Up In Flames(22)
Author: Nicole Williams

Logan had also been gone. A few nights here, a couple nights there . . . baseball season kept him just as busy as fire season kept Cole.

So I was alone.

I suppose I could have used my newfound solitude to work out the fog of confusion that followed me everywhere, but instead, I used it to long for Cole and to let the guilt I had towards Logan consume my days and nights. Other than checking on Grandma M every morning and working double shifts at the diner, my life was as useless as I’d always feared it becoming.

Finishing up yet another long day at the diner, I said goodbye to the closing cook and server—I’d managed to get one night off from closing—grabbed my purse, and headed for my Jeep. It was almost eight, but still bright out, and I was half contemplating heading for the swimming hole and trying again for that sinking record when my phone rang.

I’d stopped hoping it would be Cole a week ago. Hope unrealized was poison in a person’s bloodstream.

When I saw who it was, I almost let it go to voicemail, but I’d let her last two go there and a third would warrant concern. Mrs. Matthews had considered me like her own daughter since Logan and I started dating and she was in my business accordingly. The last thing I needed right now was for her to call my dad to try to track me down, or worse, Logan. Knowing him, he’d be on the first bus home from Yakima to make sure I was all right.

Logan knew something was up; he wasn’t dumb. However, he didn’t have the first clue as to what. He guessed it had to do with graduating high school and saying goodbye to that part of our lives. He’d also guessed my funk had something to do with him being gone so much.

I still hadn’t had the heart, or the courage, to tell him the truth. Not that there’d been much opportunity anyways. Over the past week, I’d seen Logan all of three times. Once when I went to watch one of his night games. The second time when we’d gone out four-wheeling with a bunch of his friends, and the third time had been when he’d stopped by to have dinner with me at the diner before he left with his team on Friday.

My phone rang a fourth time and, this time, I answered it.

“Hi, Mrs. Matthews,” I greeted, trying to sound as upbeat as I didn’t feel.

“Oh, Elle. Thank goodness I finally got a hold of you,” she said. I could hear a lot of voices in the background, not that that was a huge surprise. Mrs. Matthews was the social elite equivalent here in central Washington. She hosted more get togethers and headed up more charity drives than the last ten White House wives combined. “I’m just finishing up with the Women’s Potluck here at church. We’ve got oodles of leftovers and I don’t want to see this all go to waste. I have to be at the final planning meeting of the year for next week’s big Fourth of July Festival and I wanted to see if you’d be willing to drop all this food off for me.”

Potlucks, planning meetings, shuttling back and forth frantically between this and that . . . It was a scary picture of what my life could become one day.

“Please, Elle?” she said when I stayed quiet. “I’d do it myself, but I’m already late.”

I was a pushover. “Okay, sure,” I said. “I’m just getting off work, so I’ll be there in five.”

“You’re a lifesaver, sweetheart,” she said, whispering a few quick words to someone. “Thank you so, so much.”

“Don’t mention it,” I said, trying not to grumble. One of the last things I wanted to do tonight was run leftover potluck casseroles and pies around town. “Where am I delivering it to?”

“The smokejumper camp,” she said.

I almost dropped the phone.

“They just got back in this afternoon after being gone all week fighting that fire over in Wenatchee. I can’t imagine anyone who would appreciate a home cooked meal more than a bunch of smokejumpers who have been surviving on dehydrated meat and potatoes all week.”

My heart trilled with excitement right before it dropped. I’d wanted to see Cole so badly these past couple weeks I was drowning in it, but knowing that I was less than a half hour from actually seeing him . . .

Well, it scared me to death.

I knew if I looked into his eyes and saw that he’d done what he promised me he would—let me go—I might curl up and die. I didn’t want to be let go.

I sure as heck hadn’t let him go.

“Mrs. Matthews?” I said, swallowing. “On second thought, I don’t think I’ll—”

“I’ve gotta go, Elle. The president of the Fourth of July planning committee is calling. Probably to yell at me for being late.” I could hear her heels pick up speed as she clicked and clacked across the church parking lot. “Thank you again. You’re an angel.”

Yeah, if I was an angel, then mankind was screwed.

The phone went dead before I could protest. Before I could beg and plead with her to find someone else to run a bunch of food over to the smokejumper camp.

Clenching my phone, I almost tossed it as far as I could. Instead, I took a deep breath to calm myself, got inside my Jeep, and tried to convince myself I would be in and out of that smokejumper building so quickly Cole would never even see me. He’d never have to know I’d been there.

Even after I’d made my way to the church, loaded the couple of cardboard boxes brimming with pyrex and ceramic dishes full of scalloped potatoes and green bean casserole into the back of the Jeep, and turned down the main road to the camp, I’d gotten nowhere in the convincing myself department.

