by Paula Cox
This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, events, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Smoke copyright @ 2017 by Paula Cox. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
SMOKE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
FILTHY
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Preview of Torched
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
SMOKE
Chapter One
Darla
I look into the reflection of the espresso machine, using the gap after the frantic pace of the lunchtime rush, and try to fix my appearance.
I overslept this morning, something I rarely do. Usually, I’m all in when it comes to my work. Sure, people—ahem, my parents—can tell me that it’s just a barista job, I should try harder, I should have more ambition, etc., but I do things on my own terms. And right now, I love my job. I’m good at it . . . even if Tracey is the golden child and always gets the best shifts and I know she’s being considered for a raise. In fact, the only reason I overslept was because I was on the super-late shift while Tracey got to dance into the sunset at five o’clock, bobbing her pixie-cut head and grinning girlishly at me.
I hear my father’s voice now: You’re twenty years old. You should be at college. Don’t you want to be a doctor? A veterinarian? It’s strange, because at no point in my life have I mentioned that I want to be a doctor or a vet. It seems my dad, who up until now has been perfectly fine letting me make my own way, has suddenly realized that he has not paid enough attention to my hopes and dreams. Now he’s scrambling. I’ve been offered up too many ideas to count. Perhaps I want to be a pilot? Perhaps I want to go into the military? Fine, fine . . . but don’t I want to be a politician? What Mom and Dad don’t understand is that working here gives me something I want more than any of that. Independence. I get to live alone. I get to do my own thing. I get to be a grownup.
I come out of my brief reverie and look closer at the reflective metal. I had no time to put on makeup today and my face, while probably looking fine, seems strange to me. When you’ve put on my makeup almost every morning for the past decade, staring at yourself naked and bare is a disorienting experience. My shoulder length blonde hair, with a natural kink at the bottom, is unchanged. And so are my wide-set green eyes, but even they look odd when they’re not ringed in eye-liner.
I quickly apply as much product as I can, but I rush it as I hear Carl approaching. Shuffling, more like. Carl is thin, balding, with thick horn-rimmed glasses that would look more fitting on porn actor from the ’eighties than a thirty-something barista. I place my little makeup bag in the pouch of my apron and turn to him. The Coffee Joint, my fifty-hour-a-week home, is empty apart from a couple of students who sit in the corner, their laptops open, typing furiously. My age, I note. How angry that would make Dad.
Carl stops a few inches from me, too close, so close I can hear the rumbling in his chest from his strained breathing. “Darla,” he says. His voice is a whisper. But I don’t lean in. I don’t like thinking of Carl as a creep, but the fact remains that he stands too close to the girls, sometimes breathes on them, often makes inappropriate comments, and once at a work party tried to wrap his arms around Tracey’s midriff. Still, after everything, he’s just a guy, and sometimes guys can be odd.
“Yes,” I respond. I take a step back, showing him as kindly and gently as I can that standing so unbearably close to somebody isn’t normal.
He doesn’t get the message; he takes another step forward, closing the gap, perhaps thinking I’ve made a mistake by stepping backwards and he’s doing me a favor. “I just wanted to say . . .” He wheezes, licks his lips. I’m reminded of the time I caught him watching pornography on his phone in the storage cupboard. Not touching himself, thank God, but staring with dead, glassy eyes at the rutting figures onscreen.
“Yes?” I reply, suddenly aware that it’s just me and him until evening.
“I just wanted to . . . say . . . that . . .” He wheezes again, sucking in desperate breaths. And then he throws his words out in a great jumble, eager just to be done with them: “I just wanted to say that you look as pretty as a flower, a nice pretty flower and your makeup is perfect and you have a very athletic body.”
The words themselves are nice, kind, innocent enough. But his eyes are beady, naturally small, but magnified in his glasses so that he looks like a giant insect. He licks his lips when he’s done and his insectoid eyes roam down to my s
hirt, lingering on my breasts. Slowly, his eyes begin to glass over as they did when I caught him watching the movie.
“Uh, thanks,” I grunt.
And then I spin around and hurry to the opposite end of the counter.
