by Casey, L. A.
Frankie didn’t reply.
“I’ll be eighteen in a few years, then I’ll be an adult and out of the system,” I rambled on. “I just have to stick it out for a few more years, then I’ll walk away and never look back.”
“D’you promise?”
“Yes, Frankie. I promise.”
“And promise you’ll do everything not to make your foster dad mad.”
“I promise.”
“Okay.” She rubbed her eyes. “I won’t tell. I hate that you’re asking me this. I shouldn’t listen, but I don’t want to hurt you so I won’t tell.”
I was so relieved, tears fell from my eyes. Frankie surprised me when she got up on her tiptoes and wrapped her short arms around my body. She squeezed me so tight it almost stole my breath. A wave of emotions I had never experienced before crashed into my heart. I had been a burden, an outcast, a misfit and unloved for as long as I could remember and this tiny, red-headed girl made me feel wanted with one conversation and one little hug.
“We’re friends now and that means I’ll take care of you, okay?” she mumbled against my chest. “You can come to my house any time you want to get away from them. I promise.”
“O-Okay.”
“Promise we’ll do everything together, that we’ll take care of each other.”
“I promise, Frankie.”
When I hugged her back, it felt right. Like I had found someone who liked me for me and accepted all that came with me. I knew we were going to be good friends because finding someone like Frankie, someone who saw through the façade I portrayed and still wanted to have my back was rare. She was rare. I think I started to love her that day because she made me feel like I wasn’t the broken one, the stray kid who couldn’t find a family.
When I was with her, I was wanted and I knew that she wouldn’t ever send me away like everyone else did.
I just knew it.
CHAPTER THREE
RISK
Present day . . .
Home.
I had been back to the UK and travelled up and down it multiple times since I left to pursue my dreams in the States nine years ago, but this was the first time since I had left that I was returning to my home town. Southwold was a small town on the coast in the East Suffolk district of Suffolk, England. The town had a population of a thousand or so people and what kept the place afloat was the tourist economy. Tourists came for the pretty views and the beaches which Southwold offered, but the hotels, B&Bs, the golf course, cafés, restaurants and the market town atmosphere were the only reason people stuck around for their weekend getaways. Half of the homes in Southwold were second homes or let to holiday-makers so you rarely saw the same faces twice unless they were locals.
Growing up, I saw the appeal in Southwold that many of its residents were blind to.
I loved how calm, how quiet and picturesque it was. It was a place where someone could find themselves, or in my case, lose myself. When I left Southwold I was only eighteen years old, but I was a broken person. I spent a long time forcing myself to never think of my past, to think of her, but being back home made that impossible. Everywhere I looked, I saw her. Frankie Fulton, my ex-girlfriend, was Southwold to me and I always figured that was why I loved the town, but never came back to it.
They say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone or that sometimes you have to lose someone to realise that you really love them. I never understood any of that because I always knew that I had the love of my life in Frankie and I knew I loved her long before I lost her. The shitty thing was, I knew all of those things and I still lost her. I had nine long years to think about why we ended and though I didn’t think it was the right thing to have had happened, I accepted it. That didn’t make it hurt any less. I knew I was a rock for Frankie, but what she didn’t know was that she was an entire boulder for me.
She knew everything about my past. All of it.
May and Hayes had been my best friends for years, but even they didn’t know the extent of the things that I had been through. Frankie was different. We started out as regular classmates at school, then when I was twelve I noticed that she was pretty and that was the beginning of how she became my entire world. She took care of me before I was hers to take care of. She gave me my first hug that I could ever remember. She had my back from the jump and didn’t take no for an answer. A deep bond developed between us. She had always been there for me when I felt trapped and all alone in a home, and world, where I wasn’t wanted. She kissed every bruise, allowed me to unload my troubles onto her and she kept my secret when I asked her to.
She gave me hell for it, but she still did it.
