Let's Be Frank (21 page)

“If you were a writer, you’d understand.”

Her mom’s words stop Frankie mid-stride on her way to the back door.

“It’s not something we can control sometimes,” Lucy continues. “It’s a compulsion. When I’m not writing, I’m not… me.”

I try to be as sneaky as possible about wiping the runaway tear from the side of my nose before putting my napkin on the table and rising to stand with Frankie.

When I reach her side, I place my hand on the back of her neck and give her a gentle squeeze. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”

For the second time, she shrugs off my hand. “I don’t need to take a walk,” she snipes. “Leave me alone.”

Stung, I watch her enter the house, leaving me to face humiliation after her public snub.

“Don’t worry about her,” Sam says, waving me back over. “Come on. Finish your dinner. There’s no need for her to ruin everyone’s night.”

At the risk of being rude, I turn my back to him and stride around the side of the house, where I hope there’s a gate. There’s not. I return to the pool area, stalking across the patio on my way to the other side.

Betty says, “Yep. That way,” but she doesn’t try to stop me or say anything else.

Sure enough, I find a gate leading to the front yard. I lift the latch and push on the slatted wood, which scrapes against the gravel path.

Maybe Frankie doesn’t need a walk, but I do.

*****

Two hours later, I’m nursing a blister between my first and second toe, because flip-flops are
not
proper walking shoes, and I’m starting to worry about the wildlife that may be wandering around here that we don’t ever have to worry about in Wisconsin. Bears, yes. Scorpions and snakes in April? No.

Plus, the scorching desert temperatures fall off to amazing lows at night. The shorts and t-shirt that were perfectly comfortable during daylight aren’t cutting it now that the sun’s gone down.

I’m limping and shivering on the shoulder of the road when one of the passing cars slows and pulls behind me, spotlighting my legs. I half-turn but continue walking when I don’t recognize the low-slung vehicle.
Please, don’t talk to me; don’t talk to me; don’t talk to me.

“Yo, Nathaniel!”

I halt, squint at the lights, and backtrack toward them, shielding my eyes with my hand the closer I get. She kills the lights.

Standing next to the passenger seat of the open-topped car, I ask Betty, as if I care, “Where’d you get this thing?”

“It’s one of Sam’s,” she answers. “Get in.”

I hesitate. “I don’t know…”

“Come on… You’ve been wandering the desert for hours, like some kind of Biblical outcast.”

Stroking the shiny turquoise metal and fingering the window slot, I avoid her eyes when I say, “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

“You’re taking everything remarkably in stride. And doing exactly what you’ve been asked to do.”

“Commanded, you mean?”

She tilts her head and tsks. “Now, now. Don’t go all self-pitying on me.”

I open the door and slide into the leather bucket seat. After I close the door, the two of us stare through the windshield, but the car remains stationary. I hold my hands out in front of me and soak up the heat blasting through the vents.

“You know, you should be thanking me,” Betty begins with excess cheer after a long, gloomy silence.

“Why’s that?” I contribute automatically.

“Lucy wanted to come looking for you, but I told her I’d handle it.” She cups her hands around her mouth and trills, “‘Henry! Henry! Where are you?’”

Despite my melancholy mood, I chuckle at her impersonation.

Encouraged, she continues, placing her hand on my upper arm, “‘Oh, Henry! I was so worried about you! You could have gotten lost! Or stung by a double-headed green-dicked scorpion! Come home now, and I’ll make you a hot toddy.’” She laughs more than speaks the last sentence, when my own laughter at her monologue proves contagious.

I playfully shrug off her hand.

Giggling, she turns on the headlights and checks over her shoulder for oncoming traffic. As she pulls onto the road in a shower of gravel against the undercarriage (not sure Sam would be thrilled about that), I sober and request, “Can we drive for a while? I’m sick of walking, but I don’t want to go back there yet.”

She stops laughing, but the smile stays on her face. “Sure,” she replies. “This baby’s got GPS, so I’m sure we can find our way back eventually.”

I let that be the last word for a while. Propping my elbow against the top edge of the door, I rest my cheek against my hand and watch the desert speed past us. Finally, after a few minutes, I ask, “How’d you find me?”

“Lucy planted a tracking device on you,” she immediately supplies, then laughs and says to my slack jaw and wide eyes, “Just kidding! Gosh. You walked in a straight line.”

Relieved the tracking device was a joke, I nevertheless muse, “Yeah, but… how did you know that? Or which direction I walked? I could have gone in any number of straight lines.”

She sighs but doesn’t answer for so long that I think she’s not going to answer at all. Then she says, “Fine. I followed you right away.”

“You’ve been following me this whole time? In this car?”

“I was worried about you,” she non-answers.

I privately marvel at my lack of awareness of my surroundings that someone could tail me for two hours without my noticing. There go my non-existent CIA or FBI aspirations.

“It’s flat around here. I stayed way back and parked a few times, giving you your space but keeping an eye on you.”

“Creepy.”

“I knew you were upset! And you don’t know this place, so I was afraid you’d get lost.”

The unsettled feeling I have suddenly has little to do with being creeped out and more to do with the sudden awareness she’s still wearing those silky pajamas. And that scares me even more.

“Well… thanks, I guess,” I mumble.

“You’re welcome. You know, we can’t lose you. You have an appearance to make at a bookstore tomorrow.” She pushes against my shoulder to let me know she’s joking. Half-joking, anyway.

Wind noise and the whisper of the tires on the highway are the only sounds for a few more miles. Then I ask, “So, who
is
Lucy, anyway? I didn’t recognize her pen name when Frankie said it.” And it hardly seemed like the time to delve further into the subject.

