Read Online The Wildfire Season by Andrew Pyper - Free Book Online

of them hurts his throat, like a bone caught halfway down.
    They surprise themselves with the energy they find, a ruthless yearning. Everything they do is lingered over, repeated, another moment won against the long night. Despite this, they can sense an absence in each other’s touch. The room’s wintry drafts find ways between them, lickingaround the borders of warmth their bodies create.
    Afterwards, they watch the flashing blue light of a streetcleaner tumble across the ceiling. This time it is Alex’s turn to search for words and for everything she might say to strike her as laughably belated. It’s not the fire that has come between them, she thinks, but an awareness of themselves. They never used to be self-conscious around each other, and this nakedness brought them an easy honesty, the gift of speaking without gain or penalty. Now they censor their thoughts as though someone is in the room with them, judging their appropriateness, their timing, whether they actually believe what they say or not. The streetcleaner’s blue light retreats through the curtains.
    Although she cannot tell Miles why she cries now, her back to him again, she knows it’s because of this. Not the loss of words. Alex weeps for what they have found, the terrible discovery of what love prevents us from seeing as obvious. They have never been one, always two.
    By the end of October, Miles stops attending classes altogether, spending his days in the laundry-strewn darkness of the apartment. Although Alex stocks the fridge with T-bones and leaves Mason jars of homemade spaghetti sauce for him in the freezer, he lives on delivery pizza and Chinese, the smelly boxes growing into a cardboard tower outside the bedroom door.
    One day that is otherwise the same as the fiftythat came before, Miles hears Alex unlock the front door and knows that something is about to change. She drops her keys on the kitchen table and the sound rips through the apartment like a crack of thunder. The storm is breaking and Miles welcomes it. He wants to stand tall enough for the lightning to find him.
    ‘What’s your plan?’ Alex asks him, standing over the shadowy hump of his back under the sheets.
    ‘I’m a man with no plan.’
    ‘Really? You look like you’ve got your crashand-burn all figured out.’
    ‘No pun intended.’
    ‘I wanted to tell you something. If it makes any difference.’
    ‘I’m all ears.’
    ‘I’ll never leave you.’
    ‘Hey! History’s most broken promise.’
    ‘It’s not history’s promise. It’s mine.’
    ‘You’re a good girl, Alex. But not that good.’
    Alex crumples onto the end of the futon. She finds his cold foot sticking out and strokes the top of it, but it wriggles away at her touch.
    ‘It’s not your fault,’ she says.
    ‘You’re not the judge of that.’
    Alex leans forward and switches on the bedside lamp, which casts a tight circle of light out from under the shade. She can see Miles now. The covers pulled up to his chin, his hair a nest of greasy tosses and turns. His eyes blink against theforty-watt bulb as though he had just stepped into the midday sun.
    ‘I’m right here,’ she says.
    ‘You don’t have to be.’
    ‘I’m telling you I know you.’
    ‘You have my apologies.’
    ‘Just listen, Miles. Listen . Even if you don’t want to hear.’
    ‘Hear what, Herr Doctor?’
    ‘You’ve always blamed yourself for what your father did, and now you’re mixing that up with what happened in the fire.’
    ‘There’s a nice logic to that, I admit,’ he says, tapping his chin. ‘It even seems to make sense. The trouble is, it doesn’t. You keep looking for sense where there isn’t any.’
    ‘So tell me, then. Tell me the senseless truth of it.’
    ‘The kid died.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘The kid died.’
    ‘His name was Tim.’
    ‘I know his name.’
    There is no gesture Alex can think of that Miles wouldn’t take as an insult. She disgusts him, although he assumes it is the other way around. If