Muffin Top (Page 61)

He picked up on the third ring. “Hey there, Muf—Lucy.” He paused and sighed. “Sorry about that. Old habits die hard.”

But he was trying to change, and that meant something. “It’s okay, Dad.”

“So what do I owe this surprise call to?”

She squeezed her eyes shut against the sun streaming in through her bedroom window like a laser beam aimed right at all of her most tender spots—especially the emotional ones. “I need your help.”

“Anything.”

“I messed up with Frankie.” And that was the undersell of the year.

After her girls had left, she’d stayed up way too long thinking about everything that Gina, Zach, and, most importantly, Frankie had said to her, stripping away her own natural defensiveness to see what they were all trying to tell her. All three of them had zeroed in on the same thing. She was so sure Frankie was going to eventually grow bored with her, she’d picked a breakup fight with him out of nothing. It seemed like something at the time, granted, but after hours of reliving the moment, she realized she didn’t even give him a chance that night. Had she ever?

She thought she was being smart by prepping for disaster. In reality, she had been expecting everyone to carry her own emotional baggage.

“What happened with Frankie?” her dad asked, his voice soft with concern.

She inhaled a deep breath and told him everything—well, at least the G-rated version. About how she’d spent most of her time with Frankie waiting for everything to go to hell, just like it had with her parents. They hadn’t lost their chance to be together—she’d never allowed them to have one in the first place.

“You think you’re the reason why your mother and I got divorced?”

She nodded even though her dad couldn’t see her, but it didn’t seem to matter.

“Lucy,” he said, managing somehow to put enough love in her name that it sounded like a hug. “That couldn’t be further from the truth. There were many factors that went into why our marriage didn’t work, but you were never on that list. Understand?”

Sniffling a little, she nodded and said, “Yeah.”

“But even if you had been, holding that against Frankie wouldn’t be fair. We all bring our emotional histories to relationships, and no one is perfect. However, it’s how well your imperfections fit together that makes a relationship work. Do you love him?”

She didn’t even have to think about it. “I do.”

“Then why are you wasting time talking to me?”

“Because I don’t know how to fix this.” Her entire career had been built around moving beyond a crisis point, but when it came to her own personal disaster she didn’t have any tools.

“What do you think you should do?”

She swallowed her first response of, If I knew I wouldn’t have asked for your help. “Get in my time machine and go back to when we were in Antioch.”

Her dad’s chuckle set off Gussie, whose whiny let’s-play bark carried over the line. “That’s not exactly an option.”

“Science really needs to catch up with what people really need.” She settled back against her pillows, already feeling a little better just by talking things out with her dad.

“Or you could just go apologize and try to work things out like adults.”

Ow. Truth hurts. “Harsh.”

“Tough love has its place, and I do love you, Lucy. You’ll figure this out. You always do.”

“Love you too, Dad.”

After saying their goodbyes, she hung up and got into the shower. She didn’t know what in the world she was going to do next, but whatever it was, it would probably go over better if she didn’t smell like vodka. By the time she was standing bent at the waist so she could blow her hair dry upside down, she had half a plan worked out.

Her dad was right. She needed to apologize for going right for Frankie’s vulnerable underbelly with a rusty shank. But she’d been hurt and mad and afraid when she’d gone for the one thing she knew would hurt him the most. He’d pegged her right that first night in Marino’s, she had been scared—not just of going to her high school reunion, but of giving people a chance. There was a reason why she led with the insults. The whole time she’d thought she’d been taking others power over her away from them, but all she’d been doing was taking it away from herself. And Frankie had paid the price because she’d put all of her baggage on him when he hadn’t done anything to deserve it. Just the opposite. He’d done everything to show he cared about and respected her just the way she was.

She had to make this right.

Half an hour later, she was wearing her favorite red dress with her strappy sandals, determined to do what it would take to find Frankie and make him listen to her. She grabbed her purse, flung open her door, and stopped dead in her tracks.

Fallon, Gina, and Tess stood in the hallway wearing identical guilty faces. Gina was holding a petal pink pillowcase.

“What’s going on and why are you holding a pillowcase?” The question flew out of Lucy’s mouth.

“We couldn’t find any potato sacks,” Tess said as if that made any sense at all.

Fallon rolled her eyes. “We’re here to kidnap you.”

Not surprisingly, that didn’t make anything any more clear. Another time she would have wanted to play along, but not right now.

“I love you, but I have to go find Frankie.”

“Oh,” Tess said, her shoulders sinking with relief. “That makes things so much easier.”

“Unless she’s looking for him just to try to whack him,” Gina responded with a melodramatic evil laugh.

“She wouldn’t be the first, and I’m just speaking for me and my siblings,” Fallon said.

Lucy looked from one of her friends to the other. They had seriously all lost it. “How many Bloody Marys have you had today?”

Gina’s face lit up. “None, but that’s a great idea.”

Fallon and Tess nodded in agreement.

Okay, there was no way she was getting dragged into whatever shenanigans this was. She was a woman on a mission. “You go ahead without me. I have to get to Frankie.”

She loved her girls, but there was no way she was letting them slow her down. She pulled her front door shut behind her, dodged the threesome, and hightailed it for the elevator.

“You’re not going anywhere without us,” Gina said

The woman moved much more like a ninja than Lucy had expected.

Nerves plucked to the very last fiber, she turned to her girls, who were walking onto the elevator with her. She counted to twenty and exhaled, reminding herself that she loved these absolutely annoying women. “Seriously, I have to get to Frankie.”

“We know, that’s who we were kidnapping you for,” Tess said. “And that’s all we’re telling you about that until we get to Marino’s. Don’t worry, Frankie will be there.”

And that was the last the evil little threesome would say about it, no matter how much she asked, begged, or threatened. Even when they had to drive around the block Marino’s was on three times to find a parking spot.

Whatever was going on, the bar was packed at ten in the morning on a Sunday. Walking inside, surrounded by her girls, she scanned the crowd and saw about a million people but no sexy-as-sin, tall, ginger firefighter who could turn her panties to ash with just a look.