Page 73 of Gravity of Love
He’s not wrong, she thought as she lowered to the edge of the tub and considered her footwear options. Comfort or style—it was the age-old conundrum.
“What are you doing? What is going on with that face? Why are you not in frame?” he asked as he lifted his head to try and see why she was sitting down.
Frankie hoisted a bare foot to the screen. “I’m still deciding between the fuck-me heels and the ‘I want a future where my toes have circulation’ flats.”
“Fuck me heels, babe. Every time. It’s right there in the name. Also, you’re an adult, and this is not a middle school dance.”
Frankie bit her lip, torn. The four-inch nude heels with the ankle strap would look amazing. But the nude flats were so practical. Her tomboy tendencies were hard to ignore.
She slid on the flats and stood up. “I’m thinking this is giving an Audrey Hepburn vibe.”
Zee stared at her with a stern expression. “Do not make me stage an intervention.”
“You’re a sadist,” she muttered, sitting back down to swap footwear.
She buckled the torture devices on and rose again. The F-me heels made her four inches taller and ninety percent more likely to break an ankle, but they did wonders for her calves andbackside. She posed again, this time angling the camera so Zion could see the full effect.
Zee gave her a slow clap. “Brava.”
She mock-bowed, hair tumbling over her shoulder as a sudden, brusque knock sounded on the door.
“We need to go. Now.” Tristan’s voice, muffled but unmistakable and curt, carried into the bathroom. Whenever he was in a hurry, he sounded like he was halfway through an argument.
“Coming.” Frankie’s voice instinctively raised two octaves in the most pleasant non-confrontational tone possible as she quickly put on her gold Kate Spade sailor’s knot bracelet Zee got her for Christmas four years earlier and grabbed her clutch.
At the same time, Zion fanned himself as if he was swooning and in his best southern drawl said flatly, “And they say chivalry is dead.”
“He just doesn’t like to be late. I’ll call you later, LYL,” Frankie abbreviated love- you-lots as she blew a kiss at the screen before hitting end.
As soon as the call disconnected, Frankie heard herself let out a little sigh through her nose, a sort of private punctuation mark to the end of the conversation where she felt safe to be herself. She was still holding the phone, thumb hovering over the black screen, when she realized she was standing, frozen in place. Her paralysis wasn’t because of indecision over footwear or because she was running late, but because of her Pavlovian response to Tristan barking at her from the other side of the bathroom door. His tone was sharp and impatient, and her body instantly responded and went into action. She didn’t process or intellectualize his request.
Over the years, she’d conditioned herself to notice a subtle tightening of his vocal cords, a look, a shift in demeanor, interpret it as urgency, and respond to it as if she were a dog. Shecouldn’t even blame Tristan. It was so dangerous and upsetting, and irritating, that left unchecked, she’d handed him the power to suck all the air out of a room.
When she and Tristan were kids, it was just a fact of life that he ran hotter than the rest of them—her brothers, Liam, and the neighborhood boys. He could be sweet, but he had a short fuse, like the hard shell on a caramel apple that could crack under just the right pressure. She never took his moods personally. She absorbed his outbursts, waited for the cloud to pass, then made a joke to draw him back into the fold. She accepted him for who he was.
She wasn’t sure when exactly she’d started adjusting herself so thoroughly to his every whim. Maybe it had something to do with always feeling responsible for her mom’s moods. After her dad died, when her mom would be in bed crying, drinking, depressed, Frankie would do anything and everything she could to make her happy. When AJ wasn’t talking at school, she’d worked so hard trying to find out why and make him happy. When Niko was acting out, being angry, and breaking his toys, she’d always patch them back up the best she could.
A therapist once told her she’d taken on the role as the unofficial emotional thermostat for the entire family. If anyone was getting too hot or cold, Frankie would do whatever she had to do to regulate them. She was the peacemaker, the people pleaser, the mood stabilizer. Maybe that’s why, over the years, she’d calibrated herself to Tristan’s emotional frequencies. Whatever the reason, she’d become a shell of herself. There was almost none of who she was in their relationship. It was all him.
