Total pages in book: 157
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
“I can’t be there right now. I love them, but I can’t be there with them while they do...whatever the hell they’re doing.”
His brow dipped, but he stayed quiet.
“Not because of what Carina or my dad said, but...”
Nico cleared his throat, suddenly refusing to meet her gaze.
“I keep asking if you’re okay just like I did when it happened,” she whispered, “and you keep saying yes.”
“I am.”
No, she didn’t think so. Even that came out too rough.
“Nic—”
“I am okay,” he repeated.
She stopped pressing, instead admitting, “It’s the fighting with them. For me, it’s always been the fighting. I can’t hear it. I can’t be around it. It makes me sick to my stomach. I’ve been listening to them scream at one another for years.”
“Sounds like they had reasons, some even valid,” Nico muttered, clearing his throat after. He shot her an apologetic look. “Sorry.”
“What’s fucked up is that I probably shouldn’t have heard any of it. Back then, or now. I think they start hating one another again and get louder and louder, and they both just forget I exist. How do you forget the kid in the middle of the room?”
Nico nodded, his expression both thoughtful and somehow amused at the same time. “The same way the kid in the middle of it all can’t remember half of it, or they can’t ever let it go, no matter how long it’s been. What’s fucked up is being so stuck in survival as a kid that you can’t even remember the day they brought your little sister home. Or the months someone should have been pregnant for her. How your entire house was just chaos and bullshit to the point you were making it minute to minute, day to day. And now you can’t even put together a fucking timeline in your head because ninety percent of your childhood was just trying to get through it instead of living it. So, now you don’t know about your own history, as if it wasn’t all lies and smoke and mirrors anyway. But don’t worry. I can calculate numbers in my head to the tune of a few million the second someone needs it. I got shit handled. The rest, it just gets filed away. Now that’s fucked up.”
She kinda froze. That was the most he’d said about what happened. At all.
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” he muttered again.
She shook her head fast. “No, don’t say that. Come here.”
He did, hiding away again under her—well, his—shirt. There, he mumbled against her skin, “A lot of things make sense now. A lot of things just...suck, too.”
“Sounds like they probably always did, anyway.”
“More than you know.”
Her fingertips found his skin under his clothes again. “I’d like to know, if you’d tell me.”
Nico stilled against her. It took a minute for him to respond, and every passing second made Frankie increasingly nervous for what he might say. “I don’t want to do that right now when I’ve got like twenty minutes with you left or less. I don’t want to talk about that shit when we’re like this, when we’re just us.”
This time, she didn’t move.
“Us, huh?”
He appeared from beneath the shirt once more, head cocked and a soft smile playing at the edges of his full lips. “What’s that for? That little huh.”
“You just said us, like it’s a thing. I didn’t realize—”
“I guess we jumped right over that part, didn’t we?” he interjected.
She lifted one shoulder, trying to be indifferent. “I mean, we have been doing this since prom.”
Whatever this even was. She tried not to overthink it because she liked it. Without even trying, he became her best friend, and like he was always supposed to be there. Like he always should have been.
“And?”
“And what?” she asked.
Nico sucked air through his teeth, still eagle-eyeing her all the while. “Do you just want me to say it, or something?”
Frankie was starting to feel like a parrot. “Say what?”
“That we’re a thing.”
Her nose scrunched up. “A thing?”
“Together.”
That sounded better.
“Like boyfriend and girlfriend, together, or...” she trailed off.
Nico made a face this time, but he fell forward, too. Catching himself with his hands flat on either side of her against the mattress. He left the shirt she wore pulled high enough to expose her breasts, but his attention stayed locked on her even as her skin pebbled and her nipples peaked. He came closer until he hovered right above her. She didn’t need the weight of his body on top of her this time to feel that same sensation of the two pulling away from the rest of the world to go somewhere else.
“I don’t know if I like that—boyfriend.”
“You don’t want me to be your girlfriend?”
He shook his head, gaze dropping to her mouth. “It’s not right for this, is it? It doesn’t feel right.”
“Well, what does?”