Page 55 of The Fire We Crave

Quinn drops her head.

“I’m also sorry if I was a dick last night. I only have the vaguest memories of what happened after we were outside. I’m sorry if I hurt you further.”

She shakes her head but doesn’t look up. “You were probably the sweetest you’ve ever been.”

There is a layer of hurt so thick in her words that it settles like a blanket between us.

I climb to my knees and crawl the few steps to her, before placing my palms on her knees. “In a different universe, Quinn, I’d be a better man with better answers. But I’m sorry no one has ever made you feel worth staying for, because you are. You don’t need to rush to move out today. Take your time. When you’re ready.”

I touch the ends of her hair, and she finally raises her eyes to mine.

I ruin everything I touch, but goddamn if I don’t want to taste her. Yet now isn’t the time or the moment. Not when Melody is standing between us so clearly.

“We’re always going to remind each other of her, aren’t we?” she asks.

With twenty-six letters in the alphabet, and a billion words at my disposal, I hate that there are only two words I can come up with.

“We are.”

16

QUINN

Ihave book club tonight. It’s a romance so dark it’s almost black. The heroine is new in town, and he’s a serial killer who stalks his victims for kicks, first.

And then, she gets hit by a runaway truck that skids on ice, and their world changes.

She gets amnesia and manages to forget every goddamn thing about the man she was scared of.

And he gets the thrill of terrorizing her all over again.

Except, because he’s spent so much time in her orbit, he sees how hard she’s working to overcome the amnesia, and how friends and family are treating her differently to change their relationship with her, not always for the better.

I almost gave up during the first chapter because I thought there was no possible way to redeem the hero. But somehow, the author pulled off a miracle, and I found myself rooting for his stalkery serial-killing ass. And the memory loss changes the heroine, not just in terms of who she is, but what she wants.

From that moment forward, they find a way to fall in love in their own way.

It’s beautiful.

And so spicy.

What I wouldn’t give to have every memory I carry erased, because that would certainly be easier than living my life so caught up in them, I sometimes feel like I’m choking on nothing but air.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, to realize that while your family meant everything to you, you didn’t mean everything to your family.

I wish I had no memories of a mother who shared my love of reading and a father who would take me to the library on Saturday mornings to find new books. Melody used to read with me. She’d share what she’d call contraband books with me. Books that were technically too old for me, but I had a burning desire to read anyway.

There’s a meme that goes around periodically that asks where your romance lore started. For me, it wasFlowers in the Atticand early Nora Roberts books. A mix of the dark and nonconsensual with true love.

I love reading scenes that expose and humiliate and dominate and bring silence to the mind. A place I can never find on my own.

But all I’ve ever found in real life is vanilla, and men who think shoutingcome nowmakes them a sex god. And, honestly, I wonder what percent of the population can actually do that.

After our talk, I continued my shift at the bakery, and Smoke, well…he fixed things. The broken light in the freezer now illuminates immediately when we open the freezer door, the tap in the small bathroom that only flowed with cold water now provides piping-hot water too, and all the bakery carts we push into the oven have had their wheels tightened and generally serviced.

I wish I hadn’t seen him with his shirt off, but I guess it also means his burns aren’t hurting as much anymore.

Which, combined with the work he did around the bakery today, reinforces how he doesn’t really need me at his home.

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