Page 15 of Smokin' Situation

MytemplesthrobbedasI opened my eyes slowly, blinking against the stream of light coming into the window that faced the parking lot. The fatigue I’d been feeling last night had lifted slightly, but I still felt like shit.

Hazel had let me crash at her apartment a few times in recent months, so I had a few tiny bottles of shampoo and body wash in the shower. Maybe getting clean would clear my head.

Raiding her mostly empty dresser, I found a clean oversized button-up shirt, but there was no way I was fitting in anything else from her wardrobe as she was tiny. I had a bit more junk in my trunk.

Stripping off my clothing from the day before, I stepped into the warm spray, washing off the dried sweat from being outside all day in the heat at the festival.

Flashes of deep blue eyes danced behind my eyelids as I washed, and I regretted letting myself get so run down. Eating chicken tenders and tater tots with Tripp would’ve been vastly more enjoyable than passing out from exhaustion on the way home and sleeping in someone else’s bed.

It almost would’ve felt like a date, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Sure, I ate meals and did things with Jay regularly, but it’d been a long, long time since that had felt remotely romantic.

When we first started hooking up, there had been an inkling that could’ve led to something more, but his emotional distance and my fear of abandonment had shut that down quickly. We werewell suited as friends, and he understood me in a way no one else probably did, but I’d never imagined a real future with him.

Letting my thoughts stray to Tripp, I wondered if my initial attraction would fade like that, but there was also an underlying current to our interactions throughout the day that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

But maybe our flirtation had passed, too. Maybe falling asleep in the truck was the natural conclusion to the night and I wouldn’t see him other than in passing. We lived in a small community, but that didn’t mean we were now magically friends. And then there was the complication of Jayden to factor in. How did you break up with someone you weren’t really dating? Just thinking about it made my head hurt.

Running through the things I should probably do since I was in town early for my shift, I decided now would be the ideal time to run some inventory in the liquor storage room.

Hudson usually kept a close eye on things since he was the other full-time bartender, but he’d also been actively cutting back on his hours. Not that I could blame him, this bar had been pretty much our lives for the last seven years. Now he’d moved on, with his relationship taking a priority in his schedule.

Plus, I was still here. Still spending every weekend making drinks for everyone in town who had a social life.

Rinsing my hair, I tried to reset my attitude, because I was the only person who could change that. No one else made me retreat into myself after my grandmother died. The woman who’d sacrificed her retirement to raise two preteen girls after their parents succumbed to the generational curse that had taken her husband at a young age. Not that I believed the curse was real. But if it was, I was running out of time to do something other than maintain the status quo.

Normally my purse contained anin case of emergencykit with a spare pair of panties, but I’d forgotten to replace them after the last time I’d stayed here—so commando it was. Thankfully, this pair of denim shorts were longer than normal and didn’t have anyartfully placed frayed spots that would show off my lack of clean undergarments. Not that I’d be the first person to have gone au naturale in the bar.

My hair was still wet, and I didn’t have the energy to dry it, which meant two loose braids were as good as it was going to get. My little emergency kit still had deodorant wipes, so I swiped my underarms and called it adequate. Everyone in town knew who I was, so it wasn’t like I needed to impress anyone other than the new firefighter who told me he rarely stepped foot inside this building, despite growing up a few miles away. Not that he’d have a reason to come to see me. He probably felt sorry for me.

“Hey, you’re up. Feeling any better?” Hazel asked, startling me from her perch on the couch as I rounded the corner into the living room of the small apartment above the bar.

A dull throb still lingered at my temples, but it wasn’t anything guzzling some water wouldn’t resolve. At least the shower had made me feel somewhat human. I cast a longing look at Hazel’s mug on the coffee table, but I knew she probably didn’t have any coffee here, anyway. While I craved the caffeine to survive the day, I knew it messed with her concentration and she preferred tea.

“Kinda. Thanks for letting me crash here.”

“It’s not like I was using the bed anyway,” she laughed, returning her attention to the tablet in her lap. I was well aware that she only used this space on her days off to draw, somewhat relieved I was no longer subjected to the sounds of raucous banging while I was doing inventory in the storage room below her bedroom.

While she appeared like innocence personified at first glance, Hazel was loud, not that it was surprising considering her boyfriend Reid’s reputation. I’d never taken a spin on that pierced ride—mostly because my tenuous situationship with his cousin would have made that epically weird—but I’d overheard enough conversations at the bar to know he had some modifications to his equipment that drove the ladies wild.

“If you need to stay here again, you’re more than welcome. I know Reese might have figured out something different, but the offer is there if you need it.”

“Okay.” The word stretched as it came out of my mouth, my furrowed brows causing Hazel’s eyes to widen.

“Oh, shit. You didn’t hear, did you? Of course you didn’t, you’ve been asleep, and your phone was out here in your purse. Shit,” she rambled, her look morphing into concern while I tried to figure out why she was being so weird. “They called a mandatory evacuation for everything north and west of the pass over the ridge. You live up there, right?”

Shit, indeed.

“Mandatory evacuation for what?”

“Here, let me pull up the notification,” she said, quickly pulling up a web browser on her tablet and clicking on the screen a few times before she extended it in my direction.

Accidental fire suspected as arson spreads through Chaffee County as authorities speculate illegal fireworks ignited land near the technical college campus. The Sherriff’s office is investigating leads while Chaffee and Lake County fire management attempt to contain the blaze.

“When did this happen?” I asked, scrolling down the webpage, but there wasn’t any new information since the alert had been sent out a few hours ago.

“I guess in the early hours of the morning. Roads out of town north were closed off around daybreak, and we’ve had a steady stream of tourists headed south along the main road. They don’t want to stick around with a wildfire close by. Hudson opened early for lunch but shut down alcohol service until they get things under control. Don’t need drunk tourists getting lost and ending up where they shouldn’t be.”

Nodding absently, I bent over and rummaged through my purse, pulling out my phone. The screen was filled with notifications, but messages from the person who I would have expected to be blowing up my phone by now were notably absent.

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