#José Morales | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

pennyserenade · 1 year

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NO NORMAN ROCKWELL PAINTING

pairing: frankie morales x female oc, frankie morales x female unnamed oc rating: m (mature) tags: fluff/comfort, some angst, talk about depression, talk of sex, some language word count: 3.5k summary: when frankie asks her a question she never expected him to she looks to the past. or: frankie asks her to marry him and she revisits all the moments in their relationship where she would’ve said yes in a heartbeat. a/n: i just found this in my drafts and finished it up. it’s been a very long time since i wrote these two - from the losing dogs series - but i hope you all enjoy it <3

The first time he kissed her bare collarbone with his warm lips, and touched the small of her back with his large hand, she thought: I needed someone to do that.

A body that has gone too long thinking of love only as an option is usually the body that needs it the most. Accordingly, because she had for so long thought she could survive without it, hers folded into the warmth of his arms and the crevices of his half-together life before she should’ve let it.

She is lucky. Frankie has handled her body - and by extension, her heart - with generosity and care. The first kiss on the collarbone was a precursor, not a full stop; she is happy to say that he is brimming with love for her, and that all of his kisses feel that comforting, especially on bad days.

He has been more patient and considerate than most have been with her. He could say that he fell into her life before he should’ve but he wouldn’t, because Frankie is kind. He is a warm smile in the morning, and he is the man who holds her hand underneath the table at restaurants. Even before they allowed themselves to want each other, Frankie showed up. He held her in showers while she cried and whispered I love you when it was such a foolish thing to say, because it was the one thing he knew he would always have to give.

God only knows why, after all they’ve been through, she wouldn’t say the one thing she knows he needs, and the one thing she knows she could give. Just a simple yes. When he got down on his knees on the green grass of their shared background, and pulled out a ring too expensive for his salary, she should’ve said it in seven different shades of ecstatic. She should’ve kissed him on the lips and weeped. Anything. But she had looked at the ring in that little box, and she looked at his face and she had paused for too long. What came out, when it did come out, was “Maybe.”

Life is a whirlwind of poor decision making and tripping over one’s own feet. They know this better than most. Frankie has had his fair share of fuck-ups: anger he gave way to when he shouldn’t have; times when he said yes when he always meant no; second guessing the good things and never the bad; and entertaining lifestyles not completely within his reach. She too knows her fuck-ups: the bad boyfriends she loved too long and the good ones she loved not at all; those bad years, which she would always feel had undone what had made her good by being mentally unwell; and the reluctant pause and subsequent ‘maybe’ she gave Frankie when he had asked her to be his wife.

It wounded him. She could see it immediately in the fallen expression that flashed across his face when he recognized she hadn’t said the enthusiastic “yes” he imagined she would’ve. Now they’ve shared six whole days of near silent meals and quiet evenings that say too much. When they do speak, it is the talk of people who haven’t shared many years of life together. They are conversations that extend mostly to “Do you know where I put my coat?” and “I’m going to work now.” They remind her of the years when they played at not caring. She hates herself for doing that to them.

It would’ve been yes if she was a more perfect person, but she isn’t and he knows this. And the six days of silence haven’t been borne out of her hesitance, but because she knows him too: if she had said yes directly after the maybe, he would’ve thought she did it because she felt she had to. If she had said it during the five days that followed it, he wouldn’t have understood or wanted it.

He is angry, upset, hurt. The ring is shoved under piles and piles of underwear in his drawer, and he only comes to bed when he is too tired to stay in the living room. Sometimes, when he doesn’t think she’s paying attention, he stares at her like she’s a puzzle he’ll never figure out and then he looks down at the ground, frowning.

If only he knew how it has been six days of nonstop thought for her. She has prepared her I’m sorry speech for every situation conceivable: before work, after work, catching him in the hallway, the moment he crawls into bed at night, the dinner table. The words have been rehearsed and rewritten and beaten to death. Until today, they’ve always sounded wrong, slightly off.

