Light My Fire: A Contemporary Winter Romance

by Lucy Snow

  That all made sense. And if that made sense, then staying away from her made sense too — at least in the…taking off our clothing sense. I didn’t want to hurt her in case she thought this was more than it was.

  The only way I could be sure not to do that was to stay away. Even if everything in my body shouted at me to go back to her room, apologize, and jump into bed with her like nothing wrong had ever happened.

  She was just some college girl, Eames. She hadn’t seen what I’d seen, and she couldn’t understand the life I lived. There was nothing more for me with her.

  Even now, as I lay in bed thinking about her, I could feel my body responding as if she were there, or just out of sight but coming back into view any second now. She was like a narcotic — and I was already addicted after just half a dose.

  I couldn’t even imagine what a full dose would do to me. But I also knew that I couldn’t afford to find out.

  I tried not to look at the clock as I lay in bed, but the blinking colon between the hour and minutes number kept drawing my eyes back to it, and before long I just watched the numbers slowly tick upward and then rollover back to double zeros as the hour changed.

  I couldn’t stay in here forever. We must be running low on firewood by now, and as impressed as I was that Marty had managed to cut enough to get us this far, I wasn’t about to laze around in bed while he put more backbreaking time in the cold to work getting us more fire wood.

  I wrenched myself out of bed and got ready, my mind still churning over what to do about Naomi. I could feel the pull of her from my room — ever since I’d happened upon her in the wreckage of the bus I had felt this almost magnetic attraction to her.

  I’d tried to resist it, but for all my strength I’d shown up to her room in the middle of the night to fool around before I inexplicably thought better of the whole thing.

  I was acting totally out of character, and I didn’t like it one bit. I was being childish and I had to sort myself out, and pronto. I hated feeling this way, especially over a girl.

  I finished pulling on some fresh but old clothes and lacing up my shoes, looking forward to getting outside and putting in some hard physical labor — the kind of thing I’d learned was sometimes the only way to calm my overactive mind.

  I hoped cutting some wood would at least temporarily erase the memories of Naomi’s fervent kisses from my head. I wasn’t optimistic, but it was worth a shot.

  As soon as I stepped out into the hallway, though, my resolve crumbled. Her closed door stood there like a monument, unmoving, calling to me. I didn’t even hesitate for more than a few seconds, I knew what I had to do.

  I had to apologize. I had to tell her that it had been a mistake to come into her room and that it wouldn’t happen again — that there couldn’t be anything between us. It sounded so simple, those words, but I knew that getting them out, actually saying them to Naomi would be anything but easy.

  As soon as I knocked on the door, though, I was committed to at least trying. I held my breath, trying to hear if she was moving in there. It occurred to me how much stock we all put into doors and their power to wall us off from things we don’t want to come in contact with, despite how flimsy they were in most cases.

  No answer, no shuffling, no movement of any kind. Maybe she was still asleep? Considering how late we’d been up, and how I’d left her, that made sense, but I also knew that I’d basically slept away the morning and I doubted she’d done the same.

  I knocked again, just to make sure. Maybe she was in there and just really good at pretending like she wasn’t. Maybe she was just really, really mad at me. That made sense too.

  I knocked a third time just to make sure, and got nothing. Well, if that’s the way she wanted to play it, then I was OK with that. Maybe I’d give her a little time to simmer down and then try again.

  At least my heart was in the right place, right? I was trying to apologize! I didn’t know how I could make it up to her, but I could sure as hell tell her things had gotten out of hand.

  I took one last look at her door and went down the stairs, thinking maybe I’d see her in the living room, dining room, or even the kitchen. No dice, and no one else around. I started heading down the corridor to where I assumed Marty and Clara’s rooms were, and probably the furnace and all the tools.

  I could feel my fingers curling, itching to get back to work - I’d kept plenty busy at the cabin by the lake, which felt like an eternity ago, even if it was just over 24 hours before now.

  “Hello?” I called out, finding the house eerily silent, reminding me of when Naomi and I had come in together yesterday and thought the place was abandoned. “Anyone here?”

  “Alex!” came a voice further down the hallway — it was Marty. “Well, good morning to you!” Marty stuck his head around a doorway off to the right. “Ready for some breakfast?”

  “Sure am,” I replied, stomach churning at the thought of Clara’s take on breakfast. “And I wanted to see if I could help out with the firewood in the meantime.”

  “Sure! That sounds great. I was gonna do it myself, since we’re using a little more of it now, but always happy to have the help. Come on back here and I’ll get you set up.”

