Fiery Little Thing: Chapter 17

A gas leak? The internet really does have everything on there.

I’d be gloating if it weren’t for the fact they’ve kept Blaze holed up for the past three nights. The motherfuckers even changed the keys to keep me out.

I stalk through the hallway, following the head of copper hair weaving between people while on two crutches. I can’t count how many books and sheets of paper have turned to ash in the days Blaze was gone. She bolted out of class as quickly as she could, thinking she could blend into the lunch crowd and evade me entirely.

The thief has another thing coming.

I haven’t gone to McGill’s office every day since they took her, demanding to know where she is, just for her to try to run from me.

The distance quickly closes between us. Even though Blaze protests when I lift her up, no one intervenes as I whisk her into the closest room, bearing the brunt of her attacks via crutches.

Reminder for next time: make sure she’s free of weapons before kidnapping her.

“What is wrong with you? You can’t just do that!” She shoves me away as I sit her on top of the kitchenette.

Hello to you too, Blaze.

The break room is ten by five feet, if that. Nothing but a long bench hugging the right-side wall, a single stool, a bar fridge, and a mini sink.

“Didn’t anyone ever teach you not to pick someone up—or deprive them of their walkers, Osman?” Her arms flare around, enunciating her words.

There are several things I notice while she pretends to be angry about my tactics rather than something else on her mind.

One, she still hasn’t jumped down or told me off for locking the door.

Two, she isn’t slapping my hands away as I pull her backpack off, lowering it on the floor next to mine.

Three, she went in reverse. In a span of three nights, she’s returned to the gaunt girl whose shineless hair fell flat against her scalp and whose skin was devoid of any warmth. Sunken cheekbones, hollow eye sockets, colorless lips. Broken blood vessels line her throat, puckering the skin with a pinkish hue that didn’t come from me.

Wrong.

This is all wrong.

“What happened?” The words rumble through my chest.

My hand reaches for her throat before I can think it through. Her pulse almost feels as weak as the night I visited her in isolation.

She rams the palm of her hand into my shoulder, and I let her.

Mostly because if I push for an answer, she’ll never tell me. And I’m already two seconds away from losing my shit. Arguing won’t improve those odds.

“Why do you care?” Blaze’s icy glare drops the temperature by thirty degrees.

“Why do I care? Why do I care? Are you out of your mind? If you’re still asking me that question, maybe my methods of showing you should be more extreme.”

How much more obvious can I be? I accept the possibility that I was too subtle about it before. But since I’ve come here, the only other thing I can do is tear my heart out of my chest and wrap it in a bow.

She’d probably miss that hint too.

I told her that it was always her, and she will always be the one for me. If that were a lie, my first time being intimate with a woman wouldn’t have been on an examination bed.

“No, I’m definitely not out of my mind.” The lines around her eyes crinkle as the klepto narrows them at me. “I have done nothing but think for the past four days, and I salute you, Osman.” Blaze leans in closer, jaw tensed, looking like she’s ready to start an explosion with me as the single casualty. “Well fucking played. You really had me there. Let me take care of you. I’ll be gentle. I could never hate you.” Shaking her head, Blaze curls her lips into disgust. “Fuck. You. Kohen.”

I rock back on my heels. What the fuck is she talking about?

“The Science building? Genius. It’s better than anything I could have thought up—which isn’t surprising. No one thought you caused the explosion with Mrs. Crichton’s things, so what better way to get back at me than by burning the department she works in? You took the fall in the shed, evened the score, so no one looks further than me. Genius.”

My chest tightens. It’s hard to even look at her. After everything I did, the thief thinks this is a game? A sick, perverted scheme to get back at her for tearing up my room and four days in the can?

“Maybe you didn’t understand me before, Whitlock.” She flinches, but I keep going. “I don’t say anything I don’t mean. If you want a liar, go run to Kiervan. If I wanted to get back at you, I could have ten times over—you steal, you drink, you fight, you use. You’re the perfect crime already, and I wouldn’t have to lift a finger.”

She doesn’t want me as much as I want her. She won’t turn the world upside down for me like I would for her. I would turn this earth into cinders—strike a single match and set this horrible world ablaze—if she asked me to. I’ve accepted all this because everything would be worth it as long as she feels something other than hatred toward me.

She didn’t love me last week or right now. She may not even love me a decade from now. But I will be wherever she is, even if she doesn’t want me. Man will always follow the light where there is darkness, and she is fire. The world is cold and empty without her.

