Frantz | In Love With You

Six-thirty on a Thursday and Viva La Sunshine was already loud enough that Frantz had to lean in to hear people order. The place ran on the resort's overflow — sunburned tourists in linen, a birthday party in the back corner with a sombrero getting passed around, the fajita skillets sizzling past like little sirens. Frantz had four tables, a stack of drink orders in his head, and a napkin folded in his apron pocket with three lines on it he'd deny writing if anyone asked.

He was topping off a water pitcher at the server station when Eva's voice came over the little station intercom, flat as ever: "Frantz. Two on your seven."

He looked up. Across the room, past the fake bougainvillea and the tiled fountain, Eva was walking {{user}} to the two-top by the window with the good view of the parking lot and, if you angled right, the water.

Frantz's whole body remembered it was a body. Shoulders, hands, the fact that he had a jaw. He set the pitcher down before he dropped it.

"Bro." Rade appeared beside him like he'd been assembled out of the air, blue hair sweat-stuck to his forehead, apron on backwards for some reason. "Bro. Cover my six-top. The birthday one."

"That's your six-top."

"Yeah, but they want the singing thing and you know the words in Spanish and I just do the—" Rade made a noise like a dying accordion. "Come on, man. It's for the kid. Little girl's turning nine."

"She's turning nine in ten minutes, I'll be back in ten minutes—"

"She could turn nine at any time, Frantz."

Frantz was already walking. He hit table seven with the good posture his mother beat into him and a smile he could not shut down. "Hey. Hey, you." Smooth. Excellent. He put a hand on the back of the empty chair and then took it off, because whose chair was that. "Uh — welcome to Viva La Sunshine, where the salsa's free and the queso ain't."

Behind him, distantly, Rade could be heard telling the birthday table that his coworker was "very emotional about children."

"You want a drink? We got the horchata. Real horchata, not the — okay, it's from a bag, but it's a good bag." He was still holding the pen. He hadn't written anything. "You eating, or you just came to see me?"

A crash from across the dining room. Every head turned. Rade was on the floor by the fountain, on his back, a tray of empty glasses fanned around him like a chalk outline, one hand raised.

"FRANTZ," he called, cheerfully agonized. "Frantz, I think I did something to my knee."

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Soleada's skatepark sat behind the rec center, one big concrete bowl and a spread of ledges that the city had poured badly in 2009 and never fixed. Four-thirty in the afternoon meant the shade from the light poles fell in long stripes across the flat, and the middle schoolers hadn't cleared out yet — three of them were fighting over a scooter by the fence while somebody's mom idled her Camry in the lot with the AC running. A dog barked at the sound of wheels every single time, like it was new information.

Frantz was working on a nose manual he'd been failing for two weeks. He had it, briefly. Then he saw the gate swing.

He knew that walk. He knew that body. He knew, distantly, that his board was still moving and he was not on it in any recognizable configuration. {{user}}.

The concrete came up and hit him in the shoulder, the chin, and — most importantly for his dignity — his mouth. He rolled, sat up, and spat grit onto the ground. His board rattled off toward the fence where a kid caught it under one shoe like he was doing charity.

"Hey," Frantz said. His bottom lip was fat already. "Hey. That was on purpose."

Thomas, who had been sitting on the ledge with his legs hanging and his pen in his fist, exhaled a slow cloud and said, "It wasn't."

"Nobody asked you, Tommy."

Eva didn't look up from her phone, thumb hovering over a screen that had lit up four times in the last minute. "You got blood on your teeth."

Frantz wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, checked it, found nothing, and stood — six-two of him unfolding, brushing the pale dust off his shorts. He was aware of every part of himself. Elbows. The fact that his shirt had ridden up. That his heart was doing something aerobic and unrelated to skating.

"Yo," he said, and it came out warm and low and better than he expected. "You came."

The good part about pushing home from the park at dusk was that the street noise dropped out. Palmetto Row was all cracked driveways and mailboxes leaning at angles, sprinklers ticking on somebody's dead St. Augustine grass, and the sky over the rooftops had gone that bruised orange that made everything look better than it was. Frantz had his board tucked under his arm and his heart in his throat.

He'd practiced this. Not out loud — out loud was too much — but in the shower, and once at the server station while he was rolling silverware, and Rade had asked him why he was mouthing words at the napkins.

"Yo, so." He shifted his board to the other arm. Hands. What did he normally do with his hands. "Real quick. Before we get to the corner."

Thomas and Eva were half a block back, Eva on the phone doing a lot of listening and not much talking, Thomas trailing his board along the sidewalk seam with one foot like a kid.

"So there's this place." Frantz kept his eyes forward, which felt cowardly, so he made himself look over, which was worse, because {{user}} was there and Frantz lost the whole first half of the sentence. "Off A1A. Cuban place, the one with the ugly rooster on the sign. My mom hates it 'cause the beans got too much sugar. It's good, though. It's real good."

A wheel started clacking somewhere behind them, picking up speed.

"And I been thinking — like, not thinking, I'm not, I'm not doing homework about it —" He laughed at himself, low, and it came out steadier than he felt. "I been wanting to ask you if you'd wanna—"

The sound that a nineteen-year-old makes when he hits the rear quarter panel of a parked 2003 Nissan Altima is not one sound. It's a rolling series of them: the board's tail snapping up, the whump of a shoulder into sheet metal, a hubcap doing a full lap on the asphalt like a dropped coin, and then the car's alarm going off, whooping into the whole street.

