What Burns Away by Melissa Falcon Field Page A

all I could think about was that kiss. I wanted more of it, of him. Then driven by an intense attraction, I took his hand.
    â€œCome home with me,” I told him.
    Both of us ran, shoes in our hands, winding through the cobblestone streets against the breeze, until we reached the door of my apartment, where I turned the key.
    I glanced over my shoulder at Miles.
    â€œYou were right,” I admitted. “Nervous girl.” I wasn’t so sure I was prepared for what would unfold, but I wanted it nonetheless.
    Miles smiled his wide, bright grin and said confidently, “You should be.”
    And there we began.
    â€¢ • •
    But Miles, I’ve come learn, is not as vulnerable as me. I’m still the nervous, needier one, and my husband has come to view that wariness as an unattractive insecurity.
    Although our relocation was exhausting and hard, it was “just a move,” as Miles likes to remind me now. “Not even all the way across the country, just half.” And, yes, he is right. People do it all the time, people with much harder lives than our own.
    And I should feel thankful that our son pulled through the pneumonia he had the week after we arrived in Wisconsin, where my mother’s letter waited, in which she wrote to Jonah: “Moving is tough, my sweet, sweet boy. But what’s a little loneliness, my dear,” even though I am quite certain she has never allowed herself to be lonely.
    Simply, the moment our boxes of packed dishes hit the floor, I couldn’t stop the sadness. Maybe it was the adjustment to the lack of lithium in the air. Being too far from the ocean has always messed with my head, which is why for nearly forty years of my life I’d avoided living in the middle, the great oceanless expanse of it, keeping a tight hold on the coast. And it was a bad time for us to be here, arriving in mid-September during the onset of shorter days, soon to be trapped by the coming winter, feeling like foreigners in our own country, and just as I was beginning to feel a part of the world after my clunky initiation into motherhood.
    Maybe I didn’t want to start over again because I didn’t know who to start over as. The former outrageous blond girl I remember was unrecognizable in the murky-haired stranger with puffy eyes who looked back at me from the mirror. Maybe because Dean remembered who I had been, I was compelled by him and those old powers he had over me.
    Having grown up with four sisters, and being the youngest and only son born to an Irish Catholic mother, Dean admitted to me that back in high school, his sisters had blessed him with insider information about girls. It was the Fourth of July, we had been dating seven months, and as we sat in the bed of his pickup truck, sharing swigs from a bottle of Miller High Life, he told me, “You know, I used every secret my sisters whispered to each other about boys to my full advantage with you.”
    I took the bottle from his hands and peeled the label back. We leaned against the cab, counting fireflies. “I don’t have those kinds of secrets,” I said. “But after I caught my mom in a lie, I set her car on fire.”
    Dean seemed neither shocked nor amazed. He simply held me as if he understood the motive.
    Over his shoulder, I watched Roman candles flaring up into the sky.
    â€œWe all have secrets,” he said, his face buried in my hair. “I bet when we’re old, we’ll have a lot more skeletons in the closet. I’ve got a few fires I’d like to set myself. If I knew where my father lived, his house would go first.”
    We sat silent for a moment. Maybe it was then that we first considered making a fire together, mutually imagining how the scene would play out. Then Dean jumped from the bed of the truck onto the gravel road and walked toward the creek. He lit a smoke. Something told me not to follow.
    Above us I located Scorpius set off by Antares, the