31. The Other Fire
The Other Fire
~AUGUST~
Beckett carries Amber off like she weighs nothing, like the last five years never happened, like the word sorry was the only thing that had ever stood between him and the rest of his life.
Amber's arm loops around the back of his neck. Her cheek finds the flannel over his shoulder. She's mumbling something into his collar that makes him laugh low in his chest, and the sound of it travels back across the dark yard to the fire, to me.
Good, I think. Good for you both.
I mean it.
That's the part that surprises me.
I keep waiting for the old ache to knot up under my sternum, the one that used to arrive on schedule whenever I watched a man reach for her.
It doesn't come…
What arrives instead is a loosening. A warmth with nothing sharp buried in the middle of it. Five years I've watched Amber walk away from us, chin high, spine straight, every exit counted.
Watching her get hauled up the porch steps like a sack of feed while she swats at Beckett's hat and giggles into his neck feels like the first honest thing to happen in this backyard all night.
Beckett and I have carried the same drought for five years, though neither of us has ever said the word for it out loud.
Two men who decided, without once deciding it together, that reaching for anyone felt like a debt we hadn't earned the right to pay. I watched him go down on his knees tonight in front of the woman we both wrecked.
I watched her let him back in.
Something in my own chest unclenched a notch I hadn't known was screwed down tight since the Lantern House. If Beckett gets to stop paying, then maybe the rest of us do too.
Maybe the sentence has an end date after all.
The screen door claps shut behind them. The porch light snaps off a beat later. That's Beckett — even drunk on relief and forgiveness, he remembers to kill the light so the moths stop drowning themselves against the bulb.
Then it's quiet.
The good kind.
Marsh frogs sawing away past the tree line.
The fire ticking down to a low orange breathing, more ember than flame now, throwing just enough light to turn the smoke gold before it climbs into the dark.
A half-built s'more abandoned on the arm of a camp chair, the marshmallow gone stiff and glossy.
Somebody's empty bottle sweating a ring into the wood of the table.
Just me. Alone.
Except I'm not.
Sawyer hasn't moved. He's still on the far side of the pit, one boot propped on a split log, elbows on his knees, a longneck dangling from two fingers like he's forgotten it's there.
He isn't watching the porch where Beckett disappeared.
He's watching me watch it. He has been for a while, I realize.
The magnolia in his scent has gone thick and slow in the night air — sweet, heavy, cut through with black pepper and the caramel burn of aged bourbon. It curls across the dead space between us and settles over the smoke like a hand laid flat on the back of my neck.
He's been waiting.
"You're doing it again," he says.
His voice is easy. Charleston-slow, the vowels stretched out like taffy. Everything about Sawyer is unhurried in a way I've never once managed to be.
"Doing what?" I ask.
"Managing." He tips the bottle toward the porch, toward the two people who just vanished behind that door.
"You watched them go up those stairs, and I could see you filing it.
Cataloguing whether everybody's okay. Whether the fire's safe to leave.
Whether I've had too much to drink to drive home.
" He takes a slow pull off the beer. "You keep a courthouse in your head, Bellamy.
You put everybody on trial but yourself, then you go quiet and call it manners. "
I feel my jaw tighten.
He's not wrong…I guess.
That's the trouble with Sawyer — he's rarely wrong, and he says the true thing at the exact moment you'd built a whole evening around not saying it.
"That's a lot of diagnosis for a man drinking my friend's beer," I say.
"It's Beckett's beer." He grins. The firelight catches the edge of it. "And I've had one. I make my living reading a room in the four seconds before the bride's mother starts crying. You"—the bottle points at me again—"read like large print."
"That's a generous way to call a man predictable."
"Predictable's not the word. Predictable men put me straight to sleep.
" He turns the bottle in his fingers, watching the firelight slide down the glass.
"You're the reverse. You spend so much effort staying a step ahead of everybody else's needs that nobody ever gets a look at yours.
That's not a predictable man. That's a locked door with the key taped to the back of it, praying the right person's patient enough to check. "
"Flattering."
"Wasn't trying to flatter you." He sets the bottle down in the grass. Stands. Stretches until something in his spine pops, unbothered, taking up the whole night while he does it. "If I wanted to flatter you, I'd have told you what your face did when Beckett said the thing earlier."