  I followed the sound of the voice around the corner and saw Marty standing there, staring at an old chest of drawers. He cradled an old teakettle in his hands, and it looked like he was trying to decide where to put it. He finally picked a spot and set it down, rubbing his hands together with a purpose - I could tell he was massaging his fingers. Catching me watching him, Marty smiled wryly. “These joints don’t work like they used to,” he said.

  I nodded. “Let me help.”

  “Yeah, follow me.” Marty turned and I walked behind him down the hall. Before long we came to the end and Marty opened the old door in front of us. We emerged from the inn in a shed with the opposite side open, and the snow threatening to roll right up to the doorway.

  “Better put on one of these old jackets first,” Marty said, handing me an old brown jacket hanging from a set of pegs just inside the doorway. “Otherwise you’ll fall apart out here, even while working up a sweat.”

  I took the jacket and pulled it on, zipping it up and tensing my body up as the fabric quickly warmed up around me. I nodded at Marty and he chuckled, giving me an approving look over.

  “The axe is over here,” Marty said, walking to the right and pulling a long axe off its pins on the wall, before turning back and handing it to me with both hands. I took it, and followed Marty’s gesture toward the other side of the shed, where there were cylinders of wood stacked up in shelves along the wall. “We have a kid who comes by every month or so and delivers the wood, but I like to chop it myself, you know, just to keep the old muscles moving.”

  I stared back at Marty and he grinned, touching his biceps. “The old lady, she likes it when I stay in shape,” he said before erupting in laughter that echoed throughout the shed.

  I couldn’t help but join him. “I’ll bet,” I said, when I could get the words out. I hefted the axe and pointed back to ward the racks of wood. “I think I got what I need here. Just do it all?”

  “That would be great, young man. That’ll last us another couple weeks at least.”

  “Happy to help, after all you two have done for us.” I paused. “That reminds me, please thank Clara for all the food she made us last night.” I patted my stomach. “I haven’t eaten that well in years.”

  Marty waved. “She’ll be thrilled to hear it.”

  I pulled the first block of wood from the top rack and set it down on the cutting platform in front of me and leaned back, ready to take my first swing. I heard Marty walking to the door.

  “Hey Marty, one thing.”

  He paused. “Yeah, sonny?”

  “You see Naomi at all this morning? She wasn’t in her room.”

  Marty looked up, facing away from me, in that way people do when they’re trying to remember something. “Naomi…” he trailed off, turning
toward me, his face tense. “Oh yeah!” he brightened. “She said she was going out to get something.” He opened the door and left.

  I turned back to the wood, staring down the block I was about to split in two. I took a practiced swing, remembering all the times I’d split firewood all around the world.

  It clicked for me the moment the head of the axe hit the block, cleaving it neatly into two roughly equal parts. I almost relaxed my grip on the axe as the realization hit me.

  “SHIT!” I shouted to myself, even louder than Marty’s laugh. The blizzard outside the shed didn’t respond to me, as if I was shouting into an abyss and the abyss didn’t think what I had to say was even worthy of reply.

  I dropped the axe to the cold, hard, ground with a clang as the metal of the head hit the carving platform, making my teeth ache.

  Naomi was going…to get something. In this weather? Where could she have gone?

  The bus.

  That was the only place.

  I pulled open the door and raced through the inn, startling Marty as I ran by him still puzzling over where the teakettle should go. “Whoa there, sonny!” Marty shouted as I careened past him. “Where you off to?!”

  “Naomi’s out there!” I waved off toward the general direction of the bus. “She’s gone to get something from her bag!”

  Marty sounded confused behind me. “Now why would…” he trailed off as I turned a corner and couldn’t hear him anymore.

  I stopped in the foyer and pulled on my shoes as quickly as I could, scooping up a hat and gloves but only getting the former onto my head before running out the door.

  All around me the wind battered me back and forth, hitting me with freezing cold while being eerily silent at the same time.

  As soon as I got down the steps I couldn’t run anymore, the snow was too deep, but I made a good attempt as I set off toward the bus.

  The snow coming down was so heavy that the path of the footprints in front of me was already tough to follow.

  Shit. I was already too late.

  CHAPTER 11 - NAOMI

  It took about 30 minutes out in the snow before I realized that maybe this wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had.

  It actually took only about 3 minutes for that to occur to me the first time, but back then I’d gritted my teeth and kept it moving, because, hey, that’s what I did in situations like this, and it had worked out for me pretty well so far.

