Page 34 of Gravity of Love
It wasn’t just those intense moments, though, the day was filled with laughter. In fact, Frankie couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed that much. Despite the heavy start to their hike, they’d spent the rest of the day reminiscing about good times. Liam talked a lot about her being the only girl in a tribe of boys. He remembered things she’d completely forgotten, like how she’d figured out how to build a makeshift catapult at eight years old on a log to defend their fort and take the victory during the water balloon war. Or how she showed up at the skate park at ten with her own skateboard, shocking her brothers, who thought she had no clue how to skate. She did four tricks, she dropped-in did, did an ollie, board-slide, and kick flip. Another time, Niko and Tristan kept pranking her by putting spiders in places she would find them, scaring her. So she poured warm water in their beds and made them both think they wet the bed. She told them that if they didn’t stop, she was going to tell everyone in school they were bedwetters. They went and toldtheir moms that she’d done that, and they got in trouble for scaring her with spiders.
She’d completely forgotten she’d done any of that. He said he thought it was impressive because she didn’t bother her mom or try to get her brother or Tristan in trouble, she handled the situation on her own, and she was seven. Those stories just scratched the surface of what he’d remembered. It made her feel a type of way—not that she could tell him that.
The one subject they hadn’t discussed was the present. He still didn’t know that she and Tristan were broken up. She was about to tell him when Poppy texted. But after finding outwhyhe wasn’t speaking to his brother and dad, she knew she couldn’t tell him. She wasn’t going to be one more thing between them. She’d never be able to live with herself. For whatever reason, Liam had always been fiercely protective of her, if he found out what Tristan did to her, it would not end well.
They pulled up into Yaya’s driveway, and she was suddenly flooded with panic. She didn’t want the day to end. It had been too…perfect. Liam had mentioned earlier that he was on call later and he’d worked the night before. She didn’t know when he slept. So no matter how badly she wished this day would go on forever, it had to come to an end.
As much as it broke her heart, she gently began to move Lucy off her lap as she racked her brain to come up with the right words to encapsulate their time together and thank Liam for the day. “Today was…”
“Come! Come! Come!” Yaya’s voice echoed outside the car.
Frankie turned and saw her grandma standing on the porch, her arms in the air, waving her hands wildly.
She looked back at Liam. “You don’t have to?—”
He was already out of the SUV and halfway around to the passenger door before Frankie could even finish the sentence. She watched as Liam’s muscular silhouette crossed in front ofthe hood, bathed in the last pale rays of dusk. Even the way he walked was sexy. He moved with purpose and intent.
When he reached her side, he opened the door.
Before she had the chance to swing her legs out, Liam had already grabbed her backpack, slinging it effortlessly over his shoulder. He scooped up Lucy—who was still snoring like a freight train, dead to the world—with one arm and extended his free hand to Frankie. She took it, and he helped her down with such deliberate gentleness that she almost wanted to tease him, but instead her heart gave a little twist in her chest. She’d never been handled like she was something precious before—not as an adult. The only person who ever had in her life was Liam. She forgot what it felt like.
Yaya was still beckoning them to, “Come, come, come” from the porch as they walked up to meet her. Her silver hair pinned in a bun, wearing a purple-and-white floral housedress and classic orthopedic slippers, her eyes darted between them, then to the sleeping form of Lucy cradled in Liam’s arm.
As she reached the top step, Frankie paused. Something was different. The front door looked all wrong. The old wood, which had been careworn and peeling, was now a glossy dark blue, and the battered brass knob was gone—replaced by a sleek black number pad and a handle that looked like it belonged in a bank vault. She blinked, confused. Above the doorframe, a miniature black camera watched over them, blinking a tiny green light.
“Inside, inside, inside!” Yaya ushered them into the house.
There was no time to recover from her shock. Once inside, the surprises kept coming. Frankie looked up and noticed another tiny camera perched on the ceiling. There was a distinct scent of fresh paint, and the light switches were now replaced by shiny new panels. There were sensors on the windows, mysterious little white domes in the corners, and a tablet mounted to the wall by the living room.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Yaya was thanking Liam profusely as he sat Lucy and her backpack down.
“You did this?” She gestured to the camera in the hallway. “Are we a trap house?”
“What is this trap house?” Yaya asked.
“A drug house.” Frankie explained. “Why would we need all these cameras and security?”
“Those aren’t cameras, they’re sensors,” Liam stated plainly, as if that explained everything.
Before she could press further, a bell chimed—a sound she’d never heard in this house before.
Yaya’s face lit up. “That is new stove! It makes a song when the food is ready. The old one only hissed and burned my rice.” She hurried into the kitchen, leaving Frankie and Liam alone in the front room.
“Is this what you wanted to talk to her about?”
He took a step towards her. “When I dropped you off last night, the screen door was unlocked?—”
“She wasawake,” Frankie exposed Yaya’s deception. “She wasfakingsleep to see if you were a good guy before she knew that it was you. It was some sort of test.”
“I don’t care.” He shook his head. “When I went to get you water, I had to turn two burners off, only one had a pan on it, the other didn’t have anything in it.”
Frankie’d had to do the same thing.
“This new stove and oven have built-in sensors so that will never happen. You can lock the front and back doors from anywhere using an app on your phone. There is one camera in the front room and the kitchen that you can access just so you can feel safe when you’re not in the house. And the rest are motions sensors. If there is a fall, and the person does not get up within ten minutes, emergency services are called.”
Frankie’s mind was spinning from information overload. She wasn’t sure how to process what she’d just been told or how to respond to it. “Okay, so you dropped me off last night, had to turn off two burners, and you thought,I’ll have all this MissionImpossible stuff installed in twenty-four hours?”
“The screen was unlocked too,” he pointed out as his lips curled in the crooked smile that had always made her insides do loop-de-loops. “And it was more like twelve, they were done by noon.”
