Eruption (Yellowblown™ Book 1)

by Hughey, J.

  “How?”

  I pulled in a shaky breath. “He asked me to marry him.”

  Boone started coughing to the point I had to loop my arm over his shoulder to smack him on the back until he recovered enough to gasp, “Oh, crap. Whoa, I’m so sorry. I just—wow—I was really not expecting that.”

  “That makes two of us. He did it in a big way. He got the microphone from the DJ and had this black onyx ring.”

  Boone choked again, now with laughter. “He asked you to marry him at a high school dance with a black onyx ring? You’re making this up.”

  “I wish.”

  “And you said no.”

  “Of course I said no! And not gently.” I clapped my hands over my face as I relived a moment I’d struggled eighteen months to repress. “The entire school was gawking and, at first, I thought he was kidding. I mean, obviously he had to be kidding, right? I shook my head and smiled at his prank. The gym was all echoey and everyone chanted ‘Yes or no.’ I looked at Parker, and he was dead F’in serious. That was when I yelled, ‘Are you crazy?’ They pushed me toward the stage. I remember hitting the foul line and digging in as hard I could with wedged sandals on. He should have gotten the message, right? But he walked toward me with a puppy-eyed smile I hated, and I screamed, ‘No!’ like he was coming to murder me or something. Oh, God, it was awful. I ran out, and he chased me. The worst teen movie you’ve ever, ever seen, times a million. I didn’t want to go back to school. My parents made me.”

  “Geez, Violet,” Boone said. He reached his arms around to pull my legs in tight so I was curled in a ball surrounded by him. I appreciated the security while I shared the most embarrassing, shameful story of my past. “What did he do when he caught you?”

  I shook my head. It wouldn’t be fair to Parker to describe the canvas his tears and pleading painted against my shocked, distant landscape. “He was…emotional. He thought I was his future, and I knew I wasn’t. Nikki drove me home.”

  “Nikki?”

  “My best friend since second grade. I mean, my former best friend. The blonde at the pizza place tonight.”

  I waited about three beats until it clicked.

  “The wife?”

  “The wife.”

  He flopped back into the dewy grass. “My head is going to explode. Maybe you should save the rest of this story for tomorrow.”

  I wasn’t proud of what had happened with Parker. In hindsight, I saw I’d led him on, trying to keep the status quo until I could make a cowardly escape. Boone now knew the details of my bad treatment of Parker and the thing an entire generation in Sycamore Springs and Gardenburg would remember me for. I’d broken a boy’s heart in a spectacular way then lost my best friend in the aftershock.

  The period between graduation and the first day at WCC had been the loneliest of my life. I’d given up Parker. I’d lost Nikki through what I’d thought was a totally unrelated mistake, though now I wondered.

  Boone’s nearness, his legs still bent along my sides, helped exorcise the demons. Releasing the burden of this final chapter of high school to the one person I hoped never would hear it left me reckless and a little unhinged.

  I pushed his legs flat, twisted to straddle him, and placed my hot spot north of his belt buckle. “Too bad. I promised I would tell you this and I’m gonna tell it, at least the Parker part.”

  He grinned in slow appreciation as his hands, rough and warm, slid along my legs and brushed under the thin cotton of my dress. “Well, then tell it, Biker-girl,” he said with a hint of cowboy twang.

  “They hooked up on graduation night. It was awkward enough, you know, with Parker and me at the same party. When he latched on to Nikki, I left, and high school ended for me the minute I walked out the door. I like to think my childhood ended there, too, though I guess when I’m Grampa’s age, I might think this is me, still being a child.”

  His hands inched farther up my legs to discover the thong I’d worn, and the bare butt cheeks it exposed, just in case. “Mmm. They made out once and got hitched?”

  “They got married in September, a couple weeks after I met you.” A couple weeks after a new door opened. I eased down to flatten myself against his chest, knowing he could bear my weight.

  He traced tantalizing patterns on my skin. “A year ago.”

  His touch made my legs tighten along his sides. “Yep.”

  “And they’re already separated?”

