Chapter Nine Vivien
We've been sneaking around for days.
Nine at night in the back of the shop with the dryers still ticking as they cool. Six in the morning in his truck outside the firehouse with a coffee going cold in the cupholder. His hand cupping my backside in a crowd, gone before anybody registers it was ever there.
Our fake relationship feels like anything but.
Thoran puts a hand on my lower back now as we climb up into place atop the float. His touch is warm and wide through my shirt. I melt right underneath it like I have every single time. The float smells like hay bales and diesel. We sit up top and wave, and the whole of Main Street waves back.
We're wearing our matching flannels. The outfits are Jules's doing, of course. They were a not so light suggestion hand-delivered to my shop in a paper sack. I've paired mine with cutoff denim shorts, because what else would a woman wear on a hay bale in June.
Thoran takes my hand. He turns it over. Kisses the back of it like it's the most natural thing in the world.
"Gross," Drew announces from the bale below us.
To be fair, we’ve managed to keep most of our entanglement from Drew.
I can’t have him getting too attached. As far as he’s concerned, Thoran and I are a secret and he’s in on the reality of it.
Drew loses interest in Thoran and I just as quickly as it arrived.
He turns and waves like a maniac at the line of lumberjacks standing at attention in full turnout gear.
The crowd absolutely loses its mind. There’s a whoop, a whistle, and an old woman on the curb pressing both hands to her chest. I feel the heat crawl straight up my neck.
Through it all, Thoran doesn't let go of my hand.
The float rolls past the hardware store, past the firehouse with its bay doors flung open and the engine gleaming inside.
Then we move past my own shop with its pink bubbly letters and its little paw print apostrophe.
Somebody's got a bubble machine going. The lagoon flashes blue and green at the bottom of every cross street.
It is very hard not to fall into the fantasy of all of it.
By the time we get down to judge the axe throwing, my face hurts from smiling.
"You're enjoying yourself," Thoran says, low, handing me a clipboard.
"I'm working on my job being a Lumberjack Lover."
"Mm-hmm, I can think of a place we can get a few reps in if you want to perfect the role." His voice is a low growl that sends tingles whipping across me.
The competitors are three feet from the line and one of them has just put a hatchet dead center on the target. He’s doing a great deal of celebrating it. I've got my pen on the sheet and I'm about to say something about form when a loud sound blares through the space.
It’s a siren and it’s deafening.
The sound rolls up out of nowhere and takes the whole afternoon with it. It’s one long climbing wail rolling off the trees and coming back at us from the ridge. Everything in the field stops at once.
"What is that?"
"It’s a brush fire." Thoran is already moving. His whole body has changed. Every easy line in him goes hard. "And it's close."
He points and my stomach drops out of me. Above, a balloon of black smoke is rising up over the tree line at the south end. It’s not gray. It’s black, boiling, and going up fast.
"There were kids down at the log rolling station." He turns and pitches his voice out over the crowd, and it carries the way a horn carries. "Everybody move away from the lagoon. Move up the hill. Now."
People listen without question. There’s an uneasy calm that whips through the crowd as we move.
"Drew." I turn a full circle with the clipboard still in my hand. I take it all in, the hay bales, the bodies, a stroller, a dog barking, but he isn’t anywhere to be found. "Drew!"
Still nothing.
"Drew!" His name rips out of my throat and lands in the chaos around me.
Thoran's hands close around both of mine. He gets right down into my eye-line, the way he did with my son on a concrete floor that day.
"Get yourself to safety." He’s steady with not one thread of panic in him anywhere. "I've got this. Drew will meet you up here. Promise me you won't leave to find him."
"What are you going to do?"
"I’m going to get him. But you have to stay here. Keep everyone off the lagoon." His thumbs press into my knuckles. "Promise me."
"Okay." My stomach lurches. My eyes are already going back to the crowd, hunting a small head in a red shirt. "Okay, I promise."
Without another word, he goes.
I watch Thoran move, herding people up the slope with both arms out. He’s calling names, he’s hauling somebody's grandmother up off a folding chair and he’s going straight into a fire to find my son.