I chuckled, imagining his cheeks turning red with embarrassment. “Anytime, Gale.”
Our gazes held for a heartbeat before he nodded and closed the car door. He aimed for the house. I didn’t pull away as he climbed the porch steps one at a time. Gale paused at the top and glanced back, likely wondering what the fuck I was doing.
Good question. WhatwasI doing?
But I heard it. Gale’s quiet thunder rumbled at a subsonic level, and my fingers twitched on the steering wheel as I remembered that spark of electricity.
This was stupid. Nothing made sense.
I threw the car in reverse and hit the gas, kicking up gravel as I backed up too fast. I was born to chase storms, sure, but I also knew when they were too dangerous, and it was time to tuck tail and run.
13
Gale
Iwatched from the narrow window beside the door until Ozrik’s car turned onto the road and vanished into the night. Only then did I properly exhale. I couldn’t take his scrutiny. The intensity of his stare was enough to turn me inside out. Why did he look at me like that?
This day had been overwhelming to say the least, and I wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed, burrow under the covers, and process. My head spun, and I was so tired.
The house was quiet, but that wasn’t unusual. When Olivia moved out, she took chaos with her. No more loud music. No more elephant feet—she stomped when she walked. No more piercing laughter that shattered your eardrums or squeals of delight as she talked on the phone to her countless friends. The TV no longer blared with sitcoms or whatever series was trending. A void had opened where her constant chatter used to live.
Dad and I were quiet people. Reserved. We preferred books to music and often used closed captions on the TV rather than turning the volume beyond a whisper. Meals consisted of simple conversation, using as few words as possible. We lived in comfortable silence. The only way you could tell one of us was walking around was from the creak and groan of the ancient floorboards shifting under our weight. The stillness reminded me of church, a place I no longer went, out of fear of having to explain my failure at the seminary.
I checked the front room where Dad spent his evenings reading, but he wasn’t there. I poked my head in the kitchen, then his bedroom at the back of the house, before heading to the basement. Although I didn’t hear the washer or dryer running, he could have been folding clothes.
Dad wasn’t there either.
The basement was spacious and mine. Along with a rec room containing a fireplace and sitting area, there was a laundry room and a cellar that I’d converted to a darkroom. My bedroom was off the rec room, a cozy but crowded space with plenty of bookshelves, a double bed, a desk, and a closet. Photographs covered every inch of the walls—some framed, others simple prints, pinned up with thumb tacks. Most were of nature or weather-bruised skies. A few of Olivia and my father hung above the bed.
On an end table was a picture of my mother and me, before she was diagnosed and grew sickly. My memories of her were thin and wispy, growing harder to hold on to as the years passed. Sometimes, I couldn’t decide if I truly remembered her at all or was influenced by the stories Dad told. I missed her every day.
In the photograph, I sat in her lap. A six-year-old boy cradled in her arms, cheek pressed to her chest as she read me a bedtime story.Charlotte’s Web. Dad said Olivia was never able to sit still for stories, but I would listen for hours.
Since I was damp from the rain, I decided to change. Collecting pajama bottoms and a worn T-shirt, I tossed them on the bed, only then noticing a handwritten note on my pillow. It was from Dad.I’m in the barn. There’s food in the fridge. Text me when you’re home, and I’ll come join you.
Dressed, I took my camera from its bag and carefully removed the film, bringing it to the darkroom to process later. Olivia couldn’t understand why I didn’t use a digital camera like everyone else. She thought having the ability to immediately preview pictures would be appealing, but I preferred the delayed gratification and the methodical process of developing prints. Film photography was a dying art, but I intended to keep it alive.
Although I was eager to revisit the enormity of the afternoon, I was more excited to privately examine the pictures I’d taken of Ozrik. I would wait until no one was around, so I could enjoy them uninterrupted.
All I might have in this life were fantasies, dreams that frustrated me with their incompleteness and intangibility. A few photographs would be a guilty pleasure no one had to know about.
Later.
Aiming for the kitchen, I found a covered plate of food in the fridge. Removing the foil, I discovered meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans. Dad was all about simple comfort foods. After Mom died, he had been forced to learn to cook. He wasn’t adventurous in the kitchen, and I remembered more than a dozen questionable meals growing up. The products of trial and error. Over time, a few staples stuck and appeared on the menu regularly. Meat loaf was one of them.
I put the plate in the microwave, then collapsed onto a stool at the kitchen island and found my phone.
Now that I had a signal, I also had a dozen missed texts from Olivia, most of them expressing animosity toward Twisted Fates.A few gave me hell for wandering off, and one, near the end, asked if I was okay, questioning why I hadn’t messaged her back.
Anger seethed under my skin. “Really, Liv?”
I sent her a text, letting her know I was home in one piece, and while I constructed a strongly worded text demanding why she had abandoned me, my phone rang.
“That manipulative asshole,” she said the moment the call connected.
“You left me.” The microwave beeped.
“No we didn’t. You wandered off.”
