Playing with Fire

by Lexi Ryan

  When I reach the sidewalk and streetlights, I breathe easier, but I keep my pace quick and my strides long until I reach my house.

  “Everything okay?”

  I jump at the sound of the voice and spin around to see Max standing on his front porch. Since he spent his day unloading moving trucks, I’m surprised to see him dressed in a shirt and tie. Max owns a health club and does personal training, and his body is everything you’d expect to go with that package. Some women might find him too muscular, but I always appreciated a well-built man, and muscle looks even better on Max than most—and even better again when he’s dressed this way. He’s loosened his tie and unfastened the top button, and his sleeves are rolled to his elbows, revealing his thick forearms.

  Yum.

  “What are you doing out here?” I’m suddenly very self-conscious in my plain-Jane white blouse and black slacks, even though this is pretty much the kind of thing I work in every day.

  “I could ask you the same thing.” He picks up a beer and takes a long pull from it. He extends his bottle. “Want a beer?”

  Desperately. “No, thank you.”

  “You usually walk alone this late at night?”

  “I got stuck at the hospital longer than I expected.” I climb onto my porch and prop my hip on the rail. “What’s your excuse?”

  “I had a date.”

  He had a date. I swallow the irrational hurt that surges up with that information. “Oh. Well, I hope you had a nice time. Good night, Max.”

  I rush inside before he can say more and go straight to my bedroom to shuck off my work clothes and pull on my pajamas. The gray cotton sleep pants and black tank certainly aren’t going to bring anyone to their knees with lust, but I live alone, so I don’t need to dress to impress.

  I grab a beer from the fridge and a cigar from my stash and head out to the deck, feeling the need to remind myself that living alone is a good thing. I know smoking cigars is nasty, but I don’t do it very often, and it’s less about the smoking and more about what it symbolizes—independence, making my own decisions.

  My cell rings, and I answer it before the late hour crosses my mind. “Hello?”

  Breathing.

  “Who is this?”

  More breathing. Something crackles in the background. Is that fire?

  “Stop calling me.” I jab at my screen to end the call, but my hands are shaking. That’s the third call like that I’ve gotten in as many weeks. The number is always blocked, and I always think I can hear fire in the background.

  I don’t want to sit outside anymore. A cold stone sinks to the bottom of my gut, and I want to go in, lock all the doors, arm the security system, and hide under the blankets. But I’m living on my own terms now, and whatever this is—my old life creeping into my new one, or a bad case of paranoia—I won’t let anyone make my decisions but me.

  So I bring the cigar to my lips and light it with shaking hands, and when Max comes onto his back patio to gather the empty bottle of wine, two glasses, and whatever other date paraphernalia he left out there, I pretend I don’t see him.

  Four

  Nix

  The ropes cut into my wrists as I tug at them. He’s tied me to the altar at the front of the church. “Let me go.”

  “Shh. Trust me. I’m only thinking of what’s best for you.”

  “Please.” I can’t breathe around my tears, and I squeeze my eyes shut to try to stop them. “I don’t belong here.”

  “You’re my phoenix. I need you. Without you, I’m as good as the ash under the flame.”

  When I open my eyes again, Max is kneeling in front of me, his hands bloody and raw. The heat of the fire makes my skin feel tight, and the flames lick at the pews and crawl closer to my bare feet.

  “Max,” I whimper. “Please get out of here.”

  “Not without you.” He fights my restraints with bloody fingers, but they won’t release.

  “You have to leave.” It’s hard to speak because it’s hard to breathe. There’s too much smoke in my lungs and too little hope in my heart. I know how this story ends.

  “Why?” he asks.

  “Because this is all my fault.”

  His face changes from desperation to accusation, and when he turns his head to take in our surroundings, we’re in his house, and Claire is crying from beyond the fire. “What did you do?”

  I want to explain, but it’s too late. There’s too much smoke.

  I wake up coughing on smoke that isn’t there and cowering from ghosts I’ll never escape. I sit up and click on the light until I can catch my breath.