Today she tries her hand at pure and honest exasperation: “Francisco I know you’re angry with me, and you’re right to be, but I am sorry. If I could go back and take those words from my mouth and put the right ones in, I would. I want to marry you and I don’t know what stopped me from saying that.”

The spoon he stirs the cream into his coffee with continues on, but the muscles in his back seem to relax. She thought it would be easier to say that with his back turned to her, but not seeing his reaction immediately worries her–makes her feel like she did when she said maybe. Poor. Foolish. Out of step and dizzy.

“Frankie,” she pleads, her voice giving way to worry.

He turns around, eyebrows furrowing. “I don’t know what to say,” he tells her. He doesn’t sound angry or mad, just honest. Her stomach turns viciously and she regrets that second cup of coffee.

“Do you still want to marry me?”

Frankie takes a careful sip of his coffee and she feels like he’s doing it slowly, deliberately. She watches his mouth, sees how the liquid goes down his throat. “I want you to want to marry me,” he tells her, “and I’m sorry if it feels like I’ve been angry with you. I have been but I’m not anymore. Not really. I know I shouldn’t have asked you that, especially because we’ve never really talked about it. I just thought...”

She frowns. “Yes you should’ve. You thought right.”

“Then why did you say no?” he asks, frustrated, placing a hand on the counter. He leans back against it.

“I said maybe.”

“That’s right: maybe.” He takes another long drink of his coffee, staring at the hardwood floors. “You’re allowed to tell me no. I think the fact that you said maybe is what made me so angry with you, like you couldn’t even trust me to handle no. I know now that’s probably not the truth, but I kept thinking about it like that.”

“But it wasn’t no, Frankie. It was yes but I was…I don’t know. Shocked.” She shrugs remorsefully. “You know it hasn’t been easy between us–or for us in general. There are some things you learn to forget about after a while, and I think that was one of those ideas I had parted with when it came to you. You’ve already been married and I don’t know–I felt like you had enough of it for a while.”

He smiles, showing a hint of his dimple. “I’m feeling a bit like an ass right now, talking to you about it.”

She laughs. “I love you, Francisco and I want to marry you. I’ve said yes to you a thousand times in my head.”

“Wish I could’ve been there,” he jokes, pushing off the counter. She scoffs, throwing the paper towel next to her at the table. He dodges it, watching them bounce off the cabinet. They begin laughing with each other, happy laughter, laughter that spills from their lips and heals the cracks created by anger. It fills the kitchen with warmth, like thawing out the ice after a bad winter.

She looks up at him laughing and she knows that she wants him, that she always will.

She knows that she always has.

———

The summer night sweltered outside of her cracked bedroom window. Their naked bodies, warm and damp with sweat, pressed into each other. Frankie’s arm held her body upwards, his arms wrapped just below her breasts, pressing her back into his front. He groaned quietly as he thrusted into her. She tugged at his curly, unruly hair, and kissed the side of his mouth clumsily when it tried to meet hers from an awkward position. The crickets from the yard filled the spaces that their moans, shared and separate, did not. It was too early for the words ‘I love you’ to spill from their mouths the way it would later,’ but it occurred to her at that moment - two months after she had first met him in that bar - that it was growing inside of her.

Frankie. Sometimes when she was alone, the idea of him excited her. Not sexually, but romantically; she enjoyed kissing him, enjoyed the way he pulled her close, held her like he was then. They had agreed that what they were sharing was sex and friendship - they laughed over beers and pretended that they didn’t kiss until they were - but she understood that when they were together like this, a shift occurred. He held her so tightly, and pressed into her so slowly at times she imagined he felt his loneliness more deeply than she did hers. The sex brought them pleasure but something else, too. Understanding.

When he filled the condom inside of her, he nibbled at her earlobe and his warm breath fanned across her goosebumped skin. Closing her eyes tightly, she imagined the sound of it rising in his throat, spilling out lovingly: I love you. And when he put his fingers between her thighs and rubbed her clit without guidance, she felt it rise in her own. But she didn’t say it, because she knew she didn’t mean it. It was only a want, a silly desire she had played out with other men, too.