Carl is about to follow when the Californian-sunbaked parking spot outside the Coffee Joint is filled in a mess of sirens, beeps, and hoots. I glance through the giant glass walls and watch as the firemen exit the truck, laughing and joking. My breath catches. There are two reasons for the tightening of my throat. The first is that the firemen usually come in on Tuesdays, not Fridays, and I haven’t prepared. Usually I pre-fill the coffee machines, arranges the cakes and pastries they like, make sure there’s enough ice and cokes.
And the second reason swaggers through the doors right now.
Brody Ellison, twenty-four years and two-hundred pounds of pure muscles, heartbreak, heat, passion, cockiness and arrogance. Look up Arrogant Prick in the dictionary and Brody’s face will appear. Tall, with a handsome face, the kind of face that draws a girl in without even trying to, short, sandy-brown hair and stubble on his strong jaw that looks almost red. His eyes are dark, hazel, and gorgeous.
My heartbeat scatters in my chest.
Why didn’t I put on that last smidge of lipstick!
Chapter Two
Brody
“Hey, look,” Marco says, as we climb down from the truck, “it’s that girl. What’s her name? Lila?”
“Darla,” I reply.
Immediately, the guys let out a cheer. Marco, Jonny, Steve, and Cliff hold their arms in the air and start whooping. “He knows her name!” Steve laughs. “He’s in love! He wants to marry the girl!”
“Can it,” I grunt, with a small smile on my face.
Marco sidles up next to me as we enter the coffee shop. The place is empty, but for a couple of kids in the corner, the thick-glasses man who always hides behind the coffee machine when we come by, and Darla. Darla is a hot chick, make no mistake. With her cute green eyes and smoking body, she’s the sort of girl any guy would be drawn to. She also has a way of holding herself that’s interesting. She’s a barista, but she holds herself like a princess. The general message she communicates is: Don’t mess with me. I’m tougher than I look.
It’s attractive, I’ve got to admit.
The guys babble on all around me, the usual fireman talk. This and that girl, this and that conquest, locker room talk transported from the locker into the Coffee Joint.
Maybe it’s time to make a connection with this girl, I think.
But that’s making it sound way more romantic than it is and I know it. Truth is, I’m an arrogant, cocky sort of guy. I’m not one of those assholes who go around being arrogant and cocky without realizing it. I know I’m arrogant and cocky. And, what’s more, women love it. No clue why. Maybe they just like my body and so let the rest slip. But I don’t think that’s it. I think it’s got more to do with me being so different from the needy, oh-so-gentle guys they usually come into contact with.
So I swagger up to the counter as the boys find a table.
“Afternoon, beautiful,” I grin.
She nods shortly, not giving anything away.
“Good afternoon, sir,” she says, staring down at her notepad. “What can I get for you?”
“How about a kiss?” I smile.
She doesn’t laugh, but her lips, set in a stern line, twitch, as though she wants to smile but forces herself not to. “I’m afraid we don’t sell those,” she says. “Can I help you with something else.”
I give her my order, coffees and cake and cokes, and then, on a sudden burst of inspiration, I reach into my jacket pocket. I have two-hundred dollars in cash from overtime. Perfect. I take it out and slide it along the counter, smiling all the while.
“What’s this?” Darla says, eyeing the envelope.
“That’s a tip, gorgeous. Maybe use it to buy some sexier clothes. Maybe some makeup. You know, make an effort.”
I say this in my jokey voice. It’s meant to come off as cocky, charming, but I see it fall flat on her face. Finally, she turns her eyes up at me. Her bright green eyes. They’re not so bright anymore. They’re as cold and hard as steel.
Chapter Three
Darla
Is he kidding me? My heartbeat was rapid before; now it’s positively racing. It bounces around my chest as though searching for an exit, bumping up against my ribcage and then rebounding. Is this a joke? Maybe it is a joke. Maybe he is trying to be funny.
