Chapter 6 #2
“We are.” Her voice thins. “Are you mad?”
I think about the burn of seeing my name next to a ring emoji. The way the guys at the house ribbed me about flower arrangements. I think about how she stood in ash and tears.
“I’m not mad,” I say. “I’m… adjusting.”
“To me?”
“To all of it.”
Her mouth tilts. “I am a lot.”
“You’re kinetic,” I say, surprising myself.
Her eyes brighten. “That sounds like a compliment.”
“It’s an observation.”
“Observer implies you’re watching.” She props her chin in her hand. “You watching me, Clay?”
“Don’t fish,” I say, but heat crawls up the back of my neck anyway.
She laughs under her breath, victory small and smug. “Fine. We set new rules, then.”
“We already have rules.”
“Those were ‘no kissing’ and ‘no touching’ and ‘no fun.’”
“I never said the last one.”
“You implied it with your face.”
I work my jaw.
“Honesty,” she says immediately. “If we’re going to do this for the town, then inside the little bubble we fake, we tell the truth. We say when we’re comfortable and when we’re not. We say when we want to—” She breaks off, eyes flicking to my mouth. Then back up. “When we want to revise the terms.”
I hold her stare until my pulse slows down. “What else?”
“Protection,” she says. “I don’t want to get blindsided by reporters again. If you need to leave a thing early, you tell me. I’ll run interference. If I need to duck out, you—”
“I walk you out,” I finish, voice rougher than I mean.
“Yeah.” She wets her lips. “That.”
“And when this ends,” I add, working a burr out of the wood grain with my thumb, “we end it clean. No pretending after. No ghosting town events. We can both walk into the diner without Betty and everyone else whispering.”
She flinches like I touched bone. “Right. Of course. End clean.”
The air between us cools a degree. My chest registers the drop. I want to fix it. I don’t know how without making a mess.
“Ember,” I say.
She looks up.
“You’re joy,” I hear myself say. It comes out like a confession I didn’t mean to give, like a flare in a dark tree line. “I didn’t know I remembered how to be near it. So if I—” I shake my head, frustrated with the words. “If I step back, it’s not because you’re too much. It’s because I’m slow.”
She stares at me, throat working. Then she smiles, small and real. “Okay,” she whispers. “We’ll move at your pace.”
“You say that now,” I warn.
She grins. “Oh, I’m going to break your pace like a wild horse.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Absolutely yes.”
The furnace breathes warm through the vents. Outside, Copper Mountain settles into the kind of cold where the sky snaps clear and the stars eavesdrop. Ember pushes her mug aside, runs her fingers along a hairline crack in the tabletop like she’s deciding whether to mend it or let the flaw sing.
“Do you ever think,” she says, “that the worst thing happened, and then you survived it, and then everything after is just…living in the outline?”
I swallow. I know exactly what she means. “Every day.”
She nods, like we just shook hands on truth. “Then maybe,” she says, “we redraw the outline.”
“You don’t redraw a fire scar,” I say. “You learn where it is and walk it.”
“Or,” she counters, sly and gentle, “you plant something that grows around it.”
“You going to plant marigolds in me, Ember?”
She lights. “God, no. You’re a pine. I’m going to string lights on you and scandalize the forest.”
I choke on a laugh and give up pretending I don’t want it. Her joy. The lights. The scandal. It terrifies me how much I want it.
A car passes outside. The headlights slide across her profile—cheek, mouth, the soft place under her jaw I won’t touch. The rental hums. Everything in me is too full.
“Come here,” I hear myself say, and my voice is lower than it should be.
“Why,” she says, but she’s already rising, socks whispering over warped floorboards.
“Test the heater vent,” I lie, and then I don’t pretend at all. I slide my hands around her waist and tug her between my knees, my thumbs fitting the curve where sweater becomes skin.
She breathes in, surprise soft and bright. “Clay.”
“Just this,” I tell us both. “Let me hold you a minute.”
She comes willingly. Arms loop my shoulders like she’s known this map forever.
Her body fits the frame of me too well for two people faking a thing.
I tuck my face against the side of her neck and breathe her in—citrus and clay and whatever wild thing wind leaves on skin when it blows off the ridge.
“I’m not trying to fix you,” she says into my hair.
“I know.”
“I’m not trying to replace her.”
“I know that too.”
“And I’m not leaving you alone with this,” she adds, and the bold certainty in her voice knocks the breath out of me. “Not tonight.”
That vow says more than the word fiancé ever could.
I ease back enough to look at her. “You’re going to get me in trouble.”
“With who?”
“Myself.”
Her smile turns slow and dangerous. “Good.”
I hold her a heartbeat longer and then let go, because if I don’t, the rules we just wrote will be ash by morning. She feels the choice and nods, like she heard it happen.
“Okay,” she says. “Go before I do something brave and ridiculous.”
I stand. “You? Brave and ridiculous? Never.”
She bumps my hip with hers. “You can flirt, Walker. Careful.”
“I wasn’t flirting.”
“You were.”
“Don’t fish.”
She grins like a cat in a sunbeam. I grab my jacket off the back of her chair and head to the door because if I look at her another second, I’ll be feral enough to forget the outline and draw something we can’t erase.
My hand hits the knob. Her voice finds my back. “Clay?”
I look over my shoulder.
“Thank you,” she says. “For the heat. And the truth.”
I nod once. “Lock your door,” I say, because I need to end on something practical or I’ll end in bad decisions.
She steps closer, fingers on the edge of the door, eyes on me like a dare. “Say it again.”
“What.”
“I’m joy.”
I should tell her no. I should keep that word in my chest and let it beat like a secret.
“You’re joy,” I say, and it lands between us like a promise.
Her breath trembles. “Goodnight, Fireman.”
“Night, firecracker.”
I step into air so cold it bites, pull the door closed behind me, and listen for the click of the lock before I take the stairs two at a time and cross the brittle yard to my truck.
I check her porch light, check the street, check everything except the part of me that’s warming in places I swore off.
Engine turns over. Radio spits static. I don’t go home.
I circle the block once, then twice, because leaving is hard even when you’ve been learning how for years. On the third pass, I see her bedroom lamp go off through the thin curtains. A shadow crosses. Pauses. The outline of a woman who plants things where scars live.
I put the truck in gear and roll away into a night that isn’t as empty as it used to be.
The text hits at 1:14 a.m.
EMBER: You awake?
I don’t sleep much anymore. CLAY: Yeah.
A bubble pulses like a heartbeat.
EMBER: The heat works. House sounds different. Like it’s breathing.
CLAY: Good.
A pause. Then: EMBER: If I redraw the outline, will you tell me when I hit a wall?
I stare at the little glowing question and let the truth be the thing that keeps me human.
CLAY: Yeah, Quinn. I’ll tell you.
Another bubble. EMBER: Night, Clay.
CLAY: Night.
I put the phone on my chest and stare at the ceiling for a long time.
Somewhere down the hill, a house breathes. Somewhere under my ribs, something that thought it was ash shifts like embers catching in a sudden wind.
I should be afraid.
I am.
But the fear doesn’t taste like it used to. It tastes like honey in hot water, like citrus on skin, like the word that should’ve burned my mouth and somehow didn’t.
Joy.
God help me, I might be stupid enough to try.