Page 66 of The Fire
I instinctively looked down the street to where the empty lot that had once been Hoff’s Bar sat, surrounded by a chain-link fence, and rubbed at the ache in my chest.
It had been nearly three months since my bar had burned down, and Unity Financial was still investigating, still going over every scrap of non-evidence with a magnifying glass and a fine-toothed comb. A few weeks back, just when I figured theyhadto be done, some idiot teenager had spray-painted obscenities on the snow-covered empty lot, and suddenly there was a new, stupid angle they hadn’t adequately explored.
This was just a teensy little bit of a sore spot for me.
Or, fine… more like a gaping, festering, aching wound in the center of my chest, if you wanted to be dramatic about the thing. I was trying to keep myself busy. I was trying to paste on a smile and make like I had all the time in the world and wasn’t the slightest bit impatient, but it was wearing on me.
I wanted thingssettled.
I mean, was it too much to ask for justone thingin my life to be settled?
“Yes, you mentioned that. And your father has toldyoucountless times that it’snonsense. You don’t need to hang around waiting for them to finish things up, you need to hire an attorney toforcethe insurance company to pay you.”
I sat back against the seat. “I don’t feel comfortable having Dad get involved.”
“Nonsense. He wouldn’t be involved. He’d be recommending a friend. And he’d love to help, Parker. He needs a project besides endlessgolf.His heart is—”
“Mom, for real, you need to stop this shit where you complain about Dad’s health, okay? He’sfine. And so am I. I don’t need or want to be Dad’s new project.” I paused, then added, “But thank him for me anyway.”
My mom sighed in my ear, then changed tack. “Have you at least found a new place to live?” she demanded.
“Nope. I’ve been looking,” I lied. “There’s just nothing available anywhere.”
“Really?Because I was speaking to Dana earlier in the week and she said they had rooms at the Crabapple. I’m sure she’d be happy to have you again.”
Aha. I rolled my eyes and idly watched Cal and Ash laughing with a group of customers.Here we go.
I’d caved and told my parents I was staying at Jamie’s house once I knew the situation was going to last longer than a weekend, mostly because I knew they’d hear it from someone else in town anyway. Better to control the narrative, right? Or so I’d thought.
“Jamie’s doing me a favor by letting me stay with him rent free. He’s a friend. We arefriends.”
And that wasn’t a lie. Wewerefriends. We hung out with Everett and Silas, Mitch and Dare Turner, and a few other folks playing darts in Silas’s garage, and made a kick-ass team. We hung drywall together, and I hooked him up with a guy I knew who’d replaced his gutters at cost. I’d scouted a deal on a construction dumpster we could keep for a month, and Jamie had ordered it delivered. We’d cleaned out the furniture from Molly’s room and Jamie’s room, and I’d helped him move the few pieces he’d wanted to keep into the master bedroom, which he’d finally claimed as his own, then haul the remaining stuff to Goodwill. He gave me a key to his truck, since I seemed to be running to O’Leary Hardware twice a week for masking tape or utility knives or something. I cooked him pasta and he bitched that there was too much sauce, then asked for seconds. He cooked me burgers and I offered to give him remedial grilling lessons, then stole the last of his burger off his plate. We watched football, and hockey, and figure skating. We talked about politics, and the latestDoctor Who, and books we read, and people who pissed us off…
Just a couple of buddies.
Just a pair of bros.
Totes platonic.
Except that every night, after Jamie got home from the diner, or after we’d finished working on the house, we climbed into bed together. And we didn’t always end up getting off—not if he was too tired or, like one week back in February when I’d bunged up my hand, I just wasn’t into it—but most nights ended with hands and mouths and skin and cocks and glorious, glorious orgasms.
Because we were friendswith benefits.
And wasn’tthatsome serious irony?
Me, who’d laid into Julian Ross about this very thing, who’d shouted from the rafters that if you weren’t all in, you were out, and if you couldn’t say yes, you had to say no, who’d insisted to anyone who’d listen that people who found themselves in fucked-up, half-assed relationships deserved the misery they were doomed to bring on themselves, was now smack in the middle of one.
And yeah, I could confirm, this was a solid seven out of ten on the miserable scale.
But I also got why it was so damn appealing. The same way the warm breeze blowing down Weaver Street made me want to believe spring was in the air, every day and night I spent with Jamie made me want to believe that his opinion of me, or of relationships, or of relationshipswith me, or whatever the hell he’d meant when he’d said, “Together’s not an option I’m interested in,” would resolve itself and he’d change his mind.
And Iknewit was dumb. I knew, every time I caught him talking to my plants when he didn’t know I could hear him, or watched him smooth my grandmother’s blanket at the foot of the bed we shared, and my heart lurched one step closer to the sharp jagged cliffs ofall the way in love, that I was actively deluding myself and setting myself up for disaster. But I’d become this creature that craved as much of Jameson Burke as I could get, and I was willing to exist in this state of half-togetherness since, honestly, it felt moretogetherthan I’d ever felt with anyone else.
I loved him. I always had. And I was way too chickenshit to force his hand, when it seemed entirely probable that if I did… that would be the end of this.
It was kinda crazy to think that I’d been ready to leave him a couple months ago and now… I was willing to accept whatever scraps I could get just to keep him.
Which was super healthy behavior, obvs, and totally didn’t confirm that I was the needy idiot he’d accused me of being back when he’d broken up with me a decade ago.
