Total pages in book: 31
Estimated words: 32231 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 161(@200wpm)___ 129(@250wpm)___ 107(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 32231 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 161(@200wpm)___ 129(@250wpm)___ 107(@300wpm)
“Ember,” I say.
She looks up.
“You’re joy,” I hear myself say. It comes out like a confession I didn’t mean to give, like a flare in a dark tree line. “I didn’t know I remembered how to be near it. So if I—” I shake my head, frustrated with the words. “If I step back, it’s not because you’re too much. It’s because I’m slow.”
She stares at me, throat working. Then she smiles, small and real. “Okay,” she whispers. “We’ll move at your pace.”
“You say that now,” I warn.
She grins. “Oh, I’m going to break your pace like a wild horse.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Absolutely yes.”
The furnace breathes warm through the vents. Outside, Copper Mountain settles into the kind of cold where the sky snaps clear and the stars eavesdrop. Ember pushes her mug aside, runs her fingers along a hairline crack in the tabletop like she’s deciding whether to mend it or let the flaw sing.
“Do you ever think,” she says, “that the worst thing happened, and then you survived it, and then everything after is just…living in the outline?”
I swallow. I know exactly what she means. “Every day.”
She nods, like we just shook hands on truth. “Then maybe,” she says, “we redraw the outline.”
“You don’t redraw a fire scar,” I say. “You learn where it is and walk it.”
“Or,” she counters, sly and gentle, “you plant something that grows around it.”
“You going to plant marigolds in me, Ember?”
She lights. “God, no. You’re a pine. I’m going to string lights on you and scandalize the forest.”
I choke on a laugh and give up pretending I don’t want it. Her joy. The lights. The scandal. It terrifies me how much I want it.
A car passes outside. The headlights slide across her profile—cheek, mouth, the soft place under her jaw I won’t touch. The rental hums. Everything in me is too full.
“Come here,” I hear myself say, and my voice is lower than it should be.
“Why,” she says, but she’s already rising, socks whispering over warped floorboards.
“Test the heater vent,” I lie, and then I don’t pretend at all. I slide my hands around her waist and tug her between my knees, my thumbs fitting the curve where sweater becomes skin.
She breathes in, surprise soft and bright. “Clay.”
“Just this,” I tell us both. “Let me hold you a minute.”
She comes willingly. Arms loop my shoulders like she’s known this map forever. Her body fits the frame of me too well for two people faking a thing. I tuck my face against the side of her neck and breathe her in—citrus and clay and whatever wild thing wind leaves on skin when it blows off the ridge.
“I’m not trying to fix you,” she says into my hair.
“I know.”
“I’m not trying to replace her.”
“I know that too.”
“And I’m not leaving you alone with this,” she adds, and the bold certainty in her voice knocks the breath out of me. “Not tonight.”
That vow says more than the word fiancé ever could.
I ease back enough to look at her. “You’re going to get me in trouble.”
“With who?”
“Myself.”
Her smile turns slow and dangerous. “Good.”
I hold her a heartbeat longer and then let go, because if I don’t, the rules we just wrote will be ash by morning. She feels the choice and nods, like she heard it happen.
“Okay,” she says. “Go before I do something brave and ridiculous.”
I stand. “You? Brave and ridiculous? Never.”
She bumps my hip with hers. “You can flirt, Walker. Careful.”
“I wasn’t flirting.”
“You were.”
“Don’t fish.”
She grins like a cat in a sunbeam. I grab my jacket off the back of her chair and head to the door because if I look at her another second, I’ll be feral enough to forget the outline and draw something we can’t erase.
My hand hits the knob. Her voice finds my back. “Clay?”
I look over my shoulder.
“Thank you,” she says. “For the heat. And the truth.”
I nod once. “Lock your door,” I say, because I need to end on something practical or I’ll end in bad decisions.
She steps closer, fingers on the edge of the door, eyes on me like a dare. “Say it again.”
“What.”
“I’m joy.”
I should tell her no. I should keep that word in my chest and let it beat like a secret.
“You’re joy,” I say, and it lands between us like a promise.
Her breath trembles. “Goodnight, Fireman.”
“Night, firecracker.”
I step into air so cold it bites, pull the door closed behind me, and listen for the click of the lock before I take the stairs two at a time and cross the brittle yard to my truck. I check her porch light, check the street, check everything except the part of me that’s warming in places I swore off.
Engine turns over. Radio spits static. I don’t go home.
I circle the block once, then twice, because leaving is hard even when you’ve been learning how for years. On the third pass, I see her bedroom lamp go off through the thin curtains. A shadow crosses. Pauses. The outline of a woman who plants things where scars live.