It was only when Frankie held her close on between the cotton sheets - their bodies now damp - and told her that he went to meetings with men who had said they found God, that she knew she wanted him differently than she had other men. He confessed that it made him angry when they said that; that he couldn’t understand how someone could go through something like he had and feel like God was the answer. Frankie admitted that he was too much of a coward to really abandon the idea all together. He was Catholic before. Frankie had told this to her without making light of it. In her bedroom, he felt he had the right to his emotions without needing to laugh at them first.

She thought, as she aimlessly stroked his hand, the one with the tattoo: So he wouldn’t want a church wedding.

That was the first time she knew she would say yes.

——

Black-and-white movies made Frankie feel anxious. As a child his mother had sat by the television and repeated the words that fell from the lips of the actors in them. It was her heavy accent that frustrated her sometimes to tears, but he thought at the time it was these movies with no color. He would sit on the couch and watch her struggle with the words and when she would stop her echoing of the dialogue, he would know that she had given up for the time being.

Even long after he had learned that she had done this to learn better English, and that the tears were products of frustration, he found the movies still discomforted him. The worlds, so devoid of color, made him bounce his leg and remember every syllable his mother had tripped over in front of him.

Frankie had never told her about this bit of his childhood, not until his stomach could handle the movies without turning and his leg had long stopped bouncing.

When she was sad, she loved to watch them. They were colorless worlds with colorful characters and they were simple: you moved from point a to point b in the plot with little thought needed. She liked to listen to the syrupy sound of a made up accent fall from the lips of people who didn’t seem quite real, too. The actors were more like fairy tale creatures than tangible beings, people with showy names that were more important than their characters. She never knew the name of the characters, only the actors who played them. He learned them: Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Ginger Rogers.

One night as The Lady Eve played on the TV in her bedroom, Frankie laughed at one of the jokes. “I used to hate these,” he confessed, laying his head across her lap, “But I’m kinda fond of them now. They’re so stupid.”

When he said that, she nodded, smilingly. Frankie said stupid affectionately, like she did. He meant: they make me laugh, even though I shouldn’t.

After the movie ended and she ended up crying because she needed it, Frankie told her about his mother and about how he had only just recently begun to like the movies. “Because of you,” he had added, hoping it would make her feel better. It did.

That day, as she curled into his body, she imagined that he would make a good husband. She knew that if he ever asked, the answer would be yes.

—

Led Zeppelin. Bob Seger. The Rolling Stones. Cheap Trick. Creedence Clearwater Revival. Prince.

These bands and artists used to belong solely to her. She had a vast collection of records she had picked up over the years, and gradually, as Frankie found himself taking more space in her life, they became his bands and artists too. He flicked through the collection with deliberation every Sunday morning he spent with her, adding comments and asking her questions about all the various things he found. Jokingly she called this time “Frankie’s College Hour” because he reminded her so much of one of those college radio hosts with too many unfiltered thoughts and too much time to himself.

That Sunday morning Frankie had his head between her thighs as the Janis Joplin record he picked out spinned.

Sometimes it happened like that: on the couch, in the daylight, when both of them were either too sad or too happy to deny they wanted to be touched. Today it was too happy. He had picked out the record after she had made him breakfast, and they had sat talking about the music. He had realized just how very much he liked her, as he sometimes did, and she could see it in his eyes. Frankie didn’t want to be her friend, so he did the next best thing he knew to do, aside from confessing: he spread her legs and pressed his tongue against her.

When he made her cum to the sound of Janis Joplin, she turned her head and saw their discarded breakfast plates on her table. At that moment, she knew that if he asked her to be his wife, she would’ve said yes. That Sunday morning was so domestic, she wanted it to be real.

——

She hated his friends. Well, most of them anyways. There was one, named Ben. Benny, Frankie called him. She didn’t mind him so much because it was obvious how much Frankie adored him. Frankie hadn’t come to her with much: a truck, a kid, an ex-wife, and Ben. She gave way to Ben because she understood Ben came with Frankie, whether she liked it or not.

