Page 8 of Set Me On Fire

“You’re walking one way along the beach, he’s walking up the other, and when you’re in your tiniest bikini, you happen to bump into him,” Annie continued.

“Is this how you met Mr. Annie?” I asked. “Is there a Mr. Annie?”

I looked at the others, who all shrugged.

“You’re an adult, and he stumbles up, unable to believe his eyes, taking in how amazing you look,” Annie said.

“Damn…” I coughed, still feeling a tickle in my throat. “Yeah, that would be cool.” I raked a hand through my hair, grimacing at the sooty texture. “Instead, I’m dirty, smoky, and damp.”

“So go to the Christmas party all dressed up and make him realise what he missed out on. Wear something sexy for a change,” Felicity said.

“Nah, I?—”

“And if Noah doesn’t sweep you off your feet, one of the others will,” Annie said. I stared at her, not sure what to say, but if the idea was so outlandish, why did I still feel the warmth of Knox’s arms around me? Those gentle hands, his voice asking me if I was OK?—

“Or both of them.” We all stared at Felicity. “If Jamie managed to bag all those hotties, why can’t you?”

“Ew,” I replied, “you called my brothers hot.”

But as arguments went up around the group about which brother the girls thought was hotter, Annie smiled.

“Why not all three? Why should Jamie have all the fun?”

Why not indeed.

The first dayof being unemployed I spent sleeping, eating a breakfast of M&Ms and Diet Coke, then sleeping some more before watching something brainless on the TV until, you guessed it, I fell asleep again. My body had decided that because I didn’t have to do night shift anymore, it was going to make full use of my free time to reduce my sleep debt.

The next day I tried to nap but felt a weird kind of restlessness. I deep cleaned the shower, scrubbed out the oven I rarely used, and considered whether or not the bathroom cabinets needed replacing again. I thought floating vanities were cool, but the grime that seemed to accumulate under them? Not so much. I could get Jamie to blackmail my brothers to redo them yet again, and their wails of protest would be half the fun.

Anything to stop that empty feeling that persisted in my chest, even after I scratched at it.

It was when I started to alphabetise my book collection and colour code my underwear that I realised I might have aproblem. A problem shared was a problem halved, so I did the only thing I could do and rang my bestie, Jamie.

“Hello?”

Brock sounded all husky and, gag, happy, which made me think he and my best friend had just been enjoying some horizontal refreshment, and that put me in a difficult position. In my mind, my brothers were like Ken dolls, smooth, sexless, and useful only in a limited number of scenarios, but my best friend? I wanted her to get railed from sundown to sun up in as many different positions as she could imagine, until she expired in a puddle of sex goo.

Trouble is, I could not handle her talking about it.

“Hey, Buttface,” I said in a deliberately breezy tone. Brock was like a bloodhound, sniffing out trouble in seconds. “Put my best girl on the phone.”

“My best girl—” he started to say.

“I licked her first.” I slapped a hand on my forehead. “Not like that.” His snicker made clear what he thought about my verbal diarrhoea. “Just put Jamie on the phone.”

“You got it, Amelia Bedelia.”

I sighed as I heard the sound of the phone being passed over, but Jamie entered the chat soon afterwards.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“The pub burned down and I lost my job, but then I quit.” This was the problem with my brothers shacking up with my best friend. It meant I couldn’t keep her on speed dial anymore, updating her on the minutiae of my life. “A bunch of hot firefighters turned up, like calendar-worthy dudes. Anyhoo, they put out the fire and one rescued me from doing something really stupid, and then the really cute one asked me to come to their Christmas party.”

This waswhere I told her about Noah, right? Right? Nope, the words came and squatted on the end of my tongue, but they were not coming out. If I said them, even to Jamie, then it’d all be real.

The shame I felt thinking I had something with Noah Taylor. The excitement I’d felt when we turned up at the party. My body was a lightning rod ready to be struck when he turned up and took my hand almost as soon as I arrived. We’d gone and sat under a tree, watching the stars, and then he’d turned to look at me and I gazed right back, the tension that was there between us both in class and out growing to fever pitch. His eyes dropped down, tracing the shape of my lips, then he leaned forward, right as Jamie came stumbling through the bushes, a hand clapped over her mouth.

She had been binge drinking with some of the other girls at school, and what goes in must come out, apparently. I led her away to vomit in the bushes, holding her hair back and making soothing sounds, but when we emerged, my brothers were waiting for us, not Noah.

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