Once Frankie entered my life in a big capacity, I shared my coping mechanism with her. Music. I explained to her how I felt when I listened to music, how I could go into a new world and escape mine whenever I listened to a song. Whenever I listened to the riffs of a guitar, the ping of a piano, the beat of drums and the emotion in a vocalist’s voice, I became part of a moment with them that took me away from all my anger, hurt and misery.
It was thanks to Frankie that I found out that I could sing.
She had severe asthma, I had known that for as long as I had known her, but I found out just how bad it was during the time that we became close friends because it was around the same time that her dad died. The day she ran towards me, screaming and crying. I knew I’d never forget how scared I was when she dropped to her knees before me and gasped for breath. Her lips had turned blue by the time I got her inhaler from her pocket and forced it into her mouth.
Hearing her inhale her medicine and listening as her wheezing faded to nothing gave me a relief I had never felt before in my life, but it also added a great worry to my mind too. Frankie was a girl who I quickly realised I needed in every way and the very thought of her dying because of her asthma terrified me whenever I allowed myself to think about it. It was the reason why I stole one of my foster mother’s blue inhalers every few months. I made sure I had one of them with me at all times just in case Frankie was ever without one of hers.
Owen had caught me stealing one once and he sliced a line into my back as punishment. Out of all of the times that the man had beat me, that was the only time he had ever left a forever-lasting physical mark on me. Across my shoulders and down to the right of my back was a thick, jagged scar. Its pink colour was fading with time. It was always there to touch though, to feel, to remember.
That awful day, when Frankie’s attack subsided, I sat on the side of the street with her and hugged her but it didn’t seem like it was enough. I asked what I could do to help; she told me patting her lower back was what her parents did so I did that and then I began to sing to her to distract her from the pain she was feeling. I didn’t know what it was like to have a real father. I never knew who mine was, and my foster father was never in the running for Dad of the Year, but just because I didn’t have a father didn’t mean I didn’t understand the pain of losing one. I had never seen Frankie so broken before and I wanted to do something, anything, to take away some of that pain.
So I sang and to my great surprise, it helped her.
A long time later, when her sobs turned to sniffles, she turned her tear-streaked, blotchy red face to mine and stared at me through her swollen, bloodshot eyes and she offered me the sweetest smile I had ever been given. She leaned her face against mine and I could still remember feeling my heart stop when her lips brushed against mine. It was a simple, chaste kiss but it was my first, hers too, and I still couldn’t imagine anything more perfect. It would be the only kiss we would share until just over two years later just after her fifteenth birthday when I bit the bullet and asked her on a date. During that date I asked her to be my girlfriend, and I kissed her, and that was that.
Her kissing me back had been enough to shake my world.
Ever since Frankie heard me sing, she almost demanded I sing to her all of the time. She encouraged me to start a band to put my passion for music into something I coul
d create myself. It was like a switch had been flipped inside of me. I loved to sing, I just loved it. Singing felt like breathing to me. May and Hayes took to the idea of being in a band like fish to water. At our school, Mr Jones was musically inclined and he was delighted to finally have students to start an after-school music club with. He taught us how to play the guitar, piano, and the drums. We learned our other instruments on our own, but Mr Jones was the reason we could even do that.
He supported Blood Oath from the second we came up with our name and took our band seriously.
He didn’t have much on a teacher’s salary, but the man went out of his way and bought us our first instruments. They weren’t new or even second hand, they were third hand and obviously not in the best of shape, but they were ours. Once we had instruments, May’s parents sat up and took notice of us one day when we were jamming out in their back garden. Three weeks later, they allowed us to have their small garage converted into a makeshift soundproof studio for us to work out of. May’s parents didn’t know it then, but they gave me a place to escape to every single day and I always appreciated them for it.
The day I turned eighteen, I moved out of my foster parents’ house with a bag full of my belongings before the sun had even risen, and I kept my promise to Frankie: I never looked back once I closed the door behind me. The day before that, Frankie and I had signed the lease to rent a cottage on Pier Street. She didn’t turn eighteen until the twenty-first of January, a week after I did, but her mum allowed us both to move in together before that because she knew we were the real deal. Her boyfriend, Dr Michael O’Rourke, was our landlord. Frankie liked the man, she just never knew how to act around him because he had always been her family’s GP, but he was a good guy.
