite sides of a coin." Mateo continued. "Pike saw her through rose-colored glasses, and he still does. He still faults himself for her leaving and stepping out on him. He thinks if he was home more, if he had asked her to marry him before we deployed, if he’d pulled himself out of the depressive episode after the accident, that would have fixed everything. But he doesn’t see what we do.”

I pulled my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around myself in what felt like the closest thing to a hug. My understanding of Frankie waxed and waned with every passing hour. I was on a boat that was sinking, without a raft, and the worst part was that I was the one letting the water in. I was becoming obsessed with knowing him, learning him, being a part of his life, getting tooinvolved. Finding out about his ex only made me want him more. Because he was so deserving of everything he ever dreamed of having in life that it overwhelmed my own self-preservation.

It made me think about Colorado. How good we could be for each other if we ever had the chance to make somethingrealout of this. How much of each other we still had to discover.

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