“No, Frankie. We’re too close, and I don’t think you’d want to listen to what I have to tell you. My becoming your therapist would destroy our friendship.”
“So, we’re still friends?”
Kenny smiled. “We’re brothers to the end.”
“Brothers to the end,” Ray repeated.
“Ditto,” Frankie drawled.
Kenny stood up. “I’ve spent most of the morning cooking, so I hope you dudes brought your appetites, because I don’t like leftovers.”
Ray rose, extending his hand to Frankie. “Come on, brother. Let’s go and get our eat on.”
Frankie took the proffered hand and wrapped his free arm around Ray’s neck. “I’m going to need you to pray with me,” he whispered.
Ray kissed his cheek. “Any time, Francis. Just let me know the day and time.”
Frankie nodded. “I’ll let you know after I talk to my girlfriend. There’s a lot I need to tell her.”
“Are y’all coming?” Kenny called out from the dining room.
“Yes,” Ray and Frankie answered in unison.
CHAPTER34
Frankie paced the floor as he waited for Sophia Toscano’s arrival. It was time for him to clear his conscience. He had to tell her everything, because he didn’t want to lose her. Ray was right that sex wasn’t everything when it came to love. And he’d been with enough women to know what he felt for Sophia was love. As real as the love he’d witnessed over the years between his parents, who in a few years were planning to celebrate their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.
Ray was also right when he said he couldn’t be trusted because he had broken a number of promises he’d made to his uncle. It wouldn’t be the first time he would invite Sophia to meet him in the apartment above the laundromat because it was more intimate than the street-level one in his family’s brownstone.
The chiming of the doorbell shattered the silence, and he went over to the intercom and tapped a button. “Yes?”
“It’s me. Sophia.”
“Come on up,” he said, tapping another button to disengage the lock on the door leading out to the street.
He didn’t have long to wait when he saw her coming upthe staircase. Frankie had taken one look at the young woman with a pair of hazel eyes and hair the color of roasted chestnuts and knew there was something about her that had appealed to him as no other had. When she told him her mother was Irish and her father Italian, he knew immediately they were ancestral kindred spirits. They were destined to meet.
Frankie knew it had to be fate when he walked into his family’s restaurant and saw her sitting alone at a table. He approached her, asking if he could share her table because he was dining alone. At first, she was hesitant, but then invited him to join her. When he mentioned that he didn’t recall seeing her come into the restaurant before, she told him she freelanced part-time to gather historical information for writers whose names she wasn’t free to divulge because she was bound by a non-disclosure agreement. She’d recently moved to Manhattan and had secured the part-time position to supplement her salary, because rents were higher in Manhattan than in her old Queens neighborhood.
Not only was it easy for them to carry on a conversation, but Frankie was captivated by her natural beauty. At some urging, she finally told him she’d been raised by her father after her mother passed away the year she’d turned thirteen, and that’s when her father had become overprotective to the point where she felt smothered. It was only after she’d finished college and got a job with a small publishing house that she was able to move out on her own. Now, at twenty-six, she was not only emancipated, but also in control of her life and destiny. When he asked if he could see her again, she accepted his phone number but held back giving him the number to her home and office, saying she would be in touch whenever she had a free moment.
The moment stretched into more than a month when she returned to the restaurant to share dinner with him. Frankie was forthcoming when he told her the restaurant had been in his family for three generations, and it was a favorite to longtime neighborhood residents. Unfortunately, she had come tothe restaurant on the weekend Kenny wasn’t scheduled to come in, because he’d wanted to ask his friend what he thought of her.
Their next official date was to the New York Botanical Garden, followed by a trip to the Cloisters, because she loved history. He’d lost track of the number of museums they had visited that summer, followed by brunch at sidewalk cafés, and Frankie knew he’d fallen in love and wanted Sophia to be the last woman in his life.
At first, he thought she was frigid, because she would allow him to kiss her, but nothing beyond that. When he asked her why, she said she’d promised her dying mother that she would remain a virgin until married, because Bridget Cunningham was forced to marry a man once she discovered she was pregnant when she’d slept with him after two dates. Her mother had drilled it into her head that she was to refrain from premarital sex until married.
One time, he became so aroused that he put his hand up her skirt, and she freaked out, spewing expletives and screaming that she never wanted to see him again. He had arranged for a florist to send candy and flowers to her office every day until she called him and asked that he stop. He told her he would stop if she accepted his apology and that he would never pressure her to do something she didn’t want to do. Sophia accepted his apology and said she would see him again. That was weeks ago.
“Hey, you,” he crooned, curbing the urge to lean over and kiss her.
Sophia smiled. “Hey, yourself.” She rubbed her hands together. “I feel like it’s going to snow.”
Frankie sandwiched her hands between his, warming her cold fingers. “Why didn’t you wear gloves?”
“I misplaced them, and I forgot to buy another pair.”
Frankie reached over and closed the door. “I’ll get you a pair lined with fur.”