Having a place of our own was better than anything I could have imagined.
Frankie and I had been dating almost three years to the day when we moved in together, but as far as our relationship went, we had never gone all the way physically. I wanted to, I had wanted to have sex with her since I was fifteen but she wasn’t ready for that step in our relationship so we waited. We kissed and touched and she let me finger her once, but full sex had never happened until the night we moved in together.
It was a memory that I would never forget.
“Frankie!” I hollered. “Babe, did you buy tea-bags when you went shopping with your mum?”
“Yeah,” she shouted from the bathroom. “They’re in the tea caddy.”
I paused. “We have a tea caddy?”
“It’s next to the sugar-pot.”
“We have a sugar-pot?”
Frankie’s musical laughter flowed down the hallway when she opened the bathroom door. I turned my head and watched as she walked into our kitchen looking good enough to eat. She had her long, curly auburn hair tied up in a high ponytail, she had a fitted green T-shirt on and a pair of black leggings. She was barefoot and wearing the most casual outfit a person could wear, but to me, she looked like a goddess. Knowing I was alone with her, and would sleep in a bed with her, was making my head – both of them – spin.
“I bought a set for coffee, tea and sugar when I was in Tesco.” She pointed to the brown pots that were near the kettle. “I filled them up already.”
I reached over and grabbed the pot that had ‘Tea’ written across it in bold, white letters. I took out two tea-bags, closed the pot and put it back before I grabbed two mugs and flipped the kettle on. I smiled when Frankie’s arms slid around my bare waist and her head rested underneath my shoulder blades. I was being a little unfair to her and I knew it. I was starting to fill out a little, my shoulders were broader and my body was lean and I knew Frankie liked it best when I was shirtless and now that we lived together I planned on being shirtless a lot.
“If I get any taller,” I commented, “you’re gonna need a foot stool to hug me.”
She reached up and pinched my nipple which made me yelp and her laugh. When I turned to face her, I looked down and snorted. I was eighteen and was already six foot four, she was a week shy of eighteen and topped the measuring stick at five foot even. She was an itty bit of a thing and I loved it. There was no woman more feminine to me than Frankie.
“You’re not allowed get any taller.” She stated. “I think my growth spurt is over.”
Laughter bubbled up my throat.
“You grew two inches the year you turned sixteen and have capped off at five foot nothing. That isn’t a growth spurt, Frodo, that’s a growth stall.”
I arched back when she jokingly pretended to bite me.
“Don’t start with me, Groot,” she warned. “Remember how much closer I am to your dick than your face and which one I can slap first.”
I shuddered. “Messaged received.”
She snorted then turned and helped me put away the rest of our shopping. After making and drinking our tea, we got to work. Once the perishable food was stored in the fridge and freezer, we took some time deciding on where everything else would go. I made the mistake of putting cups, bowls and plates into the top cupboards. I forgot my girlfriend was a hobbit so I had to take them all out and put them in a floor cupboard. When everything was put away Frankie beamed and hugged me for the hundredth time that day.
“I can’t believe we live here. Together. We’ve leased this place, we both graduated school, have jobs and pay rent and bills. We’re actual adults. It’s terrifying. I love it.”
I chuckled as I kissed the crown of her head.
“I’m not scared at all.”
She looked up at me with wonder in her clear green eyes.
“You’re not?”
“Nope,” I chirped. “Because being here in this cottage with you is the first time I feel like I’m actually living. I wouldn’t trade this for anything in the world, Cherry.”
Her eyes suddenly glazed over with tears so I moved her over to the counter and helped her sit on top of it so I didn’t have to keep looking down at her. She was still shorter than me, but the height difference wasn’t as drastic now. I leaned in and kissed her pale pink lips, which were quivering.
