Velvet’s still chewing on my fingers, standing on the desk gnawing at me like I’m a human chew toy. Mews is prowling around restlessly, letting out his typical high demanding yowls while bumping up against the chair.
Yawning, I push myself upright, pulling my hand free from Velvet’s mouth and wiping my fingers on my thigh. I fell asleep in my chair. I couldn't have been out long enough for them to start screaming for their dinner, though.
I see why when I glance out the window. Toward the burning orange glow of sunset over the ocean.
Except that glow isn’t the sunset.
It’s fire, licking up out of the windows of the beach house, curling against wood turned black by flames, giving off sooty streams of smoke that plume into the sky.
The beach house glows like the mouth of hell roared open against the early nighttime darkness, a raw ember of crackling death.
My mouth dries. My heart stops. My stomach ices over, and before I can stop myself, I spring up, bolting for the door with only one thing on my mind.
Kenna.
5
Flame-Broiled (Kenna)
There are few things that can’t be fixed by a Godzilla burger.
If you’ve never had a Katsu Burger, then you have no idea what you’re missing. It’s this weird Japanese-American mish-mash cuisine with grass-fed Kobe beef breaded in panko crumbs and piled with so much weird stuff, like wasabi mayo and coleslaw and ginger and even a fried egg, if you want it.
It’s massive. Messy. The perfect thing for a bad day when you don’t want to think about anything but trying to get more of the spicy mayo on your mouth than you do on your shirt.
I’ve got a stomach full of Katsu Burger chased by a green tea smoothie, but it’s not the massive double-decker that’s got my belly feeling heavy.
It’s the miles counting down between me and Landon.
I’d rattled around the beach house all day, beating myself up left and right. If I wasn’t guilting myself over shoving myself into his life in the first place, I was guilting myself over losing a desperately needed writing day to what was basically just biting my nails.
Worrying myself into an anxiety attack. I needed to get out, clear my head.
But now I’ve got to go back. I can’t exactly sleep in my car, and this time of night, it’s a little late to pack everything up again for the six-hour drive back to L.A.
I can head home in the morning, if I have to. This late, Landon’s probably either asleep or out on a job, so if I just hole up in the beach house until morning, we don’t even have to see each other again.
Still, my stomach bottoms out. I’m suddenly regretting every bite of that grass-fed Kobe beef when I turn onto the long drive leading to the guest house. I can taste it in the back of my throat, courtesy of one hell of a case of nerves.
He won’t be there.
He won’t be standing in the door with those cold, cutting blue eyes tearing me open, asking me what I think I’m doing on his property and banishing me from ever coming back.
Yet, as I round the bend, coming into view of the beach, my stomach drops for a different reason.
At first I can’t really process what I’m seeing. It’s too surreal, like I’m in an episode of Buffy and no one told me there was a convenient corner Hellmouth in the neighborhood.
Flames glow orange against the night, throwing harsh light out on the sand, turning it into a garish nightmare. Smoke plumes up into the sky. Mostly from one side of the house, an accusing black finger stabbing into the night.
The guest house is on fire.
Holy shit.
And I must be in shock, because my first numb thought is Thank God I haven’t unpacked my car completely yet.
My second thought is Oh. Fuck. Landon’s going to kill me.
There’s a little more real fear in the notion than there should be.
I screech my little Smurfberry-colored Prius to a halt and stare, fumbling for my phone. Calling 9-11 is raw instinct, but before I can even press the first button I’m captured by a sharp, erratic motion next to the leaping flames.
Landon.
He's out here, flinging himself against the door to the beach house, shouting something I can’t quite hear through the car's insulation.
But it sure sounds a lot like Kenna. Kenna. Kenna!
The sound of sirens wailing shocks me from my daze. Oh, thank God, Landon already called for help. I tumble out of the car without thinking, the sound of my name floating toward me in desperate cries that sure as hell don’t sound like the voice of a man who hates me with every fiber of his being.
The firelight casts Landon in stark, violent shades until he looks like the darkly devilish thing he is, a demon against the leaping fire, smolderingly handsome.
Every muscle in his body straining. Sweat darkening in clinging spots against his shirt.
He throws himself against the door one more time with a ragged call – Kenna! – a call that cuts my heart and tears it into ribbons. The door splinters inward under the impact of his shoulder.
Then he pulls himself back, readies himself to charge again, latent energy bristling in every hard-cut line of him.
“Landon!”
My turn. I call his name, then stop, faltering, hovering a safe distance away. Not from the flames.
From him.
He can hurt me more than any fire. His looks can sear deeper than any burn.
He goes so completely still it’s like he’s been cast in stone. Then he lifts his head, staring at me, his eyes wide and haunted and stark, his face haggard.
I’m so confused I could pass out dizzy – torn between the adrenaline, the shock, the fear of the primal animal response to fire...and the charged, trembling emotions of my primal animal response to him.
He takes one step toward me. Reaches out a hand. “Reb.” A nickname I haven’t heard in years, a single syllable with the power to crush me.
And then the fire trucks come flying in, ambulance not a foot off their bumper, and there’s no room for words. There’s only the rush of the firefighters unspooling their hoses, turning roaring arcs of spray on flames.
The emergency responders swarm both of us, a buffering layer of humanity asking questions I don’t quite process, but still manage to answer. No, I’m not hurt. No, there’s no one else inside. No, I didn’t inhale any smoke.
Landon’s getting the same interrogation, but he’s also getting hustled away from me when his shirt peels off over the powerful, tapered sculpture of a hard-chiseled chest marked in scars, revealing the livid red bruise he’d made on his shoulder trying to break down the door. His hands, too, are a mess, knuckles scraped raw from smashing at the beach house. For me.
He did that because he was worried for me.
I don’t know how to feel. I just know that the distance between us is like a stretching thread, and I don’t want it to snap. I want to be near him, suddenly, even if it hurts.
So I edge through the cloud of EMTs guiding him to sit on the edge of the open back of an ambulance, while a man in a blue uniform looks over Landon’s bruises and scratches. I make myself unobtrusive, tucking myself against the open back door of the ambulance, less than a foot away from Landon. Close enough that I can feel his body heat. Close enough that every hair on my body prickles, as he stares into me, as if he can see right down to the center of my chaotic heart.
This whole time, he never looks away.
But he says nothing. So I don’t say anything, either. We're locked in this heavy, heavy silence.
Together, we just watch, while the firefighters put out the flames. Water cools their glow, until the night is night again, and the only thing left burning is me.
*
It takes a while to finish, after the fire seems to be out.
I’d never really thought a sustained blaze can take an hour or more of intense effort to completely put it out. It looks like it’s only the kitchen that’s damaged, though. The flames are contained before they spread to the rest of the house.