Don't ask.
"What thing?"
Fucking hell…
"You know the thing."
I do. My face is doing it again right now. I can feel the heat climb up my throat. Earlier tonight, before the Twinkies and the confessions and all of it, Beckett had leaned into me by the cooler, breath warm with whiskey, and said it plain as weather.
Quit circling the man and go fuck Sawyer already. You've been orbiting him since the roadside. It's exhausting to watch.
I'd turned the color of a stop sign and mumbled something about the fire needing another log.
"See," Sawyer says, delighted, reading every degree of it off my skin. "Large print."
Every man builds his own courthouse.
Mine's been in session five years. I know its rules. I manage, I smooth, I hand people the thing they need before they've finished asking, then I go home to the shop, and I do not, under any circumstances, reach for the thing I want.
Reaching is how you end up standing at the front of the Lantern House with a boutonnière wilting in your fist and a woman's whole future collapsing in your hands.
Sawyer walks around the fire. Not fast. He takes the long way, past the abandoned s'more, past the empty chairs, and every step of it the magnolia gets thicker, the pepper sharper, until he's standing over me where I sit. The heat of the coals is at my back, and the heat of him is everywhere else.
"Get up," he says.
"I'm comfortable."
"You're hiding. There's a difference." He doesn't wait.
He reaches down, hooks two fingers under my chin, and tips my face up to his — not rough, not gentle either, just certain, the way you'd steady a fence post you already knew would hold.
"I'm not the kind of man who lets you run away from what makes you uncomfortable, Bellamy. Ask anybody who's ever tried to leave one of my rehearsal dinners early."
His fingers are warm. Callused across the pads from twenty years of tying knots nobody sees. My pulse goes stupid and loud. I could pull back. It would be the easy thing, the managed thing, the thing that keeps the courthouse quiet.
I don't pull back.
"You've been circling," he says, softer now, close enough that I can smell the bourbon under the magnolia and something warmer beneath even that — skin, sweat, the day baked into his collar.
"Since the roadside. Since I put my hands on your truck and you looked at me like I'd read your diary.
I told you then I'd give you the opportunity you were yearning for.
" His thumb drags along the line of my jaw, slow, deliberate, taking its time about it.
"This is me giving it to you. You want it, you take it.
You don't, I go sleep on the couch, and we never speak of it.
Either way you stop pretending you don't know your own mind. "
The roadside comes back to me whole — the busted radiator hissing, the heat shimmer rising off the asphalt in sheets, Sawyer crouched at my ribs with grease on his knuckles, thumbing the unfinished rose inked over my side like he was reading a sentence nobody had ever let me finish.
Who's this for? he'd asked. Nobody, I'd said, too fast, the lie loud as a confession.
He'd only smiled and told me he'd give me the opportunity I was yearning for.
This is the problem nobody tells you about a man like Sawyer.
You spend years learning to read people so you can stay ahead of them, so you can hand them the exit before they know they want one.
Then a man comes along who is better at it than you, who reads you like large print, who takes the chin in his hand and the choice out of the air and hands it right back to you clean — you take it, or you don't — and the whole apparatus of your careful management just falls over sideways in the grass.
"I don't like you," I tell him.
It comes out lower than I mean it to.
Rougher.
Sawyer's mouth curves.
"No?"
"You're smug. You're slow on purpose to make everyone else feel frantic.
You touched my tattoo like you had a right to it.
" My hand has found the front of his shirt without my permission, a fistful of soft flannel gone warm from the fire.
"You've been observing us since you arrived, and acting like you already own the lease to this damn agreement. "
"Mm." He hasn't moved. He's letting me hold him there, hanging on his own certainty like it's a doorframe. "That all?"
"No." This is the part where I manage it. The part where I let go and reach for a log. "You smell like the inside of a bourbon barrel, and I've been trying not to notice."
"A shame that you can’t simply embrace what you’re afraid of admitting is a brewing addic-" Sawyer murmurs.
Then I kiss him.
I kiss him — that's what I keep coming back to, after, when I try to lay it out in order in my mind while everything is playing in real time.
I'm the one who closes the distance. I'm the one who fists the flannel, hauls him down, and takes his slow, smug, certain mouth with mine before he can say another true thing about me.