Page 37 of Smoke and Fire
Whether or not Dahlia would be a good thing for my life right now remained to be seen, but I couldn’t deny it felt nice to have someone that cared.
Bastian:Will do. Sleep well, Dahlia.
Dahlia:GIF
The GIF of a puppy nosing its way under a sheet, curling up in a ball, and then poking a tiny pink nose out showed up.
With a roll of my lips, I suppressed the idiotic smile that I couldn’t help and watched her video one last time. Her happy chatter and quick smiles captured me again. I shook my head, turned the phone off, and stuffed it back into my bag.
Then I fell into an utterly dreamless sleep.
11
DAHLIA
“What’s up, cuz?”
The booming voice came a second before a sharp rap on the trailer door.
An hour had passed since my shift at the coffee shop ended and I’d already finished Jess’s fifth novel,Afterglow is a Promise. It lay on the counter behind me near a pineapple I’d almost hacked to death. Not as good as what we’d get in California, but it would do.
I straightened, startled away from an email written by a middle-aged woman in Turkey that had recently read Jess’s book and couldn’t find a copy of the next book in the series. Her broken-English email made my heart warm.
I slammed the computer shut and set it aside as I stood. Meaty shoulders darkened my doorstep.
“Come in, Sione.”
Sione stepped inside the RV with a bright smile. Sweat beaded on top of his forehead, darkening the neck of his Polo shirt that saidAdventura Summer Campon the left breast side. He wore tan cargo shorts and a pair of dusty tennis shoes. Given the opportunity, he’d much rather his favorite, gaudy Hawaiian t-shirts so bright it made eyes spontaneously bleed, but this worked too.
“Aunt Lalani told me to drop by when I could.” He pulled a pair of sunglasses off, his white-tooth grin wide and happy. “I was in town and wanted to stop by.”
“Mom has always been overprotective.”
“She has reason. You broke up with your should-be-husband, cashed in all your savings for an RV, and started to roam the world without a job.”
I grinned, happy to see him.
“I have a job now! And you’re here with me. Life is good.”
“Life is good.”
The sound of a ukulele streamed through my mind whenever Sione stood near, and I wondered if he still played it for the youth at camp before they pulled the flag down. It had become Adventura’s favorite tradition.
“Glad you came,” I said. “What’s up?”
He gazed around. “Just missed you and wanted to see how you’d been. RV life still treating you well without me?”
“Not as fun, of course, but still great. I think there might be an issue with the black water tank, but I’m not sure yet. My stabilizer jack is acting a bit funky, too.”
“You call my dad?”
“Of course.” I laughed. “He told me not to tell you because you’d break it while you tried to fix it.”
He grunted, but thankfully didn’t offer to look at it. Sione wanted to be good at tinkering and fixing stuff, like his father, my uncle, but he ended up further breaking everything he attempted to repair.
I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and tossed it in his direction. He caught it, then lowered his big body onto a couch, legs sprawled across the area under the table.
Sione had always filled a room. In some ways, he looked like a younger version of my dad, and it gave me a pang of homesickness. I missed my family. When I lived with Jakob, they were just down the road and I saw my Dad daily . Months had passed since I last saw my parents, the longest I’d ever gone without them.
