PROLOGUE
My brother pushes the ad for a fire watcher across the worn, laminate table to me. He tops off my coffee; my stomach gurgles and one of his dark eyebrows shoots up.
"Em," I squint up at him, the hangover rattling my brain. The light is too bright around his curly head, almost like a halo. But my brother is no angel.
He cajoles me in his deep, husky voice. "Last night, you talked about wanting to get out of here. So... here's your chance."
I flip the ad over - on the back is a clipping from a news story about a lost hiker - and take a sip of the bitter coffee, coughing as it makes its way into the acid fire that my stomach has become. Emmett always made the worst coffee. "Sure, sure." I mutter.
"Bells." He leans across the table and uses his hand to force me to look at him. He's big, in terms of height and muscle, and when he smiles, his dimples are on full display. He used to use those dimples to get out of everything when we were kids. Teachers, administrators, even cops would bend to the power of the dimples. "I think it'd help to get away from here for a while."
I crumple up the paper and stuff it into the pocket of my hoodie. "Just because I cried to you last night over a shared bottle of tequila does not mean I need to run to the other side of the state," I insist.
He laughs. "That's not it and you know it. You're always talking about wanting time to write the next great American novel, and here you are sitting at home still, working as an admin assistant for Dad's office." He smiles sadly at me. "He's gone, Bells."
I swallow past the sudden lump in my throat. Dad died last year after a short and rough battle with dementia. Despite being a private eye for years, with one of the best memories in the game, the disease wiped him away rather quickly. Emmett and I both moved home to help and we watched as his mind and personality slowly deteriorated. Emmett quit his job; I dropped out of my dream creative writing and art program just to graduate from... Forks College.
In short, it really fucked us both up.
Jake was a great support through it all, really. He helped with Dad since he was once a primary caretaker of his father, Billy, but I could tell something was different the last few months. I chalked it up to me pulling away from him. I didn't initiate sex with him anymore - I was too tired, too depressed. We fought over it and he claimed he understood. Two months after Charlie passed, however, I got dumped by my boyfriend of three years.
He said he would always love me, but he wasn't in love with me. Y'know the drill. Said he met someone and it was like love at first sight: birds singing, carolers, you name it. He just waited for me to be in a better place before he left.
How fucking noble of him.
Now, I'm sitting in Charlie's cottage kitchen, the yellow paint on the walls peeling from when mom painted it in an attempt to bring some sunshine to one of the rainiest areas in the continental U.S. Before she left the three of us to go find a better life, away from the small town and away from her family.
My head pounds as I sit here, the yellow too bright, squinting at the laminate kitchen table.
"Just think about it," Emmett suggests.
"Fine," I snap, chugging the hot coffee. It burns on the way down.
I fiddle with the newspaper clipping in the pocket of my hoodie.
A/N: I don't even know what I'm doing anymore - three stories at a time? I just have all these ideas suddenly after not writing for years.
This one is inspired by Fire Watch, which I played through this weekend.