One night she had gone to Frankie’s house for dinner and Ben was there too, watching football with him. She had met him a handful of times before but she had never really sat and talked to him. Over dinner he had told her a handful of amusing stories about their time in the service, and she had managed to forget this man was the one who Frankie had endured most of his troubles with.

It became obvious later that night that Frankie hadn’t told him what kind of relationship it was they shared. Benny had asked her whether she had a boyfriend or not after they had chatted for a little while. She had said no, partially because it was true and partially because Frankie hadn’t told someone so close to him what she was to him. That hurt her.

He had asked her to come see a boxing match of his sometime and she had said, smiling too warmly, that she would love to. When Benny had left, Frankie pretended it hadn’t happened. It was easy for him to disregard things like that, especially when it came to Benny and her. Frankie viewed Ben as being kiddish, someone who needed guidance, and he viewed her as too kind, too capable of saying what pleased people. He hadn’t expected her to really go to that match, just as much as he hadn’t assumed Benny to really be flirting; it was just what they did.

The crash never came but a realization did, when he really did run into her at one of those matches. She looked so pretty, wearing a summer dress and strappy sandals, holding a beer. Benny had gotten them seats next to each other, somewhere near the front, and every time Ben staggered or a blow landed to his head, she flinched closer and closer to Frankie.

Frankie could’ve been angry, could've been possessive and bitter. A part of her hoped he would be, even though she knew it was wrong to want that. But Frankie said nothing. He took them out to a burger joint afterwards, and paid because Benny had won his match and only managed to get one busted eyebrow in the meantime. Benny had sat next to her in the booth, Frankie on the other side.

The only signal Frankie gave her the entire night was a barely perceptible shake of the head when Benny got up to go to the bathroom. Frankie wasn’t mean, didn’t get a hard look in his eye as he looked at her. He was apologetic, pleading. Please, the look told her. And then he asked her how she liked the match, like nothing had happened.

Frankie went home with her that night, after he had dropped Benny off. They had sex in the garage, unable even to climb out of his truck to get into her bed. It was not sex that was quick and harsh, like it could sometimes be. Their bodies came together slowly and his mouth almost never parted from hers. After she had told him she was sorry for being such a bitch to him. He had told her, softly, affectionately, “It’s okay, honey. I know. I get it, and I’m sorry too.”

And he meant it.

She wanted to marry him so badly, it had created an ache in her.

——

She takes the blue box from his hand giddily, making sure the emotion is apparent on her face as she opens it up this time. Frankie laughs, shaking his head. “Oh, c’mon, don’t make a mockery of it. I’ll put it back in the underwear drawer.”

She smiles as she puts it on her finger, liking the way it looks despite the fact that she doesn’t exactly love how much she knows it must’ve cost him. This is months of his life on her finger, a luxury he couldn't afford but did. It is one more sacrifice he made willingly, happily, stupidly in his love for her.

“Do you like it?” he asks quietly, staring down at her finger. He holds it between his own fingers for a moment, inspecting the ring. “I can get a different one if you don’t like it.”

She looks up at him, sees the vulnerability in his expression, and her heart softens for him once again. “Oh Frankie,” her voice cracks. “ I love it. Really. Thank you.”

He brings her hand up to his lips and kisses the inside of her palm. “You sure you really want to marry me?” he mumbles against her skin.

She nods her head without a second thought. It comes to her just as it did all those other times and she knows it to be true.

“I’ve never been more certain of anything, Francisco.”

“That’s good,” he whispers, the grin meeting his dark brown eyes. “That’s so good, really, because I don’t know what I’d be without you, honey, and I don’t want to know.”

“I know,” she tells him softly, because she gets it too. She wishes she was better with words because if she was, she would tell him that he was always the man she would marry. Instead she says, “Thank you so much, Francisco. Thank you.”

The way the skin around his eyes crinkles tells her that he does get it, though and she knows just looking at him that she will want to marry him many more times before she actually does.

That body that thought it could live without love now survives because of it. And she thinks: It is good to be alive.

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