  “Big surprise.” I sighed. “Nikki didn’t marry for love, and Parker was…. At least I didn’t sleep with him.” I’d held this stupid, tiny victory close to me through the breakup and the screwy trajectory of Parker’s rebound. We’d gone almost all the way a few times. I’d done enough he couldn’t call me a tease, but he’d never known me that way. He could never compare me to Nikki. It took me half a minute to realize Boone had gone still again. His hands left my legs to slide up the outside of my jacket to my back.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Eighteen months is a long time. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “What, so now I’m uncool because I’m a virgin?”

  “No,” he said harshly, then he quieted. “No. Celibacy is a valid choice.”

  “You sound like a pro-life pamphlet.”

  “I don’t mean to.”

  I lay there for a long time, listening to the thump of Boone’s heartbeat under my ear. His hands were still on my back. “I wasn’t choosing celibacy,” I finally whispered. “It never felt right with him. Not like it does with you.”

  He reached up to lift my head from his plaid shirt so I would look at him. My hair hung down, shadowing my face. “Are you sure you don’t like being called Vie?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “A lot of people seem to do it.”

  “Not people who notice what I want. Or care.”

  I could see the faint shine of teeth as he smiled. “Good. Because I like Violet.”

  I kissed him with enough violence to make our teeth clack together. Everything in me centered on wanting to be with him in a way I’d never wanted with Parker. I shimmied down until my hips were aligned with his. His hands dropped down to my legs again, sliding up under my dress to caress my bare bottom. He groaned into my mouth as he squeezed. “Ah, babe, you are so hot. This ass…if you knew…so, so hot.”

  I rubbed my hands up and down the front of his shirt, over his ribs and down the tapering line to his waist. When I moved my hips, he grunted, in a good way, and pressed up to me and held firm. He levered up to nip at my neck. The zinging sensation made me clutch his head, and I thought, Yes, finally….

  Tires crunched up the gravel road to throw cold water on the idea. “Are you F’in kidding me?” Boone moaned. He grabbed my skirt to flip it down. He pulled me to my feet in the same easy motion as earlier today, a lifetime ago, and wrapped his arm around my waist. A beam of white light roved through the trees. “Spotlighters,” he said. “Get in the car.”

  The blinding light washed over us.

  I hoped for the back seat but he opened up the driver’s door for me. After the pickup truck passed behind us, with plenty of suggestive hooting and hollering, Boone leaned his skull back on the head rest of the passenger seat.

  I reached for him. He caught my hand and brought it to his mouth. “Look, Violet, there is nothing—and I mean nothing—I want more than you right now, but I didn’t come prepared tonight, if you know what I mean. And it sounds old-fashioned, but I’m a guest in your parents’ home.” I tugged my hand away. “And, like you learned some hard lessons from Parker, the thing I’ve learned from the ghosts of old girlfriends is it’s better for me to take things…slow.”

  I bit my lip and turned to look out the window so he wouldn’t see me wincing against the sting of rejection. “Wow. A trifecta of ain’t-gonna-happen.”

  He turned in his seat and grabbed my hand. “I’m not saying no. I’m saying not yet.”

  I whirled. “How come you always get to decide when is the right time f
or us?” I demanded.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I asked you to a formal last spring—Valentine’s Day, no less—and you said no then, too, because you couldn’t go out with someone in your dorm. But we could’ve started hanging out at the end of last year. Nobody would have cared. We could’ve kept in touch over the summer. That’s what I would have liked. But you decided things would start on the first day of classes. Then you went all cold when you thought you might leave college since Drew was away when the eruption started, right? That’s what you were thinking when you stopped coming around.”

  “Look, I wanted to go to the formal with you. Believe me, if I could’ve, I would’ve. I didn’t start to date you in the spring because that’s what I did with Twyla, and it sucked. We started going out in May. I slept with her during the last week of school and then summer came and, at first, I thought I missed her, but by July she drove me bat-shit crazy. Okay?”

  “I’m not Twyla.” I stared at him until he spoke again.

  “You can’t start a relationship then move a thousand miles apart. Well, maybe some people can, but I can’t.”

