Page 83 of Drilled (Dad Bod Contracting 2)
“I’m scared, too,” he says. “I’ve spent the last month trying to convince myself otherwise, but…I couldn’t do it.”
“Ask me again,” I say, my voice a murmur as I run my hands up his chest to clutch his shoulders.
He knows what I mean. “Audra…do you want there to be a now-what with us?”
I rest my ear against his chest, listen to his heartbeat and his breathing. I nod, my chin brushing his pec. “Yes, Franco. I want a now-what between us.”
His arms encircle me, and I feel safe and protected and the weight of sadness is gone.
“Me too,” he says, relief in his voice.
Chapter 14
Neither of us say it, but we’re both tempted to hide in the condo for the next two days, doing you know what until the last possible moment. Instead, we do something neither of us is quite ready for, but know is the most responsible thing: we just…talk.
We stay in the water as the sun sets, and we hold hands, rest palms on waists, steal sensual touches, exchange small, secret smiles. And we talk. I tell him more about my childhood, my eternal sense of loneliness, how I always felt more at home in the gym with the football guys and wrestlers than with other girls, and how that often translated into assumptions about my gender identity or sexual preference, especially since I’ve hated how I look with long hair since I was six, and have insisted on short hair ever since. And how those assumptions and rumors probably fueled the way I approach sexuality.
He tells me about his grandfather, about his carpentry apprenticeship, about his first girlfriend—who was, in his words, the most stereotypical Catholic schoolgirl there’s ever been, down to the pleated skirt hiked a bit too high and the white button-down unbuttoned a bit too far, and the behaviors and predilections that were anything but Catholic.
We talk about everything. Movies, sports, cars, music. We talk as the sunset disappears at the approach of nightfall; we transition back to the cabana long after the rest of the beach is deserted. When the cabana boys start closing down, I gather my purse and cover-up, and Franco collects his phone and wallet from where he had them rolled up into his shirt, tucks the T-shirt in the back pocket of now-dry board shorts, and we walk hand in hand along the beach, letting the moon-tinged surf lick at our ankles.
We talk about our exes, and our parents, and trade horror stories of growing up in our respective familial disasters. We talk about run-ins with disgruntled ex-hookups, awkward morning-afters, comical bedroom mishaps, close calls with crazy almost-lovers whom we realized were crazy in the nick of time. We talk about sex in an almost clinical way—discussing favorite positions and least favorite positions, foreplay tactics, exit strategies; this is a strange part of the conversation, because you’d think talking sex would lead to doing it, but somehow, it’s intimate and informational and personal rather than erotic or sensual.
At some point we realize we’ve wandered so far down the beach that we have no idea how far we’ve gone, and that it’s deep in the night.
We stop, turn around, and keep talking.
He tells me hysterical stories of the various hijinks he and the other guys got into over the years, and I tell him some of the wild and weird trouble I’d get Imogen and myself into, which she would then have to sweet-talk us out of. We talk about the future—how he wants to eventually make furniture full-time, but that he loves working with the guys too much to ever quit. I tell him about my dream of eventually owning my own gym.
The stars twinkle and blink overhead, and the moon is huge and bright. We’re alone on the beach, except for the occasional couple passing by on their own late-night wander.
You hear about “long walks on the beach,” but the reality? It’s more magical than you’d believe.
I know this man.
He knows me.
I know that he cried when his grandfather died. He knows I got my first period at thirteen, and that I cried out of fear because my mom hadn’t prepared me for it, and I thought I was going to bleed to death. I know that he was scared stupid when he moved into that shitty basement apartment in Chicago, terrified that he’d get shot just for living there as a white man. He knows I chose the shot for birth control in defiance of my own needle phobia, which I force myself to face every few months when I get a new shot.
He even knows things Imogen doesn’t—that I’ve always been low-key jealous of her body, the extra layer of softness and curve she has that I don’t, but that my addiction to exercise is greater than my jealousy, so I stay lean and shredded.