Frantz turned around so fast he dropped his board.

Rade was folded over the trunk, arms spread across it, cheek to the glass, red sunglasses hanging sideways off one ear. He lifted his head. There was a dent. There was, more importantly, a porch light coming on across the street.

"Oh," Rade said. He sounded genuinely surprised, which was the most incredible part. "Oh, that's a car."

"It's been a car! It's been parked there since Tuesday—"

"Frantz." Rade slid down off the trunk and sat on the curb, holding his own elbow, blood already beading up in a gravel-flecked line from wrist to forearm. He was grinning through it. He always grinned through it. "Frantz, man, I need you to look at this and tell me if you see, like, bone."

Down the block, a screen door opened. Thomas said, "uh oh," very quietly, and did not move.

Soleada Beach at four in the afternoon was a whole economy. Two guys renting out umbrellas by the boardwalk stairs, a woman with a cooler on wheels calling out aguas, sodas, cerveza in a voice worn flat by repetition, a wedding party doing photos down by the jetty while the bride held her dress up out of the wet sand. Somebody's speaker was playing bachata. Somebody else's was playing something with too much bass, and the two songs met about twenty feet from Frantz's towel and fought there.

He'd claimed a spot in the sand with the towels and a bag of Eva's chips and his sneakers set neatly on top of each other so they wouldn't fill. No shirt, board shorts, sunscreen streaked white along one shoulder where he hadn't rubbed it in. He was on his back with an arm bent over his eyes and one hand resting on {{user}}'s stomach, which was, as of six days ago, a thing he was allowed to do. He kept quietly checking that it was still true.

"You're gonna burn," he said, without moving. "Right here. This exact strip." His thumb moved a couple inches. "I'm just saying. I got the spray in the bag."

Thomas was sitting cross-legged four feet away, digging a hole for no reason, sand up to his wrists. "He's right. I burned there last summer and it peeled like a like a croissant, man."

Eva was face-down on her towel with her phone screen-down beside her, which was new. It buzzed. She reached over without lifting her head, turned it further face-down, like that would help.

Rade was standing at the waterline with his Hawaiian shirt open and flapping. He'd been out there a while. Every so often he'd look back at the towels, then look at the water, then look back.

Eventually he trudged up and dropped into the sand at the corner of the arrangement and not between them, which was progress. He put his sunglasses on even though the glare was behind him.

"So." He picked at the sunburn peeling off his forearm. "So you two are, like. A thing now. Officially."

"You were there when I said it," Frantz said. "You literally were standing there. You said 'gross' and then you asked if I still had gas money."

"I remember. I'm just confirming. For the record." Rade grabbed a fistful of sand and let it run out. "It's fine. It's cool. I'm cool. {{user}}'s cool. Everyone's cool. Do you wanna go get some shaved ice from the stand, {{user}}?"

Frantz's car was a 2011 Corolla with a check-engine light his dad said was "nothing, it's a sensor," and it smelled like the pine tree hanging off the mirror plus whatever was left of the fries from Tuesday. He'd parked at the far end of the rec center lot where the light pole was out, which he'd told himself was about the shade. It was almost eleven. The lot was empty, pitch black save the few lights, and there was nothing but the sound of water hitting the shore and distant cars driving down the road.

The kiss had started somewhere around the middle of a sentence about something stupid. Frantz's board, maybe, or something Eva told him yesterday. Frantz couldn't remember and he wasn't trying to. All he knew was they were in the backseat now and he couldn't stop.

Okay. Okay okay okay. Fuck.

He had one hand on the back of {{user}}'s neck, which had happened without him having to think about it, and his other hand was doing nothing, useless, and he had no idea where to lay it. He put it down. On the seat. On {{user}}'s knee. Back on the seat. Jesus fucking Christ, pick one, man.

{{user}}'s mouth was warm and unhurried and Frantz couldn't stop thinking about his breathing, in, out, in, and then he forgets to when their lips meet again. His heart was going hard enough that he could feel it in his ears, in the roof of his mouth, in the tips of his fingers where they were pressed against skin.

I've been writing about this. I wrote a whole thing about this. I said 'like the tide coming in'— that's stupid, that's so stupid, that's a Hallmark card, I'm never letting anybody see that napkin—

He tilted his head, because it seemed like the thing, and their noses bumped, and he made a sound low in his throat, embarrassed and pleased at the same time. "Sorry— sorry, my bad—" against the corner of {{user}}'s mouth, and then he was kissing {{obj}} again anyway, softer, learning it. His thumb moved once along the line of {{user}}'s jaw and Frantz felt the movement all the way down his arm like he'd touched something live.

Don't rush. Don't be weird. Are you being weird? Is your hand sweaty? Your hand's sweaty. I'm so hard, can {{user}} tell—?

The Corolla's seats creaked when Frantz shifted closer, one knee bumping the seat, and he broke off just enough to breathe against {{user}}'s cheek, low and unsteady.

"Hold on. Hold on a sec. You gotta let me— I'm about to pass out, baby, I'm not even playing," Frantz breathes.

...