Page 105 of The Fire

I grinned. “You might hate Arizona, but I’ve got a certain fondness for it.Though, if we ever go back to visit, we are staying at a hotel. I’ve been dying to get close to you for two days, and the guest room is way too close to your mother’s… uh, Parker?” I glanced over and found him staring down at the little magnet, tracing the contours with his fingertip. “Everything okay?”

“It’s a cactus,” Parker said, sounding stupefied. “A little cactus magnet.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Because it looked like Lucille. No?”

“It says, ‘I’ll neverdesertyou.’”

“It’s a pun,” I explained, glancing over at him again. “Get it?”

Parker sucked in a breath through his nose and clasped the little magnet tightly in his hand.

“Babe, it’s only a magnet.”

“A magnet with acactus-based pun. For my memory box.”

“Riiiight,” I agreed, stretching the word out. “Because it’s a happy memory. Isn’t it?”

“Very,” Parker said, but he didn’t explain further, or look at me, or even smile, and I was totally missing something.

“Parks, you remember we’re doing the talking thing now, yes? Where we explain our emotions and don’t make assumptions?”

“I remember,” Parker said. “But this is a case where explaining might not work. I think maybe I need toshowyou instead. When we get home.”

I sucked in a breath at that, because even though I’d lived in that house my whole life, it had never felt as much like a home as it did now that Parker would be living there with me…

And also because, when my boyfriend offered toshow me something at home, it reminded me that it had been a very long, very sexless two days.

We pulled into the driveway, where I parked behind the construction dumpster and reached for the door handle. “I’ll grab your backpack,” I said. “You get ready for show-and-tell.”

But Parker didn’t move.

“Um. Jameson? Why does it look like there’s a section of the kitchen counter poking out of the dumpster?”

“Oh.” I bit my lip and winced. “That.”

“Do I want to know?”

“Well”—I cleared my throat—“you know how you dealt with our argument by going to Cal’s and drinking Irish coffee?”

Parker looked at me.

“Well, whiskey isn’t a good option for me. And I needed to blow off steam.”

“By ripping out the countertops?” he demanded.

I bit my lip as I remembered the state of the kitchen when Ev and I had left the house. “Possibly the cabinets too. And the table.”

“What?” Parker gaped at me. Then he threw open the door and ran for the house through the rain, like he needed to see for himself. I grabbed his bag and followed more reluctantly.

The room looked even rougher than I remembered. I noticed I hadn’t been particularly careful when taking the cabinets off the walls, and there was a heap of debris thrown in the corner next to the fridge where the table used to be. It looked a lot like the nightly news footage of a house ravaged by a natural disaster.

Parker stood in the middle of the room and turned in a slow circle. He let out a low, keening moan. “You Hulk-smashed our kitchen?”

I pushed my lips together. “This… would not be a good time to tell you how much I love hearing you call itourkitchen, right?”

Parker turned to me with wide eyes. “I want to see the humor here, Jamie. But this isn’t gonna be just joint compound and paint, babe. Cabinets are expensive. And counters.” He ran a hand through his hair. “It’ll be fine. We’ll make it fine. But… shit.” He drew a deep breath. “It’s a lot.”

“Parks,” I said, grabbing him by the belt loops—which happened to bemybelt loops, since he was still wearing my pants—and pulling him against me. “I admit I wasn’t at my most rational when I did this—”