  The clock reads three a.m. It was nearly one before I fell asleep, but I’d rather be exhausted all day than risk falling into that nightmare again, so I climb out of bed and pad toward the shower. I let the water rain on me until my skin is pruned and the memory of the smoke has lifted from my lungs.

  After my long shower, I make myself coffee and breakfast, but my stomach isn’t interested in either, so I sit at my kitchen table, take deep breaths, and wish I had anti-anxiety meds. I haven’t had a prescription since medical school. After Kent left me, I had regular panic attacks, and one of my professors insisted I use pharmaceutical help to get me through. But then I moved to New Hope a few years ago and tapered off the meds because my life was changing and the anxiety fading away.

  When the clock on my wall hits six, I pick up my phone and dial.

  “Hello?”

  I squeeze my eyes shut at the sound of my mother’s voice. The only thing more bittersweet is the smell of her perfume. I miss her. And there’s no one in this world—not Patrick, not Kent, not Max—who could hurt me as much as she does. No one who has hurt me as much as she has.

  “Mom,” I squeak. I sound like a little girl. I feel like one too. “It’s Phoenix.”

  “I don’t know a Phoenix,” she snaps. “How’d you get this number? Don’t call here again.”

  I slip my hand under my shirt and run my fingers over the thick rings of scar tissue covering my ribs. “Don’t hang up. I need to ask you something.”

  “I don’t speak to servants of the devil.”

  The rough tissue burns with her words. Breathe. Just breathe. “Did you tell Patrick where I’m living?” It’s not that he’d have to be a sleuth to figure it out in the age of Google, but there has to be some reason he’s contacting me now. If he’s contacting me now.

  She’s silent for a beat too many, but just when I think she’s not going to answer, she says, “No.” Then, in the softest voice she’s used the whole conversation, she says, “He still hasn’t come home. I don’t think they’d let him, no thanks to you.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “On the outside. What does it matter where? Even if he had come home, I wouldn’t tell him where to find you. You’re no good for him, and I won’t let him burn trying to save you.”

  Her words knock against deadened nerves. You can only be sliced open so many times before the feeling fades. “Are you okay? Do you need anything?”

  “Salvation, child. That’s all I need, and that’s all I’ve needed since the day you were born and brought your hellfire into my life.” She hangs up before I can respond.

  “I love you, Mom,” I whisper into dead air. “Take care of yourself.”

  Patrick still hasn’t returned to Camelot. If that’s true, that means he isn’t coming to take me back there, so why would he be here at all? What does he get out of following me for months and spying on me in my own home?

  But the only idea more terrifying to me than Patrick being back is that I’ve manifested this fear from nothing. The only thing more terrifying than being stalked by a madman is the possibility that I’m not being stalked at all and that I’m as paranoid as my mother.

  * * *

  “Take it off,” Krystal Thompson says as she stares out my front window. “Mm-mm-mm.”

  I look up from my pot of macaroni and cheese and into my dining room. There, at the front window, my
best friends gather, shamelessly spying on the guys across the street.

  My best friends. The words hang suspended in my mind and make me smile.

  I don’t know what I expected to find when I moved to New Hope, but I never would have dreamed that I could be the kind of girl who had girlfriends. Or at least not ones like these. The kind who joke so easily and laugh at themselves, ogle hot men, and talk openly about sex. The kind who look out for each other and will ditch their hot men for a girls’ night just because.

  Our special little group is comprised of Cally Fisher, the Thompson sisters—Krystal, Hanna, Lizzy, and Maggie—and me.

  “One of these things is not like the other,” I sing in a whisper.

  Krystal’s the only single one in the group, aside from me. Cally, Maggie, Hanna, and Liz have snatched up some of the sexiest—and most delicious—men I’ve ever seen. And they all seem like great guys too. Even Sam, whom I wasn’t fond of there for a while, turned out to be pretty great.

  I’d be an ugly shade of green with envy if a) I didn’t think every girl in this crew deserves happiness more than I ever will, and b) I hadn’t sworn off men during med school.