  Of course, very rarely had that involved a life or death situation, which it took me about 6 minutes after I stepped out of the door of the inn to realize that this was.

  The storm was unrelenting, the wind whipping around me, pushing the snow coming down in weird angles that seemed to shift and turn without any rhyme or reason. It was like being assaulted by tiny, cold, melting flakes.

  It wasn’t a great feeling.

  Of course, by now I was committed, and I had a goal in mind, something to strive for, something to get to. Somewhere down this road that I could vaguely tell the shape and direction of by the way the hills caved downward to meet it lay the bus where Naomi’s diary waited for me…and the cliff that the bus hung so perilously over.

  I shook my head and pulled my jacket closer around my shoulders. The cliff thing could wait till I got there. I could figure it out. Alex wasn’t the only one who knew a little bit about the cold.

  Alex popped into my head again, and not for the first time, setting off a chain of flares in my mind that ignited memories of anger, frustration, amazing pleasure, and above all else, confusion.

  I tried to turn him over in my mind and put him away for a little while, at least while I worked on putting one foot in front of the other over and over and get to the bus, but Alex kept bouncing around in there and making it difficult to concentrate.

  I still couldn’t figure out what had happened last night. Sure, we’d fought each other as usual, and I had definitely left the dining room thinking that we’d never get along, much less see eye to eye on anything, but then he’d shown up at my room, and for a moment everything had become clear: we were both thinking the same thing.

  Maybe we hadn’t figured out the whole, you know, talking to each other thing, or the whole saying anything to each other without being at each other’s throats, but for a little while last night in my room, none of that had mattered.

  All that had mattered was the feel of his skin on my skin, his lips on mine, the insistent and powerful way he kissed me, the way our bodies fit together.

  There had been nothing else. Not the inn, not the storm, not the day to day problems of every day life, nor the bigger questions everyone, especially me, seemed to be asking themselves, publicly and privately, at all hours of the day.

  It was as if all of that had ceased to exist.

  It had felt incredible.

  And then…Alex had left. Without saying a word, he’d shown me a vision of what peace could be, and then taken it away from me, away from us, by getting up and leaving, without an explanation.

  That was the worst part — not knowing what had gone wrong. Was it me? Was it him? Who knew? Oh wait, Alex knew. And I didn’t.

  Something. Anything! Anything would have been better than the nothing I’d gotten.

  I ground my teeth as I trudged on, half out of cold and half out of frustration, shaking my head at my inability to figure out this particular puzzle. This tall, gorgeous, sexy as hell, walking conundrum that bothered me in ways no other guy ever had.

  It was infuriating.

  I wasn’t a shut in, I’d grown up around TV and movies, and certainly had my run-ins with thirsty boys from high school, and a few in college too. I’d grown up thinking and learning that boys were pretty much out for one thing from age 13 to at least 30, before they, at least hopefully, cooled off a little bit down there long enough to have a rational thought once in a while.

  Which made me even more confused - I was right there!

  In bed!

  Wearing very little!

  Wanting more!

  What the hell, dude?!

  Way to give a girl mixed signals.

  “Stupid boys,” I muttered to the blizzard all around me, and the wind picked up a little bit right then and there, shaking me to my bones, as if the universe, or at least the local weather system, agreed with me that boys were dumb.

  “Yup, you get me,” I whispered back to the blizzard and kept walking.

  About 10 minutes later I angrily realized that maybe this was for the best. Maybe last night could have played out a little differently and Alex and I would have had amazing sex, and then in the morning things would have gone back to how weird they were between us and we’d have kept fighting. What would I complain about then? The same thing — how we for some reason just couldn’t have a civil conversation without wanting to bite each other’s heads off.

  I knew a little bit about dating, and if there was anything of value in there, it was that wanting to kill your partner made for an exciting thriller movie but an exhausting relationship. Especially after just over a day of knowing each other.

  Ugh, dating. Come on, Avery, don’t get ahead of yourself. I’d just met the guy and here I was already thinking like we were going to end up together. As if the only reason we’d even met was the giant bucket of snow the world decided to randomly drop on New Hampshire just as we were both getting on the road to get back to Meridian.

  One in a million chance! Didn’t mean anything!

  No, it would never have worked out between Alex and I. Even if we had had sex last night, I’d have woken up this morning wanting more, and maybe he’d have wanted more, but then we’d have gone right back to our fighting. Sex didn’t change things, not when there were bigger problems at hand — it mainly just made it easy to ignore other problems for a little while longer while everyone was moony-eyed over all the hot sex they were having.