But the truth is, if every person has at least one Sore Spot, a spot so sore you capitalize it in your mind, this is my Sore Spot. I had a boyfriend, once, called Charles (pretentious ass wouldn’t let you call him Charley) who criticized my appearance almost endlessly. My foundation was too dark, too light, I was wearing too much or too little eyeliner, my body was too thin, too childish, but then I was too fat. The straw that broke this camel’s too-thin too-fat too-pale too-dark back was when Charley (let’s see him stop me now) flirted with Tracey right in front of me.
I broke it off with him, but the damage had been done. My self-esteem, never my strongest feature, took a hard, brutal hit and now I’m in a constant state of near-paranoia when it comes to my appearance.
I look down at the envelope, which is actually stuffed with cash and labelled conveniently with $200, and then I turn away from it and look up into his face. He must see something in my eyes; his cocky smile falters, but only for a moment. It’s like a shield being lowered—and then lifted again. The smile returns.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see his friends watching. I know one. Marco Rodriquez. Bronze-skinned with dark opal eyes and the whitest teeth I’ve ever seen, a self-proclaimed ladies’ man who hits on everybody indiscriminately. He’s loving this, if his snow-white smirk is anything to go by.
Slowly, I push the envelope back across the counter, never letting my gaze leave his. “Why don’t you take this back?” I say, hoping my anxiety doesn’t show on my face. “I think it’d be better spent buying you some flirting lessons.”
Brody’s eyes widen and he looks at me as though seeing me for the first time. From his friends’ table, everybody laughs. Marco claps his hands. “She got you, my man! She got you good!”
Brody watches me for a long moment, and then shrugs as though it’s no big deal.
He turns on his heels and swaggers away, thumping Marco in the arm and dropping into his seat like a man without a care in the world.
I go about making their order, setting out the cakes and pouring the coffees, and I tell myself that I wasn’t, in the least, excited by that exchange.
But one thought keeps recurring, no matter how much I fight it: At least he’s actually seeing me now.
Chapter Four
Brody
Many people still think that a fireman’s job is all blaze and glory, charging into crumbling husks of buildings and emerging, triumphant and proud, onto the street to the sound of cheering and clapping.
I talk to people all the time who ask me how many fires I’ve defeated (their word) today. I always laugh. Sometimes it’s one, sometimes two, but often it’s zero. Well, then, they ask me, arching their eyebrow as though they’ve caught me in some lie, what do you do? I tell them. We give talks in the community. We promote fire safety. We fill in paper work. And we hang around the station, playing pool and working out, waiting for the siren to ring. And when it’s a fire, sure, we put it out. But if it’s backup for a paramedic that needs help getting someone out of a difficult situation, we do that, too.
Today, the Monday after our trip to the coffee shop, I’m in the gym room, on my back doing the bench-press. Marco sits across from me, squatting. And Jonny, the newest of the guys, a short wide bulldog of a kid with a tuft of red hair and a tattoo of a snake up his right arm, sits on the rowing machine, sweating onto the tiled floor.
“You’ve ruined any chance with that girl, you know,” Marco grins, for about the hundredth time.
“You t
ake some sick pleasure in that, don’t you?” I say, muscles tensing as I push the weights into the bracket and lean up. I take my towel from the floor and wipe at my sweaty face. “It really gives you a hard-on, don’t it, Marco?”
“It was just pathetic to watch,” Marco chuckles. “In you go, all swagger and cocky and cool, and I gotta say, me and the guys were already thinking you had it in the bag. Say what you want about Brody, but he’s got this. That’s what we were thinking, weren’t we, Jonny?”
“Damn straight,” Jonny grunts.
“And then you go and slip her your overtime money like a man trying to pay for sex!”
“I don’t need your advice, Casanova.”
I stand up from the bench and make my way over to the dumbbells. As I pass Marco, I kick him in the leg. He grunts, grinning like a wolf, and just manages to stay on his feet, the weights piled heavy behind his head.
“That’s not funny,” he says. “Could’ve killed me.”
“Then stop grinning at me.”
He laughs.
I pick up the dumbbells and begin curling.
“So why didn’t you want to go to the coffee shop last Friday, my man?” Marco goads. “Gone off coffee and cake all at once? That’s interesting.”