Eat My Heart Out

I slowly open my eyes and look down at the weight on my chest. I love that weight. Even though Frank has been living here permanently for more than a month now, I still haven’t gotten used to waking up with him in my arms. I only do so on weekends, but it’s a pleasant surprise every time.

Frank slowly stirs and I lean down to kiss him awake. He smiles, lifts his head and opens his eyes slightly. He gazes at me through the crack between his heavy eyelids, before he closes the distance between them and our lips.

I giggle at him, but stop to enjoy the kiss. It’s nothing but lips, since we’ve both just woken up. We got over the morning-breath thing about a week ago, but open-mouth-kisses are still not a reality in the morning. And I’m okay with that. We have the rest of the day for that.

“Morning,” Frank mumbles when he pulls away and lays his head back onto my chest.

“Good morning,” I say back, more clear than him. I brush a hand through his hair, but only get halfway before it’s tangled in his messy bird’s nest.
“Do you think mom has made pancakes?” Frank doesn’t call mom ‘mom’, but I still do. I’m not sure if he ever will. Maybe when we move out. I’d love to move to New York or Boston with him.

“If not, then you are,” he answers, and I can clearly hear the amusement in his gruff voice. I smile widely up at the ceiling.

It’s times like these that I feel like our lives are perfect: when Frank actually insists on eating. He had a hard time eating regularly for about a week after the verdict, but after he – all of us, really – started realizing he wasn’t going anywhere, he started relaxing more and then also eating more.

I pull him into a hug, before I scoot away from him and out of my bed. I walk into the bathroom and do my business. The mirror is still absent. I want him to be completely okay, before he starts facing himself every day. He usually tosses a towel over the mirror in the upstairs bathroom when he showers. It is kinda perverted that the sink and mirror is on the opposite wall of the shower so that you’re basically staring at yourself through the curtain when you’re showering, but that’s the way this house was designed.

Horny plumbers.

I wish I could take that mirror down, but the rest of the family needs one to look pretty, so a towel has to do. And it does quite well for now.

I also wish I could take down the mirrors at the school, but that’s beyond my control.
I wash my hands and walk out of the bathroom to see Frank sitting up in our bed. It’s ours on weekends. On weekdays, it’s only mine – alone.

“Ready for pancakes?” I ask him as I smile at how cute he looks when he rubs his eyes like a little kid.
He nods.

“Yeah. I just gotta pee first,” he says sleepily and pulls the duvet away from him. He gets up and walks over to me, then tiptoes up to peck my lips.

“I’ll go prepare the pancakes, then,” I say and peck him back, before we go each our way.

I love how we’ve already seemed to have fallen into kind of a pattern. It’s comfortable. It’s something I can depend on every day, and I value that.

It keeps me in control of myself.