Page 94 of The Fire

Get by.

Get through.

Keep going.

It had worked before. It would work again.

“Jamie?” a voice called through the open kitchen window. “You here?”

There was one tiny moment when I thought the voice was Parker’s… that he’d come back.

But then I realized Parker wouldn’t ask for permission, because this was his home too.

And then I remembered that it wasn’t anymore.

So I answered whoever it was by slamming my sledgehammer against the countertop with another satisfyingcrunch.

“Holy shit.” Everett walked through the door from the breezeway carrying a pizza and a six-pack of soda, but stopped dead when he saw the state of the room. “What the hell happened?” He looked up at me, sweating through my t-shirt and covered in plaster dust, and his eyes went wide. “Was there a leak? Did you find that the tree caused more damage than you’d thought?”

I swiped my sweaty forearm over my equally sweaty face and made a gimme motion toward the soda. “Nope. Just ready for a change.”

“For a change,” Ev repeated, passing me a can and then looking around again. “A spur of the moment change. Of your entire kitchen. Sure. That’s a reasonable thing people do.”

I drank half the can in one go, then belched. “You need something, Ev?”

“Nope. Not a thing. Just came by to hang out.” He looked around for a place to set the pizza and found that I’d already demolished the kitchen table and all but one counter. He ended up setting the pizza on top of the refrigerator, which I’d moved to the eating area, and put the rest of the soda inside. He wiped his hands on his jeans. “What, ah… prompted all this?” he asked as he closed the fridge door. But the tone of his voice—a little too careful, a little too sympathetic—said he already knew.

I finished my soda and threw the can in the sink. “Word spread that fast, huh? Everyone knows Parker and I—” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

We hadn’t broken up if we’d never been together, right?

He hadn’t moved out if he’d never officially lived here.

He hadn’t hurt me if I’d never let myself believe this was anything but temporary.

Ev’s mouth twisted to one side. “You wanna talk about it?”

I chuckled once, with zero humor. “Does it look like I wanna talk about it?” I grabbed two splintered pieces of countertop and threw them in a huge rolling bin I could transport out to the dumpster in the driveway.

“I feel like I’m missing whatever gene lets guys deal with shit through physical labor,” Ev mused. “You do it. Silas does it. It looks… uncomfortable.”

“Destroying things?” I looked at him, amused against my will. “It’s fun.”

“Is it?”

“No,” I admitted. “Not fun. But tiring. Numbing, I guess.” I shrugged. “I thought about drinking. Thought about it a lot actually. And then I thought about going to a meeting. AA,” I added, when Ev looked confused. “I go sometimes.”

“Ah. Cool. And then you decided to destroy your kitchen,” Ev said. “I mean, it’s not the worst choice of the three. Possibly not the best either.”

“So, um…” I blew out a breath.Don’t ask. Don’t ask. Don’t ask.“Did you see him?” I asked.

“Who, Parker?”

“No, Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance.Of courseParker.”

Ev burst out laughing. “That might be the gayest thing you’ve ever said to me, Jameson.”

I rolled my eyes. “Whatever that means.”