Page 752 of Hell Hath No Fury

“You have a lot to live up to,” she told the glass of red.

A few hours and three glasses later, she was feeling more charitable toward the bottle. It hadn’t delivered on the pleasureof climax—what beverage could?—but it had certainly given her a postorgasmic haze.

From through the wall:Ohhhhhhh, baby.

A little wine sloshed out of the cup as Kennedy startled. She supposed the candles and card had done their trick. Annie sounded very, very pleased.

Low, urgent muttering was followed by a slap of flesh and a shriek.

Laughter.

Aw, hell. They were going to make her crazy. She gulped down the last of the glass and got ready to sleep amid the grunts and impassioned cries from across the other apartment. In bed, she pushed in her earbuds and laid her head on the pillow. At least when she woke up, Valentine’s Day would be over. Then she could go back to her regular life… filled with people in love. She sighed and pulled the covers over her head.

* * *

Smoke and blackness invaded her dreams, choking her. She needed to wake up. A cough racked her body, sending shards of pain into her throat. The sheets tangled around her legs, holding her captive, tripping her when she pulled out of bed. She stumbled to the ground, grasping at the carpet. Her carpet. Shewasawake. This was real.

A fire.

The strangest part: there was no telltale orange glow, no flames at all. But she felt the heat of it, as if she were being roasted alive. And she sure as hell felt the smoke as it abraded her lungs. She crawled to her bedroom door, trying to remember rules about staying down and checking the door handle forburning. Luckily, it was only warm, and she wrenched it open, stumbling back with her own force.

She crawled back to the door, only to be almost stepped on by a pair of boots, the yellow like a beacon against the smoky air. He was yelling something to her, the wearer of those boots, but she couldn’t understand. Her mind was foggy from leftover sleep and lack of oxygen. No matter how hard she sucked in air, it never felt like enough.

Until a plastic mask came over her head, and she breathed in deep. A fist squeezed her lungs and she coughed it all back into the mask. It was pulled away a second before her whole body was lifted. Her world receded to hazy shadowed boxes, but she was aware of the man holding her in a tight, almost painful grip and another man in front of him, leading the way.

Bright lights seared her eyes, the red flashing from the top of the truck. He carried her away, but the dark world was still hazy, shimmery like a mirage, and she realized that her cheeks were wet with tears she’d shed unknowingly. The grass felt like crispy strands of heaven beneath her fingers, so blessedly cool and damp. Something was fitted over her mouth and nose, and for a minute, she panicked. It felt like she couldn’t breath—but it was just the thought of constriction that held her breath.

“Breathe now,” said the shadow edged in moonlight. “Breathe.”

She forced them, in and out, steady breaths, and some of her awareness returned to her. When she tried to sit up, he nudged her back.Wait, just wait.When she tugged at the mask;no, not yet, just breathe.

In those seconds, her whole world shifted on its axis, becoming attuned to what this faceless, nameless man wanted her to do, become wholly dependent on the one who had saved her. She was dizzy with it; and while, even then, she could have attributed that to oxygen deprivation, she knew it wassomething more, a link between them that cemented when she was helpless to stop it—becauseshe was helpless.

Her world passed not in minutes or hours but in breaths, slow ones to appease the arms that held her. This too, she recognized, was not strictly normal. She should be relegated to the grass or a stretcher, not wrapped securely between a solid chest and hard arms.

The other guy seemed to know it too—his partner. “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.

“Fuck off,” the man who held her replied.

His partner tossed a few bottles of water onto the grass beside them before stomping away. The man twisted off the top and helped her drink. He didn’t seem disturbed by the liquid that escaped; he just wiped her lips with fingers that smelled like smoke. When she had drank half the bottle, he put it down and rocked her.

As the time passed, she could see the men still working outside her house. They had put the fire out quickly, pulled the people out quickly; it was a picture of efficiency. The bricks of the duplex were barely marred, but through the open doors, she could see the charred walls, the faint outline of cheap particle-board furniture stacked with hundreds of dollars’ worth of stationery, all infused with smoke and then drenched with chemicals.

Behind the fire truck and beside an abandoned apartment complex on the other side of the street, she was almost certain…

Annie and Dan were making out in the grass. From the movements of their silhouettes—voraciously. Well, she didn’t blame them. Sex was life affirming. And it was still Valentine’s Day.

She glanced back at the man who held her. His eyes glinted with the knowledge of what was going on twenty feet away. Even if he hadn’t seen… they were getting loud.

The suggestion bloomed between them, like some sort of primal equation: man + woman = sex. And suddenly all she could think about was his maleness.

His skin was rough. Even in the twilight she could see every detail of his patchwork skin, some brighter, some dark, some hollowed and some raised with scar tissue. His lips were unexpectedly soft and thin; she imagined they were agile. But she was most interested in his eyebrows. They were so full, bushy and almost plush—brown with streaks of shiny silver. She wanted to run her fingertips over them, to straighten them out and ruffle them up again.

Her gaze drifted lower, to where his gaze was trained on her mouth. They were each studying the other, each cataloguing and memorizing, but she couldn’t have said why.

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Leaned closer. Bent his head. Was he going tokissher?

She coughed from deep in her throat—right in his face.