“You do that exceptionally well.”
He smiles. “I love you, Frankie. You are everything I know about love.”
We lose each other in our lips. In our whispered confessions. In our touch. It feels new, all over again. We tell eachother secrets with only our hands. We make promises with our tongues. We undress each other with reverence, laying devotional kisses to jaws and shoulders and scars.
“You know what I’ve always wanted to do?” he asks, removing my underwear.
“Tell me,” I breathe.
He gives me a wicked grin and tilts his head in the direction of the cupboard.
“Think we can fit?”
He holds out his hand. “Only one way to find out.”
We barely squeeze inside, but there’s just enough room for George to back me against the wall and hook my leg around his hip. He fits himself inside me with one powerful thrust that has us both gasping. We stare into each other’s eyes, and it’s not the past that unfolds before me; it’s our future.
Endless possibilities. A lifetime of adventures. Laughter. Arguments. Dancing. Travel. Sex. Food. Friendship.
And one constant.
Us.
Chapter Fifty-three
We stay wrapped up together, kissing softly on the couch, afterward. George’s fingers trail down my spine, and then I sit up suddenly, remembering what I came for. “I want to read the rest of your letters.”
“Not now,” George says, tilting his head up for another kiss. “Let’s save that humiliation for another time.”
I shake my head. “I’m utterly desperate to open that box.”
We get dressed and curl up on the sofa with the chest between us, and George watches me, flushed, as I flick the latch and open the lid. It’s stuffed with scraps of paper, postcards, letters, and ephemera from our friendship. A blue jay feather. A sketch of a labyrinth. The menu from my final presentation at culinary school. Some of the letters are in my handwriting. Some of them are in George’s. I pull out one of mine. It’s a homemade card with a drawing of George and me playing in the field on the front and a message written in blue marker inside.
To George,
Happy 9th birthday! I hope you like your present.
From your best friend,
Frankie
“Do you remember what you got me?” George asks.
I shake my head.
“You’d captured a toad and put it in a shoebox with holes in the top.”
“And you let it go!” I say as it comes back to me.
“It was cruel to keep it.”
I take out another, written in purple pen. I can tell from the handwriting that I would have been a teenager.
It’ll never happen again. I promise.
“This must have been when I tried to seduce you.”
He laughs. “That green bra was torture.”