  “Funny, I thought we’d already started one.”

  He squeezed my hand. “You’re right.” It seemed he would say more, but he stopped there.

  I knew the real question in his mind, the real obstacle between us, was how long he’d be here. He felt like he should be with his parents, which made everything here, including me, temporary. He was trying to do the right thing, and it pissed me off ’cuz for once I was ready to do the risky thing. Not pretend I was doing it with a Jordan Blue wanna-be, but actually do it. Yet, one of the greatest things about Boone was his internal compass. Time and again, his compass got in my way, but damn if it wasn’t one of his attractions for me.

  I rubbed my fingers over the back of his hand as the chill of the clear night seeped into the car and cooled things down. Ridges of tendons and the weird roll of veins and the bristly hairs tantalized me. This hand controlled a tractor and wielded a shovel and turned my insides to hot wax. “Why do you have to be such a straight arrow?”

  He snorted. “Why can’t I be a man-whore like everybody else? I have no idea.”

  I leaned over to nibble on his jaw. “Tell me one thing.” His hand clenched when I breathed in his ear.

  “What?” He bent his head toward me.

  “What did Twyla do to drive you bat-shit crazy?” I nibbled more. “Save me from the same mistake?”

  He sat back in the seat again. “You saw Twyla. She wasn’t fun or particularly nice.” He smoothed a palm over his forehead. “I don’t know why I didn’t recognize it. My mind was in a weird place at the end of that year, still half-crippled and facing a summer and fall without football.”

  “You were still with her, though, the day we met up on the bike ride.”

  He turned his head to look at me again. “That’s the day it ended.” He spread the fingers of the hand I still caressed to mesh us together. “You’re right about one thing. I was definitely waiting for you on the first day of class this year. Definitely. In fact, I’d hoped to run into you the weekend before. When I didn’t get that lucky…well…I was really looking forward to seeing you again.”

  Danny’s mid-eighties two-door hogged more than its fair share of the driveway so I wasn’t surprised to see him with his arm draped around Sara’s shoulder when we walked into the living room during the eleven o’clock news. Well, Boone walked and I floated. I hadn’t gotten everything I wanted tonight, but what girl wouldn’t defy gravity when her freshman crush fessed up to thinking about her all summer. Of course, Sara’d probably get laid in a crappy sports car at 11:30 while I faced another night in a nun’s cell.

  We stood near the steps to watch the TV for a minute.

  Female announcer: Riots continue to break out in cities at the perimeter of the evacuation area. The National Guard stopped a two-day looting spree in Minneapolis, one of many cities crippled by failed public water supplies and dwindling food and fuel. Law enforcement and the military are hampered by the inability to use aircraft to monitor these explosive public crises.

  The screen flashed a map with alarming red explosion icons at the locations of the cities destroying themselves. “Look,” I whispered to Boone. “Nobody’s going crazy in Iowa.” I’d hoped to make him feel better about his parents, but he grimaced at my encouraging words.

  Male announcer: The Federal government insists all insurance obligations will be met, even as two major companies filed for bankruptcy protection, crushed by the seemingly limitless weight of claims amid their own losses of personnel and capital assets to the caldera. Analysts predict this will only accelerate the free fall of the stock market.

  Mom muted the TV at the commercial. She and Sara stared up at us like they had a bad cancer diagnosis to tell us about while Dad and Danny commented on a ticker of sports news listing cancellation after cancellation.

  Sara chewed on her thumbnail. “Tighty texted Danny from Carpucci’s.”

  “Who’s Tighty?” Her eyebrows arched to convey significance to me. “Oh, I get it. Great. Welcome back to the fishbowl.” I turned to Boone. “I think I’m going to head upstairs before the local gossip ruins a good night. Thanks for coming out with me.” I brushed my hand down his arm, not ready to let go of him, but knowing, if I couldn’t be alone with him, I needed to be alone, period. “A lot of it was fun, anyway.”

  “I thought most of it was fun.” He stepped back to let me pass.

