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Fox didn’t move away from my hand. In fact, his knee moved inches closer to mine, skin touching skin. “I don’t know…”
“It’s true. Hell, you can see it even in nature… You know, back when I was ten, we lived in California for a year. It was near Malibu, and it was one of the driest years ever recorded. Three days before my birthday, we get woken up by the sound of sirens. It’s two in the morning, and we’re being evacuated, but they didn’t come soon enough. The fire was too fast, too powerful. We could see it barreling at us from the hillside about a half mile away from our property. So we get in the car and slam it, and we… get stuck in traffic. There’s only one road out, and it’s jammed. As fire is closing in on us from behind and from the sides.” I swallowed, not realizing how dry my mouth was getting. I hadn’t talked about this much with anyone, so it was bringing up that acrid aftertaste of distant fear that still haunted my worst night terrors.
“It was the scariest twenty minutes of our lives. My brother was only four, and my parents were completely losing their shit but trying to keep it together because I had my eyes pinned on them, trying to figure out how the hell I should be acting.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, his name came up a lot in the car during that time.” I laughed and Fox joined, glad I was able to find some comedy in the trauma. “So, finally, we get out of the jam and are able to make it out. There’s massive plumes of pitch-dark smoke behind us, which you could see because the fire underneath was lighting it up in this weird, eerie spotlight effect that I’ll never forget.”
“But you all made it out okay?”
“Yup, thankfully. It was close. Really, really close. The house we were staying at was burned to the ground, but all the others on the block were able to be saved. We lost a lot of photo albums and things we can never replace, but thankfully we didn’t lose each other.”
“Definitely,” Fox said. His hand fell on mine, his thumb started to make almost imperceptible circles.
But I could feel them. I could trace them, however tiny they were. I could feel every single point of contact that happened between me and Fox, as if it were my superpower. I could tell where every atom of his bounced against mine.
“So.” I kept my hand stone-still now, as if moving might scare him away, like he were some kind of rare butterfly landing on my hand. My eyes were pinned to the opposite end of the room, as if the white wall had been turned into an interesting pop-up art gallery. I couldn’t look into Fox’s eyes. I couldn’t. I knew I’d drop all my defenses the moment I broke. With his hand on mine, I could feel emotions stirring inside me that had long been thought expired. “After the fire,” I continued, “and since it happened during the summer when school was out, my parents decided to relocate us back to Florida. It wasn’t the easiest of moves, but it was fine in the end. Anyways, back to my original point of this entire saga: we went back a year later to the same neighborhood, and on that same hillside that had been red and orange with angry flames, there was a bright purple, neon pink, and sky blue super bloom of wildflowers. It was something no one had ever seen in the area before. It took a devastating, life-changing wildfire to bring out this blast of new life.”
I did it. I broke. I allowed myself to look away from the far wall and into Fox’s eyes, his hand still on mine, his thumb tracing even bigger circles now.
And in that one moment of eye contact, in that split second of human connection, I felt the wildfire spark inside of me and explode into a roaring monster, devastating my entire soul.
14 Gabriel “Fox” Morrison
This was moving at a breakneck speed. I had whiplash. Maybe I was hit on the head on the way here and this was all some kind of concussion dream? There was no possible way that I had my half-naked coworker sitting next to me, knee to knee, hand in hand, and heart to fucking heart. This all had to be some kind of glitch in the system.
Jonah leaning in to kiss me told me it wasn’t. His wet lips against mine told me this was all very real.
And so were my feelings, which were spiraling out of control in a way I’d never experienced before.
And all for a man who wasn’t even available to me. Regardless of the kisses and the handjobs, tonight Jonah’s life had been thrown into chaos and he was getting all his frustrations and fantasies out at once. Maybe he missed the experimental college years and was working out that buildup now. Or maybe he was simply toying with me, using me to get his rocks off and a decent place to sleep.
