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“If I didn’t hate you for loving him then, I couldn’t very well hate you for it now,” he said, reaching his hand out for me again.
I took it, and he kissed the tops of my knuckles, walking us both back to the couch. I sat down with a tired groan, and Frankie pulled me against him, adjusting us both so my back rested against his chest.
“Tell me about your trip,” he said softly against my ear. “Tell me about the man who has always held your heart.”
“That’s not fair to say,” I protested.
“I’ve always known it, Owen,” he assured me. “Even if you haven’t.”
I swallowed and settled against him, unable to stop myself from comparing the fit of his body against mine to Archie’s and finding all the ways it was lacking. Not that it was any fault of Frankie’s, he just wasn’t Archie, and that was the first time I felt the gravity of the decision I’d made.
“I wonder if he felt this way,” I choked out, screwing my eyes closed and balling my hands into fists at my sides. “If he hurt this badly when he walked away from me.”
“I’m sure it was the same or worse. Everything is amplified when you’re young. When it’s the first of everything,” he said.
“I had a really nice weekend,” I rasped. “We went out with his friends. He took me on a proper date.”
“Had he ever done that before?”
“A date?”
Frankie nodded against the top of my head.
“No, we never had. Back then we’d just been friends, he’d been with Mandy, it wasn’t…” I trailed off, and Frankie was quick to pick up the change in my mood.
“Where did you go?”
Thinking of our date, I chuckled, fingers going tingly at the memory of Archie scaling Rob’s fence like we were teenagers again.
“We went to a museum and had a picnic, then we broke into his friend’s house to go swimming.”
I thought about Flynn, and Dalton, about Grayson, and the rest of them. I told Frankie about all of them and the lecture from Grayson on not having sex in other people’s kitchens. Frankie laughed at that and tightened his arms around me when I talked my way to Sunday morning, to the fight by the pool and the fraught frot before I asked him to change my flight.
“It’s obvious,” Frankie said, long after I’d finished, “that you need to go back to California.”
“I can’t,” I still argued with him. “Not with Mandy here. Not with the history…”
“Has Archer called you since you left? Texted?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t even turned my phone off airplane mode,” I admitted.
“He’s probably frantic.”
“You don’t even know a thing about him,” I said.
“I know that he’s in love with you, and I would be worried sick about sending you back across the country after the story you just told me.” Frankie shoved his hand into my pocket and pulled out my phone. He switched it off airplane mode and held it in front of us both while it rattled incessantly with vibration alerts.
I grumbled, watching Archie’s name flash across my screen no less than half a dozen times.
“He chartered the flight,” I said. “He knows it landed safe.”
“Owen, I loved you once as a partner and I love you now as my closest friend, so I’m saying this with all the love in my heart.”
“Don’t.” I took my phone out of his hand and tossed it onto the table. It was still vibrating, the screen flashing with every alert that popped up onto the screen.
“Learn from his example, Owen. Don’t let history repeat itself when it’s so damn obvious the two of you are meant to be together.”
CHAPTER27