Another loud, insistent knock battered at the bathroom door—three sharp raps, spaced evenly and with enough force that Frankie felt the vibration in the tile beneath her feet. The sudden interruption jolted her out of the self-reflection spiral she’d been spinning down. For a beat, she just stood there, hand pressedto her chest, feeling the way her heart ricocheted against her breastbone.
She took a breath and opened the door truly believing she expected nothing from him. Over the years she’d trained herself, the same way she’d conditioned herself to respond to his change in tone and demeanor, that any reaction from Tristan regarding her appearance was unnecessary, but now that she was walking out of the bathroom into his line of sight, she realized she’d lied to herself, and denial was a leaky raft. She hadn’t consciously expected his face to light up or for him to maybe, just maybe, tell her that she looked nice. But when neither of those things happened, her heart sank. Not quickly, like a ton of bricks dropped in a backyard pool. No, it began to slowly plunge into the abyss of disappointment, like the Titanic, after hitting the iceberg—a sluggish descent with the band playing on its way down.
Tristan stood at the end of the bed, he glanced up when she entered the room, his eyes performed a cursory sweep that landed somewhere in the vicinity of her collarbone, then returned to his phone just as quickly.
“Ready?” he asked, not raising his voice above conversational volume.
“Yep,” Frankie chirped.
He turned, and she followed him out of the room, the click of her heels echoing in the hallway and down the stairs. Frankie imagined herself as a character in a half-hour sitcom where the heroine’s love life was an obvious train wreck and the audience screamed at her to wake up. She recognized her emotional response was completely ridiculous considering they weren’t together, but at the moment logic was the good angel on one shoulder and her irrational feelings were the devil on the other and she had whispering in her ear.
As she walked behind her ex, she noticed he didn’t slow his pace for her and didn’t once glance back to check if she was keeping up or if she’d tumbled down the steep steps in her deathtrap heels. It was possible he didn’t even realize he was doing it—or, more accurately,notdoing it. Part of her wanted to be annoyed, but that feeling was quickly replaced by a deeper, duller ache—something close to grief, but not for him. She was sad for herself, for the part of herself that had been slowly starving for attention, for the validation she’d convinced herself she didn’t need. It was the kind of sadness that, if given form, would be a tangle of wet laundry, heavy and cumbersome.
They walked out to the car together in silence, Tristan taking the driver’s seat without hesitation, not a thought in his mind to open her door. Frankie slid into the passenger side, arranging her skirt carefully to avoid wrinkling the fabric. As they headed up the mountain, Tristan connected the Bluetooth to his phone and started his ’80s and ’90s metal playlist. Metallica’s “Fade to Black” started crackling through the speakers, and Frankie realized she’d never spoken up and said how much she disliked metal music. Not once.
It wasn’t Tristan’s fault he played it all the time around her. How would he know she didn’t like it? She never voiced her opinion on the matter.
The drive to The Castaway took less than fifteen minutes, but in that span of time, Frankie found herself taking a fearless emotional inventory so exhaustive it left her drained. She watched the scenery roll by—the green pines and orange hues of the gathering sunset. Her mind wondered how many times she’d excused away this exact dynamic between herself and Tristan. How many times she’d convinced herself that needing to be noticed, heard, or considered, even in small ways, was a character flaw instead of a basic human desire. She told herself that their relationship was built on deeper things, thather appearance didn’t matter to him, and that she didn’t need to hear she was pretty. That her preferences regarding music, movies, and restaurants were insignificant. She convinced herself she had Zee for those things. That friendships were the place to share commonalities or to make concessions, not romantic relationships. She’d spent years gaslighting herself into believing that wanting a compliment was the moral equivalent of vanity and that the only way to prove her worth was to never ask for anything.
