Page 9 of Slow Burn
To a kid starving for time, it looked like a feast behind glass.
By the time Cole hit middle school, he was already a handful—bitter as week-old coffee and twice as hard to swallow. He was fourteen when his daddy pulled Jocelyn out of that fire—the one that took her mama. Whole thing threw Cedar Hollow into the spotlight. News crews swarmed the station, their house, the scene. And Pop? He got pulled even further away. Giving interviews, shaking hands, getting honored like a damn hero.
All it did was make the gap at home wider.
Cole understood the weight of it, an ordinary man saving a life. That kind of thing stuck with folks. Made them see you different. But he resented it all the same. It turned his daddy into something untouchable. The Hero. The man who always did right.
Took him a long while to see how much that fed the anger he carried. Longer still to work his way through it and come out the other side—if he even was.
Maybe that was why his parents didn’t tell him about John’s addiction until last night—how close it came to taking everything from him. He and his daddy had only just started rebuilding from the wreckage between them, and this new truth was near to knocking the whole thing sideways.
So yeah, Cole got it. Sort of.
His jaw ached from grinding his teeth, and the hammer damn near slipped out of his hand, missed smashing the other one by an inch.
He let out a string of curses and dropped the hammer, running both hands through his hair like he could get a grip on more than just the mess in front of him. That old anger still burned hot—same as it did when he was a kid. Felt like fire under the skin, hard to hold and harder to put out.
Maybe that was why he hadn’t followed in his daddy’s footsteps. Fighting fire felt too much like what he’d been doing his whole life inside himself.
Cole spent years hearing folks whisper how they couldn’t believe he was the son of such a good man. The kid getting suspended for pulling fire alarms, vandalizing half the town, shoplifting at the general store, drinking before he could drive, and chasing skirts—or slipping ‘em off any girl who’d let him.
It was a hell of a long way from where he stood today as a man who’d built himself a damn good business, never missed a payment, and could be counted on to lend a hand whenever themayor cooked up some fool town shindig. But deep down, he was still the same ornery cuss he’d always been.
And maybe that was what kept the rage going.
The sun had burned through the morning haze, turning the treetops gold, and he quit what he was doing to walk his property, hoping it’d clear his head before he had to go back and open The Hammered Nail for the Sunday after-church crowd and all the tourists who flooded their little town this time of year.
Thirty minutes in, and he gave up, heading back to the restaurant sooner than he’d like. He pounded up the back steps to his place above it to throw on his running gear. Since he couldn’t shake that damn buzzing in his head, he figured to try beating the hell out of himself on a long run, even if he couldn’t stand the actual running part. It was what it did for him afterward that made all that misery worth it.
Seven miles down and a cold shower later, he felt halfway human again, if not exactly calm. Coming down to the bar, he ran his hand along the banister he’d fixed up himself, checking his work without even thinking about it while he listened for voices coming from the kitchen.
The Nail used to be a sad-sack saloon whose owner had run it into the ground after inheriting it from his grandfather, who’d—rumor had it—won the thing in a poker game decades back. It had lasted longer than expected as a haunt for derelicts before its doors closed when Cole was a teenager.
After high school, when Cole was bouncing from one dead-end job to another, those boarded-up windows caught his eye more than once. For ten years, he’d walk by and cook up bigger and bigger schemes for what he could do with the place until his eyes had grown too big for his stomach.
Once he scaled back on the ideas, realizing he didn’t have to think so outside the box, he’d stewed on the idea of a bar andgrill for a year before he approached his cousin Terra to go in on buying the place.
Walking through the wall of heat created by the kitchen like some sort of humid curtain, he emerged behind the bar to survey the atmosphere they’d curated, that sense of pride filling his chest like a balloon.
He’d done most of the renovation himself. Busting his hide for contractors right out of high school had its perks. There was an extra measure of satisfaction knowing that this was the result of his literal blood, sweat, and tears, especially when a lot of the space was already occupied only forty minutes after opening for the day.
He sidled up beside his cousin Terra, who was busy pouring a Belgian beer they had on tap for the month. “How’s it going?”
She didn’t glance up. “Steady. I figure we’ll get slammed soon. Lunch rush.”
It was a standard report, nothing surprising for a weekend. The tourists always came through for the trails and waterfalls—big draw every year. The falls really were something to see, and the cool mist was about the only mercy this late-summer heat offered.
“Need help?” he offered.
“I got it, Cole.”
Terra didn’t ask for or receive help unless she really needed it. Pushing forty, raising two boys on her own, she was built tough as nails. Didn’t mean she didn’t have a heart buried under all that steel, but she kept it tucked away. He respected that about her. It made her a damn good partner to run a business with.
Since she’d given her answer, he moved on, making the rounds. Folks expected smiles, handshakes, a little small talk. Not his strong suit, but owning a business meant he had to play along.
“Cole, that was such a nice ceremony for your daddy yesterday,” Sylvia Dayberry said, leaning forward to snag a fry off her husband’s plate. Walt just smiled like a man used to losing battles.
Cole’s gut tightened. He forced a nod. “It was.”
