I nodded and she gave me a once-over to make sure I was telling the truth before she left.
“Look,” Frank said, “let’s go somewhere quiet where we can talk about this.”
Suddenly it all came flooding back. The pain of leaving him, the nights I’d cried myself to sleep, the years I’d prayed he’d come back to me. Thinking every evening as I came home that maybe I’d see his car in my driveway, that maybe he’d finally come to his senses and tracked me down. But he never did. Twenty-two years, and he never came. And now he was here, begging for redemption. All I knew was I needed to get the hell away, just like I did all those years ago.
I opened my car door, slid in, and started the ignition in one smooth move. Well, as smooth as it can be when your battery only half charges and it sounds like a choking dog for a few seconds before it finally takes. Frank didn’t try to stop me or ask where I was going. He just disappeared into his T-bird.
Tears welled up in my eyes as I took off across the bridge, trying to steady myself, trying to breathe. I banged my hand on the steering wheel. “I’m such an idiot,” I yelled. He had come back for me—what I’d waited for my whole life—and I had missed my chance. But that was me. No matter how old I got or how hard I tried or how much living I had in me, I was always going to run away from anybody trying to love me—anybody good, anyway. The possibility of losing it down the road was too much to bear.
About the time I pulled into Gray’s driveway, I laid my head down on the steering wheel and started to cry. Nothing else to do. When I picked my head up, I screamed so loud I was surprised the neighbors didn’t come out. Frank was standing there, face in my window.
“You got away from me once, Diana. It won’t happen again without a fight.”
I flung my door open. “Frank, I don’t know why you don’t get that I don’t want you around anymore. Just get out of here.” I took off toward the door of the guesthouse, him following right behind.
“That’d be a whole lot easier to believe if you weren’t just crying about me in the car.”
I opened the door, prepared to say something cutting, but he interrupted me: “You leave your house unlocked so any nutso off the street can walk right in?”
I looked at him pointedly, like,Yup. And the nutso did walk right in.
“I can’t do this again, Frank. I can’t. I can’t love you and trust you and fall for you and you disappoint me all over again.” I tossed my purse on the tiny kitchen counter and sat down in one of the pair of club chairs.
“Diana,” Frank said, crossing his arms and standing tall and strong right in front of me. “You’re right, okay? I didn’t want to lose those stores. But I would’ve figured out a way. I wasn’t the one who left you. You left me. And I want to know why.”
I crossed my arms, mimicking his action from a moment before. “I just knew that it was going to be too hard. I could seeit that night, clear as day. I didn’t want to spend my life with you taking your momma’s side over mine. I didn’t want to spend my life with us arguing over having to see them.…” I trailed off.
He was still staring down at me hard. “So you’re telling me that that’s it? That’s why we never spoke again?”
I shrugged.
“You expect me to believe that, feisty as you are, you walked away because you were scared to stand up to my momma? I don’t buy it.”
I suddenly felt hard inside, like maybe he deserved to feel what I had been feeling all this time, like maybe I didn’t care about protecting him or his precious tender heart anymore. “I was pregnant, okay?”
That stopped him cold. His eyes got wide and his arms just fell down. “You mean to tell me I got a kid wandering around out there that I don’t even know about?”
I looked at him like he was an idiot and shook my head the tiniest bit.
His eyes met mine, and I could feel the same pain flash through both of us at the same time. Like he was about to faint or something, Frank fell to his knees, his face in his hands.
“Look,” I said, standing up, feeling like I couldn’t breathe. “I’ve spent the last twenty-two years getting over this, so let’s not make too big a thing—”
He wrapped his arms around my waist and rested his head on my stomach. “Oh, Diana,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. So sorry. If I had known… things could have been so different.”
He put his lips all along the expanse of that flat, tight emptiness. I could feel the heat running through me, muscle memory taking over, my body remembering how it was to have his lips on it, how his hands felt. It wasn’t here. It wasn’t now. It was then, and we were young and we were in love and we were the only two people in the world.
“Di, you are all I want in this life,” he said. “You’re the reason I never married. You’re the reason I never told another woman except my momma that I loved her. You’re the reason I have cried myself to sleep more nights than not. And when Daddy died, I knew that, no matter what happened, I had to try. I had to come back for you.”
Maybe it was because I had missed him so much. Maybe it was because I was so vulnerable, at the lowest point in my life, and Frank was the only person who had ever really, truly taken care of me. Maybe it’s because I just wanted to feel loved and cherished even for just a little bit.
But I kissed Frank. He held me in his arms like he’d never let me go. He lifted the white shirt with the lace trim that Gray had given me over my head and threw it on the floor beside him, and I thought briefly that if I’d had on one of my T-shirts I would have remembered. This never would have happened. And I thought about protesting, but, oh, those big navy eyes looking down at me, those powerful hands that took my face in them, the way he kissed me slow and deep and sweet, with a touch of whiskey on those lips.
“Frank,” I whispered, wanting the heat of this moment to last forever. Wanting to rewind time, to tell Frank about thebaby, to stand up to his momma, to be married with a family of our own. A tear seeped out of my closed eye, partially for the memories we’d lost and partly for all the ones we could still have.
“You’re so beautiful, Diana,” he whispered. “You’re still so beautiful.”
I unbuttoned his shirt slowly as he continued to kiss me. He said, “I’ll never walk away from you again. I’ll chase you to the ends of the earth.”