  Been there, done that, scraped my heart off the ground, and don’t intend to let anyone put it there again.

  “That’s right,” Maggie murmurs as she twirls a red curl around her finger. “Scrub that hood.”

  I don’t need to join them to know what—or rather, whom—they’re looking at. “I swear they wait until they see you ladies here before they wash those trucks.”

  “Would be a waste for them to take off their shirts if no one was watching,” Cally says. “If they need an audience to get their work done, I consider it our civic duty to stare.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Krystal nods her agreement but doesn’t take her eyes off the view. “I don’t care what you say, Nix. You bought this house for the eye candy.”

  “She’ll deny it,” Maggie says, “but it’s gotta be true.”

  That’s not exactly the case, but they’re not wrong either. The home’s proximity to the New Hope Fire Station was a definite selling point for me. I hadn’t considered the views that came with it until after I moved in and the weather heated up—hadn’t considered it, but definitely don’t mind. Regardless, it gets the girls over here more often. Maggie lives with her rocker husband in a beautiful estate on the river, and yet my house has the best scenery. And now that I’ll need something to keep my mind off my sexy neighbor, I’m more grateful than ever for the hottie firefighters across the street.

  I scoop the cheesy noodles into a glass dish, cover it with plastic wrap, and put it on the kitchen counter beside all the other pieces of our potluck assortment—pastries from Hanna’s bakery, booze from Lizzy’s stash, and a couple casseroles from Cally and Krystal. “Okay. I’m ready whenever you are.” I stare at their backs. “Ladies?”

  Nothing.

  It’s as if they can’t hear me. Or don’t want to.

  On my dramatic sigh, Liz breaks away from the group and comes into the kitchen, her engagement ring flashing in the evening sun. “Let them look. We’re in no rush.”

  I shrug and glance at the clock. If we leave now, we’ll only be a few minutes late.

  “It’s a barbeque,” she says, reading my mind. “The starting time is more of a suggestion than anything.”

  I swallow. “I just . . . don’t want to be rude. Won’t your guys be expecting you?”

  “They’ll wait. It helps them appreciate us.” She grins then lowers her voice. “So, what do you think it will be like? Living so close to . . .?” She tilts her head in the direction of Max’s house.

  I look over her shoulder to make sure the other girls aren’t listening, but they’re still glued to the window, tittering like schoolgirls. Can’t blame them. “It’ll be fine, just like living next to anyone else.”

  “Things aren’t awkward since . . . you know . . .”

  So awkward that if awkward were a finite resource, I would be a rich woman. But only on my part.

  Max doesn’t seem at all bothered by the fact that one night we hooked up and it was hot and amazing and the memory makes my toes curl. When he called me and asked me out a couple of days after, I told him it was a one-time thing and I didn’t want more than friendship, and he took me at my word. Or maybe he was grateful for the excuse not to make more of it than what it was. Maybe he’d been scratching an itch and I’d been convenient. Sure, he’s casually invited me to join him for a movie or dinner here and there, but he probably feels like he owes me. Guys can be like that. Especially the good ones.

  “It’s fine,” I mumble.

  She arches a brow. “So no repeat performances of that night?”

  And those, apparently, are the magic words needed to break the spell. The rest of the girls spin toward us with wide eyes.

  Hanna pounces first. “You and Max? When did this happen, and why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Um . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” Liz whispers, but I’m not sure if she’s apologizing to me or her sister.

  “It was a few months ago, and it’s nothing,” I say, but the vultures are descending and now my kitchen island is surrounded by women hungry for drama. There hasn’t been much since Liz and Sam worked things out at the beginning of the summer. Krystal’s entertained us with tales from her dating escapades but, all in all, there’s been a shortage of meaty gossip. I wasn’t looking to fill that shortage with my own love life. I turn to Hanna. “I promise. It was one night. There’s nothing between us.”

  She narrows her eyes and shifts them to Liz, then to me and back to Liz. “Why does it sound like she’s apologizing to me for sleeping with Max?”

