Up in Flames by Nicole Williams

Author:Nicole Williams [Williams, Nicole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Contemporary, Young Adult
Publisher: Nicole Williams
Published: 2012-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

I wasn’t really living. I was more like surviving.

After that fateful conversation with Cole, I felt like he’d taken a piece of me with him when he’d walked away that night. A large piece. He was true to his word—he let me go better than I thought “letting go” could be done.

He didn’t take my calls, he never came back to the diner, he didn’t show up at the swimming hole. Other than running into him once at the gas station and being stopped beside him once at the same traffic light, Cole had become a ghost.

A ghost that haunted me at every turn.

It didn’t matter how hard I tried or how angry I got at myself for failing. I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I couldn’t get him out of my heart. I couldn’t get him out of anything.

So I stopped trying.

Once I gave up trying to think about Cole, I felt better. Marginally, but better. I accepted that he’d become a part of me and I had to learn to deal with it.

Last Monday, the whole crew flew off to a particularly nasty fire, for this early in the season, on the edge of the Wenatchee National Forest. So Cole was gone, and now that we were in the heart of fire season, he’d be gone more days than he’d be here at camp. Especially since everyone was saying they couldn’t remember such dry conditions this early in the summer.

Logan had also been gone. A few nights here, a couple nights there . . . baseball season kept him just as busy as fire season kept Cole.

So I was alone.

I suppose I could have used my newfound solitude to work out the fog of confusion that followed me everywhere, but instead, I used it to long for Cole and to let the guilt I had towards Logan consume my days and nights. Other than checking on Grandma M every morning and working double shifts at the diner, my life was as useless as I’d always feared it becoming.

Finishing up yet another long day at the diner, I said goodbye to the closing cook and server—I’d managed to get one night off from closing—grabbed my purse, and headed for my Jeep. It was almost eight, but still bright out, and I was half contemplating heading for the swimming hole and trying again for that sinking record when my phone rang.

I’d stopped hoping it would be Cole a week ago. Hope unrealized was poison in a person’s bloodstream.

When I saw who it was, I almost let it go to voicemail, but I’d let her last two go there and a third would warrant concern. Mrs. Matthews had considered me like her own daughter since Logan and I started dating and she was in my business accordingly. The last thing I needed right now was for her to call my dad to try to track me down, or worse, Logan. Knowing him, he’d be on the first bus home from Yakima to make sure I was all right.

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