Her eyes met his, and he waited for her to ask. Because after that dig, he wasn’t going to offer, and he wasn’t going to assume that she wanted his help.
“I mean, can you look?” she said finally.
“I’m not sure I’m in the best position to assess—”
She yanked his hand from his side of the table and jutted her head forward.
“Here,” she said, placing his palm on the back of her head. “Do you feel anything?”
It was odd, Ezra thought, to be touching her again. This woman whose body he once knew so intimately, whose body he had loved so intimately. Running his fingers through her hair was as personal an act as he knew.
His hand found the egg-like bump on the back right of her skull.
“Ow! Shit!” Frankie yelped. “I didn’t ask for a cranium massage!”
He pulled his fingers back and noticed a light film of what looked like blood.
“Is this... I can’t see well... but are you bleeding?”
Frankie went pale in front of him. He’d forgotten how bad she was with blood. They used to play “all’s fair football” on the quad with Gregory and Connor and Laila and Alec Barstow, and once April and Connor started dating, with April too. This mostly meant that when Frankie was on the opposite team, she’d climb on his back and try to pin him down while howling with laughter because she was hypercompetitive and tiny, and he was not, but sometimes he played along and fell to the ground just so he could kiss her while she giggled. During one outing when they admittedly all had a beer too many, Connor beaned Gregory square in the nose, which sent blood spurting, and they would later learn, after X-rays at student health, that he had broken it. And this was when Ezra learned that his hardened New York City girlfriend was extremely bad with blood: she literally fainted right there on the quad. Now, he wondered if she had changed as little as he had: still scared of her own insides, in more ways than one.
He tested the waters.
“Remember Gregory and that football?” he asked.
“Are you trying to make me pass out?”
So she did remember.Interesting, Ezra thought.How far she’d run away from this place without possibly running far at all.
“Is his nose still crooked?” she asked. “Remember how it looked off-center for the rest of senior year?”
Ezra almost laughed, because it really had: if you looked at Gregory straight on, you’d wonder if you were having a bit of a stroke because his nose just never sat right on his face again.But Ezra found that he was in too much pain for any joy: his eyes were really killing him now, and he started to notice that his throat didn’t feel so hot either.
“I think I may have inhaled that pepper spray,” he said. He swigged from his coffee cup, and it stung going down but maybe helped a little bit.
They sat in silence for a long minute. The songs switched and “All I Want For Christmas Is You” started up, instantly recognizable.
“Mariah,” Frankie said, like Ezra didn’t know who sang it.
“Obviously,” he replied.
“She bailed out one of my artists—let us sample a song when we were up shit’s creek. So, like, I have her number in my phone.”
“I’m not sure Mariah Carey would be the one to call in an emergency.” Ezra knew that wasn’t what she meant, that she was only showing off, throwing around her self-importance, but he wanted to needle her anyway.
“Well, this is a different type of emergency, ok? So don’t be a dickhead.” Frankie winced and squeezed her eyes shut. “Goddammit, my head hurts.”
“I think maybe you’re the one who needs to go to student health?” Ezra said.
Frankie made a noise that sounded like indignant disdain, as if seeking help was a weakness. Ezra blew out his breath and scanned his brain once more for any speck of information that could help him sort it out—something about Alec Barstow being an ordained minister worried him, like as preposterous as this all was, as banged up as they both were, there was a not-zero chance that the damage could be, might be, far worse.Shit.He tugged out the keys from his pocket, ran his fingers over the beveled edges, then spun the gold band around his left ring finger.
“Look,” he said finally. “The only way we figure this out is if we do this together.” He paused, really considered it.Would they do it together? Could they do it together?“So,” he finally continued and held out his right hand. “Truce?”
SEVEN
Frankie
Frankie fiddled with the set of keys—four total on a Middleton key chain—and watched Ezra while he asked the nice girl at the coffee shop if he could borrow the phone. They’d agreed to a truce, but Frankie wondered, really, how long either of them would stick with it. Fidelity had never been their problem, but maybe loyalty had.