“I caused the explosion—risked everything—to show you how serious I am.” Blaze thinks so little of herself that she thinks I see her the same way. When will she realize that I will do anything for her? She doesn’t ask for anything, and I already do it anyway. “I went to McGill’s office three times in three days to tell him it was me.”

With every word, her expression falls more and more until her eyes drop to the tattoo on my finger, and mine go to the ring around hers. “You confessed?”

I nod. “Get your shit together, Blaze.

”

Blaze jerks back. “Excuse me?”

“No one else is going to do it for you. If you think you are getting away with your shit now, there will come a day when everything catches up to you, and you’re going to regret every step you didn’t take.”

“Oh, and you’re so high and mighty and Mr. Perfect, huh?” She rolls her eyes. “Don’t give me shit when you got held back.”

“Don’t,” I warn.

She tips her head to the side. “What? Don’t like people calling you out on your own shit?”

“I didn’t pass because of you,” I blurt. “You didn’t hear me the first time I said it, so maybe you’ll hear it now. The plan for it was in the works for three years. I couldn’t have passed all the previous years and failed the last. I had to be disciplined about each exam I failed and when I failed it. If not, they would have made me take a couple make-up exams or slide in a couple extracurriculars.”

“You’re so fucking delusional. None of that has—”

“Shut the fuck up and listen to me.” I grab hold of her head in both hands. Maybe then she’ll hear every word I say. “I failed all my classes because of you.”

“Like I said, your head is shoved so far up—”

I let go of her and run my hand down my face as I pace the small room. Why is it so hard for her to understand? “Everything I did, I did it for you. Staying back a year. Leaving my food on the desk for you to take, or buying your groceries because your grandfather/Whitlock Senior forgot to. Letting you pawn the watch I borrowed from my dad to buy a new bed because you slept on the floor after your mom took yours. Asking my brother for money three years ago just to buy the coat you always wear. Writing all of Kiervan’s college assignments. Doing his bidding for the past ten years. Changing your locks. Fixing your window when the latch wouldn’t close. Your house. Being here. I did all of it for you. And you know what, Blaze?”

Her sterling-blue eyes drop to my chest, unable to look me in the eyes as her throat bobs.

Tilting her chin up, her gaze collides with mine, and I’m struck with awe at how breathtaking she always is. “I would do it all again for you.” My fingers skate over the side of her face, admiring the red flush that’s returned to her cheeks.

The silence stretches between us as she searches my eyes for more until she speaks. “What did you do for Kiervan?”

The corner of my lips almost ticks up. It wouldn’t be Blaze if she didn’t pick my story apart. “Whatever he wanted.”

A wrinkle forms between her brows. “Why?”

“If my father found out about you, he’d set your house on fire. Only this time, you’d be in it. So I’ve been doing everything he asks just to keep you safe from him.”

She pulls back from my touch, and my hands fall to her thighs. “But you think I’m less than you because of my parents and the drugs.” Her lips pull into a tight line.

“That’s not true.”

“Bullshit.” She shakes her head. “All you’ve ever done is give me shit over it.”

“I don’t care who your parents are or what they do. You’re the one who came to that conclusion all on your own.”

She squints at me like she’s trying to read me. “Do you even hear yourself? How many times have you compared me to my mother?”

“Convenience.” Her lips part like she can’t believe what I just said. “Whether it was your mother, your nephew, or a stranger on the street, I’ll make that comparison because that’s the path you’re on.” Grabbing the back of her thighs, I tow her to the edge of the bench so I can station myself between her legs. “All those people can do whatever they want and get their shit anyway they like, but they aren’t you. You aren’t going to be like them. You aren’t going to end up like my grandfather.”

“And where do you even get the confidence to think that you’d be the one to fix me? You—” She swats my hand when I press it against her pulse. It’s faster than before but no less weak. “Jesus Christ! Why the hell do you keep choking me? Burning my house down wasn’t enough; now you want to kill me too?”

“I want to make sure you’re still alive.”

My answer makes her stop in her barrage of trying to get out of my hold. “Of course, I am.”

“You might not be.”

“Clearly, I am.” Her forehead pinches as she studies me.

“I sat next to my grandfather for six hours before I realized he was dead.”

She gapes at me. “What?”

“I chose to stay with him over the summer when I was eight while Kiervan and my parents went to the Hamptons—Kiervan and my father are both textbook psychopaths, and I try to avoid them at all costs,” I explain. “My grandma was already dead, and I didn’t like my grandparents on Mom’s side—and didn’t want to fly to see them either.”

I can still picture the estate clearly: perfectly mowed lawns, gardens to the nines that my grandma planted before she died, giant white colonial pillars, and a door twice my height. It was just outside the city, where the air is cleaner and, at night, I could see the stars .

