Page 151 of Smoke and Fire
“Seems fun but . . . too dirty.”
“You’ve never cared about grease and dirt when you helped my Dad restore the old truck. The two of you worked on that thing for years!”
“Yes, but being covered with grease and smelling like cars all the time is different from smelling like grease and cars on the weekend.” I shrugged. “Meh. How is Adventura?”
“Good. I love it. I’m so happy there. Seeing the positive change in the teenagers when they come through? It’s my dream job.”
“Mark still threatening to have it open all winter?”
Sione chuckled. “No. It’s a pipe dream. He thinks he’d like to have Adventura functional all year round, but then he’d have people up in his space too much. He and Stella like the quiet, especially with their new baby.”
“Huh.”
Sione grunted, then chugged the whole water bottle, crushed it with his fist, and tossed it into the sink to put in the recycling later. “I heard from Lofa,” he said.
My voice pitched a bit too high when I said, “From home?”
The expression on his face made my stomach sour. Lofa was a notoriously popular guy from our neighborhood. Lofa knew a lot of people, including Jakob.
I lowered onto the couch next to Sione. The air conditioning blew on the back of my neck now, sending a chill all the way down my skin.
Sione and I grew up only a block away from each other in California. His mother and my father, siblings, needed quick access to the ocean to be happy. We’d spent our childhoods in each other’s houses and running into the crisp California waves together.
Sione was, in a word, safety. Which is why I slept in an RV on a reservoir in a landlocked mountain chain, far from my family, my ocean, and my people. Right now, he was the only place I felt not so alone, yet still far from old ghosts.
“Yes, Lofa.” Sione leaned forward, forearms on his legs. “Said that Jakob asked about you the other day.”
“What did he ask?”
Sione shrugged, which meant he didn’t want me to know everything. “Just wanted to know how you were and where you went.”
I frowned. “He doesn’t get to ask that.”
“Why not?”
“This whole breakup was his idea.” I waved a hand in the air to encompass the RV. “If I’d had my way, I’d be happily married and probably pregnant with his baby. But, no. He’s the one that had to get bored.”
Sione sighed. “It wasn’t right, Dahlia. You know that. The two of you were . . . you just weren’t the right fit, no matter how much you tried to force it. You were roomates, not lovers. You were hardly even friends toward the end. Would you really want to marry a guy like that? Believe it or not, marriage binds you together forever.” He tapped his heart. “It happens in here. I’m glad you didn’t marry him. He wasn’t the one.”
That was Sione, a giant, utter romantic to the end.
Unable to deny the truth, I leaned back against the wall. Jakob had been an easy escape. Bright and brilliant and sparkling at first, our relationship had eventually faded into something benign and formulaic.
We lived easily with each other, but maybe not happily. It bothered me that I’d been willing to live a mostlyblehway of life for so long. The only reason I’d snapped out of it was because Jakob brought it up.
Would I have stayed that way forever?
Unbidden, Bastian came to mind. He shared no similarities with Jakob. Happy, energetic Jakob. Jakob had always been the life of the party. The originator of the excitement. Karaoke. Stage plays. Saturday game nights. People flowed to Jakob. In some ways, Jakob and I had been too similar. Clones of the same personality, just represented in different genders.
Bastian, on the other hand, appeared recalcitrant in comparison. Brooding, sharp, and quiet. He carried responsibility like a superpower instead of a burden. His gaze could set me on fire in a second.
No, there was nothing similar.
My lips tingled at the merethoughtof Bastian. He hadn’t even kissed me yet, but the intimacy of scenes from his book made me feel like he had. If he could describe a kiss in words that made my heart flutter, what would his actual touch do to me? I’d fall apart at the seams.
“You there?”
I blinked out of my thoughts. Sione had smacked my knee with the back of his hand. I shook my head.