“Don’t cry.”
She sniffled. “I just love you so much.”
“I love you too,” I smoothed some unruly tendrils of hair back from her face. “Only you.”
When Frankie kissed me, I wasn’t sure how I knew, but I was confident that this would end with us experiencing the other’s body for the first time and the anticipation of it made me shake. I lifted my hands to her face and stepped between her parted thighs. I almost couldn’t keep up with how desperately she kissed me until she surrendered herself to me and followed my lead.
I was a virgin like her; I had waited for her to be ready and according to her kiss and touch on my body, I felt that she had reached that point. This thought was confirmed when her hand slid down my bare stomach and shockingly dipped under the band of my trousers and boxer briefs. The second her soft, supple hand touched my hardened cock, I broke our kiss.
“Are you sure?” I asked, staring down into her lust-filled eyes. “We can just kiss and touch; we don’t have to have sex.”
When Frankie smiled up at me, I knew then just how dangerous she was because for that smile, for that overwhelming look of want for me in her big, round eyes, I knew that I would do just about anything. I’d give her the world if I had it in my hands.
“I’m ready. I want to be with you in every way,” she said, her hand stroking me twice. “I hurt for you. Please.”
Christ. She was testing me with her words and a couple of strokes. I had to regain control, so I picked her up and attached my lips to her neck as I moved. She gasped and pulled her hand from my underwear so she could grip my shoulders with both of her hands. Within seconds, I was in our bedroom and laid her back on our already-made bed. I moved my lips up to hers and kissed her until she wrapped her legs around my body and squeezed me tightly with her thighs.
“Please,” she moaned against my lips. “Risk, please. Love me.”
&n
bsp; I could have dropped dead there and then from excitement alone.
My heart was at risk of exploding in my chest when Frankie removed her T-shirt as she lay under me. She had no bra on and while I had seen her small, perky breasts before, the sight of them still made my breath catch just like it did the first time. Without a word, I leaned down and sucked her right, hardened nipple into my mouth. She shifted, pushing her breast roughly against my lips. I flicked my eyes upwards and watched as Frankie’s eyes squeezed shut and her mouth hung open in a silent moan as I swirled my tongue around her areola and then suckled.
“Yes,” she hissed. “Fuck, yes!”
Blood surged to my already hard cock, it throbbed to the point of pain.
As I switched breasts, I multitasked by hooking my thumbs under the hem of Frankie’s leggings and underwear and I began to push them down. She helped me by lifting her hips and kicking the fabric off her legs when I couldn’t push them down any further without stopping what I was doing. I sat back on my heels and got my first look at my naked, red-headed beauty and I was already embarrassed because I knew I was going to come before I was supposed to.
My girl was a goddess who would have Aphrodite herself leering her way with jealousy.
Her skin was flawless, smooth to the touch and she was so fair she looked immaculate. Her cheeks were flushed with colour and her green eyes were hooded with desire. Her hair had come out of its tie and was spilled over the white bedsheets, the fiery colour popping out against the backdrop. That same auburn colour was between the apex of her thighs. My heart was a pounding mess and staring at her pussy didn’t help matters. I didn’t wait for an invite, I lay flat on my stomach, spread her lips apart and licked up her wet slit until my tongue slid over the swollen, pulsing bud of her clit.
Frankie’s hips bucked against my face.
“Risk!” she screamed. “Oh my god. Oh my god!”
Except for hearing her cry my name, her words became inaudible as they jumbled together. I had never done this before; I took my cue from the pornos I had watched. I explored her pussy, devouring her taste and smell as I paid attention to her body’s responses whenever my tongue made it twitch or jolt. She liked when I tongued the hole of her pussy’s entrance, but she loved when I swirled around her clit before clamping it between my lips and sucking. I wasn’t sure how long I had been eating her pussy, it could have been five minutes, or five hours, but time was lost on me because what I was doing was pleasurable for me too.