It was starting to get dark by the time I turned the Jeep off. I sat there, staring at the building in front of me, and wondered if he was inside and what he was doing. The place seemed quiet, empty, but even from the parking lot, in the confines of my car, I could feel that energy sparking to life.

So he was here.

As if fate itself were confirming that assumption, a light flashed on in the dark building.

I took a breath, then another, before forcing myself out of the Jeep. After balancing one of the heavy boxes in my arms, I headed for the entrance. My palms were sweating; my stomach was a sea of nerves. I was a wreck, but I was doing it. I kept going forward. For the first time this summer, I was being brave and doing what was difficult instead of easy.

The door was unlocked, so I somehow managed to heave it open before hurrying inside. The box was getting heavy and cumbersome. Rushing into the dark kitchen, I dropped the box on the table and was considering if I should put the dishes in the refrigerator, since it appeared no one was here, when a sound caught my attention.

I followed the sound down the hall. Someone was inhaling and exhaling sharply. Repeatedly.

It was a sound I was familiar with, and the voice making it was just as familiar.

Knowing nothing good could come of this, I took the last few steps towards the room the hitched breathing came from. This room was just as dark as the rest of the building, but it wasn’t as empty.

My whole body tensed.

Cole was lying on a bench, nak*d from the waist up, heaving a gleaming metal bar stacked with large weights on either end. He was alone and consumed by the battle he seemed to be waging with the heavy barbell.

Lowering it once more, he inhaled before exerting every last ounce of power he had left. His whole body, every muscle, flexed to the surface as he struggled to lift that weight. Just when I was sure it would come crashing back down on his chest, Cole let out a low roar and his body flexed even tighter. The bar went up easily after that, like it had figured out fighting against him was a wasted effort.

Cole racked the weight and dropped his arms.

I watched his chest rise and fall, feeling this huge sense of relief that he was here. That I was near him again. The ache that had gone everywhere with me these past couple weeks took a momentary hiatus. All was right in the world again as I watched him.

“I know you’re here, you know.”

My throat went dry. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think you could see me.”

Cole exhaled like he just had a few seconds ago, although this time he wasn’t trying to lift a three hundred pound weight. “I couldn’t.” He sat up and his eyes landed on me in the same way they had before. It took my breath away like it had before, too.

“Hi,” I said, giving a little wave before I crossed my arms. Being around Cole was still unsettling.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, rising from the bench.

What was I doing here? There were several answers to that and one big one. I wanted to see him. When he stayed frozen, not coming towards me with open arms, I went with one of the other answers.

“Mrs. Matthews asked me to swing by a bunch of potluck leftovers since she heard you all had just gotten back,” I said, resisting the urge to go to him.

It was hard. If ever there’d be a time to want to run to a man, it would be now. As he stood shirtless, coated in a light sheen of sweat, in a dark room, in an empty building.

“Who’s Mrs. Matthews?” he asked, crossing his arms. That did wonderful things to the muscles he’d just worked. “Besides the potluck leftover fairy?” A smile tugged on the corner of his mouth.

How could I answer that in a roundabout way?

“She’s Logan’s mom.”

So much for roundabout’ing.

“Ah.” Cole rolled his neck from side to side. “How is the other man?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Let me guess . . . still in a state of ignorance is bliss. Right?”

He waited for me to respond.

I couldn’t.

“You’re too predictable. You might know what you want, but you won’t do what it takes to have it.”

I bristled. “What would be the point of that since it was made clear to me that I couldn’t have what I wanted anymore?”

Cole’s shoulders fell. “Good point,” he said. “But you and I both know if push came to shove, I wouldn’t be what you truly wanted. What you wanted was the idea of me. The dream. An escape from the life you’re living. You wanted freedom. Not me.”

Disillusioned was the word that came to mind when I heard his words. I didn’t want the idea of him. I wanted him.

“I don’t care who would have pushed or shoved, I would have chosen you.”

“Says the woman who never had to make that choice in real life,” he snapped back.

I didn’t flinch. “I guess we’ll never know.”

Cole took a few steps backwards until his back was against the wall. I wasn’t sure if his way of putting as much space between us as the room would allow was intentional, but it certainly felt that way. “I guess not.”

I gave myself a few seconds to calm down before speaking again. “Where is everyone?”

He shrugged as he leaned deeper into the wall. “Out. It’s Saturday night and we’ve been fighting a forest fire for close to a week. They’re getting drunk and getting laid tonight. They’ve earned it.”

“And you?” Cole had never struck me as the one to hang back when everyone else was en route to a good time.

“I already told you. I don’t drink anymore.”

“And what about the getting laid part?”