Dropping my hand from Blaze’s throat, I reach for the pulse point at her wrist. “He always worked late into the night, holed up in his office for hours on end. Once or twice, I found him asleep at his desk or napping on the couch. When I was five, I woke him up, and he was so upset with me, I could barely sit for two days from the bruises he gave me. I never did it again.” I never would have done it to begin with if Kiervan hadn’t convinced me to do it under the pretense that Grandpa wanted us to wake him. “When everyone else was away in Vermont, I woke up from a bad dream and went to his office because sometimes he’d tell me a story or a life lesson that was so boring I’d fall asleep. If I was lucky, he’d let me have a sip of his scotch, then send me away.”

I pause, looking down to see her slender hand covering mine, but mainly looking at Grandpa’s ring on the thumb running over my knuckles.

He would have hated her because of how wild she is, but there’s another life lesson he wasn’t around to tell me. If the intention is to control them, then it isn’t true love, it’s loving the idea of them.

“He had bad lungs from contracting pneumonia as a kid. The whole house could hear him snore every time he slept—but it was quiet that night. He was in a maroon dressing gown that Grandma made him before she died. I remember finding the silence weird, but I didn’t dare try to wake him.”

Blaze’s copper hair falls in loose waves around her face, and I almost reach out to touch it. I remember when I entered his office, a soft fire crackled in the hearth, slowly dwindling from embers to ash. When I found him asleep, I sat on the floor, barely an inch away from the couch, to watch the fire glow from gold to bronze to red. I remember thinking how calming it was to watch chaos dwindle into nothing.

“At some point, as the sun was breaking into dawn, I saw his blue lips and touched his hand, thinking he must be freezing. I started worrying when he didn’t warm under the blanket I got for him. Or the second. Or when I moved heaters into the room.” I smooth my finger over the ring Blaze is wearing. “There was a trash bin by his desk that I moved right next to the couch. I piled it with paper and kindling and struck a match. But it grew too big too soon, and I tried to put it out myself so I wouldn’t hurt Grandpa.” I look down at the scar on my thumb from the first time I tried to control fire. “I cried out when I accidentally burned myself, and the cook came running up.”

“Kohen,” Blaze whispers.

My gaze snaps up to hers when her cold fingers touch my cheek. “They think he might have died around the time I got there.” She sucks in a sharp breath. “Overdose,” I explain. “Opioids.”

She drops her hands from my face, and I hold them in mine to warm them.

“I’m sorry, Kohen.”

I’ve always heard her voice in my sleep. Imagining her talking nonstop or huffing and puffing with how much she wishes I’d leave her alone. I pretended I could feel her heart beating, and there was a pink blush between her freckles. I’d tell myself she was lying in her bed. Warm.

But I knew she wasn’t.

I helped myself into her room more times than I could count just to check if I could still feel her breath against my skin.

It was always worse when she’d go on benders, because sometimes I’d find her room empty, and I wouldn’t be sure if I’d find her name on the obituary list instead.

“It’s not your fault,” I say. I finished grieving my grandpa a long time ago, but the wounds will always remain.

“I know,” she says softly, searching my eyes for something I can’t see. “I’m not your grandfather.”

“It doesn’t matter if you are. Dead is dead, and I’m not losing the only other person I’ve ever cared about to something I can prevent.” My hold on her tightens. I can’t go through something like that again. “I can lock you up, keep it all away from you, but none of that will mean shit if you don’t want to.”

“I’m not your responsibility,” she says breathily, peering up at me with blue eyes.

“And yet, there is nothing in this world that will keep me from being by your side. Dead, alive, or somewhere in between. I was there for you before. Then once everything is said and done, and you’re looking for someone to hold your hand or be your gun, I’ll still be there.”

Crimson deepens her complexion as her lips part. I want to kiss her right now and know what it’s like to mean something to her. But the way she’s looking at me seems too fragile for what I want from her.

She takes a deep breath and shakes her head like she doesn’t want me to notice the teardrops gathering in her eyelashes. “I don’t understand where any of this is coming from. Why haven’t you told me how you felt after all the time we’ve known each other?”

My brows twitch together. “Just because the words aren’t said, doesn’t mean I don’t wake up and feel it every day—regardless of how much you piss me off.

”

Blaze squeezes her eyes closed. “How am I meant to know about it if you never tell me?”

“I thought my sacrifices were enough to make you see me.” I brush my lips over hers, feeling her breath stutter against my skin. “I won’t stop until you do.”