  Liz flips her blond curls. “Because in Nix’s mind, Max is yours forever and always.”

  Hanna frowns at me and folds her arms. “You know I married the other guy, right? Because I thought you were at the wedding, but maybe that was somebody else.”

  “I know.” I throw up my hands. “It’s not that I think he’s yours . . .” Not exactly. But kind of. “It’s just that, well, it’s weird, isn’t it? He used to be in love with my friend—sleeping with you, engaged to you. It would be weird for me to be with him now. Who does that?”

  Cally, Maggie, and Krystal all exchange looks before bursting into laughter.

  “What?” I ask. “What am I missing?”

  Maggie bites back a grin and clears her throat. “Well, Krystal and I were each with William Bailey before Cally came back to town.”

  Now it’s my eyes that go wide. “You two slept with Cally’s husband?”

  “I never slept with him,” Krystal says. “I was going through a born-again phase. But . . .”

  “We were both engaged to him,” Maggie says. “I mean, at different times of course.”

  Krystal winces. “I’m the bitch who scooped him up after Maggie played runaway bride.” She turns to her sister. “I’m still sorry about that.”

  Maggie shrugs. “It worked out. If I hadn’t come back for your wedding, I wouldn’t have met Asher.”

  I look to Cally. “You knew about this?”

  She nods and looks completely unconcerned. “Yeah. It’s not like we sit around and compare Will’s bedroom techniques or anything.”

  “But only because it would piss off Asher.” Maggie grins at Cally and whispers, “We all know your boy’s got skills.”

  “Oh my God,” I whisper. They’re all so cool about it.

  “And Max had a crush on Liz for years before he and I started dating,” Hanna says. “Never mind Meredith’s history with our men.”

  The girls all scowl at the mention of their common enemy.

  Krystal smiles. “There is no reason Hanna’s history with Max should keep you from dating him. It’s just the past. It makes us who we are.”

  Yes, but I doubt any of them have a past like mine. This is New Hope, after all. Small town, USA, where they sell live bait at the gas station, and everyone knows everyone�
�s business.

  “Wait, you said three months ago?” Hanna asks. She turns to Liz. “You kept this from me for three months.”

  Liz lifts her palms then ticks her reasons off on her fingers. “One, I promised I wouldn’t tell—I didn’t even tell Sam. Two, I was sure one of you would catch on soon enough by the way Max looked at her after.”

  “What do you mean, the way he looked at me?” Something buzzes in my belly, less like butterflies and more like the vibration of hundreds of buzzing bumblebees. And bees scare the crap out of me.

  Liz rolls her eyes. “Come on, you’re going to pretend you didn’t notice? Max wears his heart on his sleeve, and every time you two are in the same room, the way he feels about you is all over his face.”

  “I think you’re seeing what you want to see,” I protest, but the bees take their vibration up a notch. Why, why, why do I so badly want her to be right? Why do I love the idea of Max looking at me like some lovesick teenage boy?

  “I was seeing what was there,” Liz says. “And then he bought the house next door to you. Plenty of other houses, but he bought that one. Hmm.”

  “He bought the house because it’s convenient to his business, close to his mom, and has a great backyard for Claire to play in.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Liz says.

  “So you and Hallowell?” Maggie asks with a grin. “I could see that.”

  “No,” I say. “Not me and Hallowell.”

  Maggie arches a brow. “Well, hell, we already know he’s one of the good ones—”

  “The best,” Hanna says.

  “It wasn’t like that, you guys.”

  “Then what was it?” Maggie asks.

  “It was . . .” Panic that my old life was coming back to get me. “Lust and loneliness.”

  Krystal snorts. “I’d say we need more than two words, but those are pretty on-point.”

  “Don’t encourage her, Krys,” Liz says. “Now that it’s okay to talk about it, I’d like a lot more than two.”

  “Lust because . . . well, you’ve seen him. He’s like two hundred pounds of sculpted muscle topped with blue eyes and the sweetest damn smile you’ve ever seen.”