Gliding to a stop at a four-way intersection that looks like part of the set of a ghost town in a Western, Betty checks for other cars that aren’t there and pulls through. “Lucinda Rathbone? She writes paranormal romances.”

I wrinkle my nose. “Like love stories with ghosts?”

“Oh, don’t pretend you don’t read them. I know you do.”

I merely laugh, figuring a stronger denial would only make me look guilty as charged.

“They’re not that bad,” she defends Lucy’s books. “Far-fetched sometimes, but that’s kind of the point. And she does a good job of poking fun at the genre a little, so her stories don’t come off cheesy, like some of the more earnest books in the genre.”

“So you’ve read all of her stuff?”

She snorts. “No way. She’s published, like, 70-something books. Two a year since before I was born.”

My mouth drops open.

“Yeah. She’s amazingly prolific. I read most of her stuff when I was a teenager. I used to skip around and read the sex scenes. They were… intense.” In the lights from the dash, I think I detect a blush.

Her mention of sex reminds me of what happened between Frankie and me before dinner, and I can’t seem to summon the appropriate laughter or teasing tone in response to her admission, so I remain mum.

“I was a teenager,” she repeats, a sharper edge of defensiveness in her tone.

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. I mean, that’s absolutely age-appropriate,” I hasten to reassure her.

“It was!”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Then what’s up with the judgmental vibe all of a sudden?”

“What? No. I… I… I got distracted, that’s all.”

“I see… Whatever. As if you haven’t read the book.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

She grunts then replies, “You don’t have to pretend you don’t know about… everything.”

“I know nothing,” I insist.

“As for being preoccupied with sex, I’m not… abnormally. It’s just easy for Frankie to think less about it, since she’s obviously getting it a lot more regularly than I am.”

“Hey!”

“Whatever, Nathaniel. There’s no reason to deny it. It’s not 1930. And I’m not her mom. Actually, her mom would be more than okay with it, too.”

I rub my jaw. “Can we please talk about something else?”

I may be completely flummoxed about whatever else Betty’s alluded to during the past five minutes, but one thing’s for sure: she’s included in the growing list of people not aware of Frankie’s abstinence pledge. Hm. Not sure why Frankie wouldn’t tell her best friend something like that, but it’s not my place to set Betty straight on it.

Plus, I really do want to talk about something else.

After her outburst, Betty seems embarrassed, and I can’t think of anything else to discuss, so the tension builds in the car until, by unspoken agreement, we return to the house. She stops on the driveway, and I get out, even though she doesn’t say a word. As soon as I close the door, she zooms toward the back of the house, where the driveway curves and leads to the garage I noticed earlier, behind the pool.

I stare at the afterimage of the taillights long after they’ve disappeared. My shivering has nothing to do with the air temperature.

Chapter Fourteen

I would have preferred preparing for the reading and signing by myself. Alone. Without other people around. Talking to me. Giving me tips. Trying to encourage me not to be nervous. (That has the opposite effect, people!) Fussing with my scarf.

Okay, actually, I need help with that last thing. The day I don’t is when it’s time to turn in my man card for good.

Everything else, though? I could do without.

“You’re going to wear
those
pants? Can you even sit down in them? What are they, man jeggings?” Frankie fires at me.

I’ve already tested that I can sit in these, but I’m not going to admit it was one of my chief worries at first, too. Nor am I going to reveal I have to do a bit of… shifting… of things beforehand to prevent painful pinching of my private parts. Instead, I look down at my legs and choose to address the last in her series of questions.

“Jeggings? No. They’re skinny jeans.”

“But you’re not skinny.”

My head snaps up so I can regard her through the bathroom mirror. “What? Well, I’m not
un
-skinny, either.”

“No, but…”

Betty fluffs my scarf, then yanks on it to even the fringed ends. I stumble into her before regaining my balance.

“Leave him alone,” Betty growls. “You’re just nit-picking because it wasn’t your idea. And if I remember correctly, I invited you to go shopping with us, but you were too busy writing.”

“Yeah. I’m a writer. I have to do it whenever I have the time.”

“Then be content with your choices and stop ragging on the ones you’ve delegated to us.”

“Do these pants make me look fat?” I ask Betty, trying to turn to the side to see my butt in the mirror but unable to do so, since she’s still tugging on the scarf.

“No. Hold still. And don’t ever ask anyone that again. Frank would
never
ask that. And neither should you. You should be getting into character.”

Frankie sighs behind us. “Seriously? Does there have to be a ‘character’? Just go out there, read the excerpt you chose, answer a few questions, sign some books. Done.”

Finally, my scarf meets Betty’s aesthetic approval, so she steps away from me, but she says, “Run your fingers through your hair. It’s too… perfect.”

“Too perfect? It’s called ‘combed.’ It’s not like I have it all slicked back.” I scratch my neck.

“Don’t touch the scarf!”

“It’s itchy!”

“You’ll get used to it. Don’t mess it up. Mess up your hair, instead. Tousle it. You know, sex hair. Or ‘I’ve been sitting at a keyboard all day, working hard at a particularly difficult scene.’”

“Hello! Is anyone going to answer me?”

We simultaneously swivel and blink at Frankie. Arms folded across her chest, she does everything short of tapping her foot to display her displeasure at the two of us.

I can’t remember her asking a question, but I can tell by the look in her eyes that it would be unwise to admit that, so I gape while desperately searching my memory of the past few minutes for something to answer.

“Uh…”

Before I can utter a word, I feel something wet poke my head. I spin to see Betty standing in front of me, her hands glistening.

“What the…?”