Page 1 of Fire Island
One
EVIE
The generator hums beside me, rattling the chain and cuffs attaching me to its bulky body with every vibration. Leaning against the cool wall of the basement, I close my eyes, trying my best to ward off the panic that comes around every few hours when I remember how I got here.
Wrestling with the fact that . . . Cal isn’t.
He isn’t here.
Firefly, I assume, is still run aground on the eastern side. She won’t stay there if the swell rises or a storm rolls in. The small, dank space I’ve been a prisoner in for the past week offers no comfort. The nights are a little cool. The days long.
But I prefer my isolation to the three times a dayhecomes down, armed with a tangled mess of threats, feigned kindness, and scraps of the food Cal worked tirelessly to grow and harvest.
Emotion rolls a boulder into my throat.
I break down every time I think of the man I shared this lighthouse with for the past nine months. The one who, by all counts, is most likely gone.
If I have learned a thing from history, it’s that it repeats itself. Against all hope. Silent tears streak a well-worn path over my cheeks, dripping off my jaw. They splatter onto the concreteunderneath, darkening the hard surface with their small, round pools.
“Where are you, Callum?” I sob.
I want to scream out for him, but my voice is still hoarse from the first three days of doing that. When I got no response, I tried for Emmett.
Still, that produced nothing.
Guilt and shame wore me down to silence.
The small wooden door to the generator room cracks open, and the blinding midday sun bursts through as the crack widens. I dip my head into my arm to save my eyes.
“Time to eat, Butterfly.” The slim, tall figure of T enters. He bends, placing a tray at my feet. “Any time you want to come upstairs, all you have to do is promise not to run away.”
I will dono such thing.
I’ve promised a man something before. I couldn’t keep it, and I love him.
Loved.
My face cracks with the uncontrollable wobble of my chin.
“Butterfly, no more tears for him. It’s you and me now,” T says, squatting a few feet from where I sit. A few feet away, because last time I lashed out.
And I will do it again.
“There isnoyou and me.” I seethe, tears flinging from my cheeks as I lurch forward until I hit the end of the chains.
There is no meek-and-mild girl here anymore.
Cal got what he wished for.
If only he’d been around to see it. If only he was the one to feel the benefits of the months of him guiding me back out of the dark place I’d crawled into. To find my fire for life.
My fire, period.
Emotion tries to steal my face again, and I tamp it back down.
T doesn’t get my tears.
They will never be for him.