  I threw him a grateful smile before continuing my path to bed. I stopped at the top of the steps when I heard Dad ask him, “So, you met Parker?”

  “You mean Jag?”

  Everybody laughed, and Dad snorted. “I hate that kid. Always have. Happiest day of my life when Violet kicked the little punk to the curb.”

  “Matt, it was traumatic for her,” Mom chided.

  “Nikki’s the witch,” Sara said.

  I eased into the bathroom, letting the sound of running water drown out their discussion of the life I had tried to encapsulate like nuclear waste and leave behind.

  Text to Nikki:

  The power flickered on and off sporadically Sunday and Monday. Boone and I finished the fencing and cover for the big spring. Dad wrestled with the fishpond for most of a day. He finally fit the tub, half the size of a blow-up kiddy pool and about two feet deep, into the ground near dusk on Sunday. He wanted to lay the pipe himself, too, so Boone dug the overflow channel while Dad froze his hands in the mud until he had a section of one-inch copper tube angled just so and anchored with some big rocks.

  Mom diverted the flow with a piece of plastic sheeting until the water cleared then they let it fill the pond.

  Dad, who reeked of muscle ointment after two days of physical work, sat on the patio to watch. He made us all come outside to see the first trickle of clear water swell then glide out the overflow. The swell carried the minute layer of ash gathered in the short time the black pool had been right side up in the ground. The jet stream had come back over Indiana, a fire hose discharging an imperceptible mist of grit.

  Dad swung his arm onto Mom’s shoulders. “Those city slickers don’t have the resources to make do for themselves. That’s why all hell is breaking loose. If we take care of these springs, we’ll always have water. And there’s food right there in the woods. You have reams of paper printed out, don’t you, Candy, from the Internet survivalists?” Mom nodded. “Who would have thought living in the backwoods of Indiana would pay off? We’ll be like the pioneer family in those books you used to read to the girls.”

  “The Ingalls?” Mom said, laughing. “Little House on the Prairie?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Sara and I groaned.

  “You’re Mary.” Sara pointed at me.

  “Mary went blind,” I protested.

  “Oldest sister is Mary, which makes me Laura. I catch the handsome Almanzo,” she said with a toss of her head.

  “Of cou
rse.” I pretended to scowl at her retreating back then laughed.

  Dad squeezed Mom’s shoulders again. “We’ll be okay, Candy.”

  “I know,” she replied. “And I know you’re a mountain man now and everything, but don’t forget your mom and I want to go to Gardenburg Tuesday. We aren’t quite ready to live off the land yet.”

  “I’ll try to fit you into my busy schedule,” he said. “And protect you from the gangsters of Gardenburg.”

  I hadn’t asked if Dad got paid anymore. I didn’t know what happened if he couldn’t sell anything to his dentist customers, though I figured we would all find out soon enough. I glanced over at Boone, whose cattle ranch with a herd recently plummeted to zero couldn’t exactly be turning a profit.

  People everywhere, of all professions, were losing the ability to earn money. Mom still worked at the paper, though, and everyone devoured the news, so hopefully her pay would tide us over, though with gas pushing above fifteen dollars a gallon, I didn’t see how, since she’d complained more than once she practically worked for free.

  “I can ride along, too,” Boone suggested, “if you’re worried about trouble.”

  “Oh, I don’t think little Gardenburg is too riled up yet. And I like knowing somebody will be here with the girls.”

  Boone wiped his hands on his jeans. “Speaking of that, Mr. and Mrs. Perch, there’s something I should mention to you if I’m going to be staying here longer.”

  A spurt of trepidation curdled my stomach. I had no idea what he planned to say.

  “I have a concealed weapon permit. There’s a handgun in the glove box of my truck. I’d feel more comfortable bringing it inside the house, along with some other supplies that might be…attractive to anybody looking. But, this is your home, and I don’t want to do something you’re uncomfortable with.”

  Mom’s mouth went slack with distaste. She thought weapons were the instruments of evil, and only tolerated Dad’s because they were for hunting, which he didn’t do often. Or well. “Why do you feel you need a gun?” Her tone suggested no reason would be good enough.