Burnt

by Lacy Hart

  I got the potatoes ready to put in the oven, figuring on a simple baked potato to go with the steaks, and let the steaks rest on the counter so they could come to room temperature. The spinach would take just a few minutes to heat up, and before I chopped it a bit, I made sure to put my apron on so I wouldn’t get anything on my dress. I quickly chopped up some shallot and parsley as well so I could put them in the pan after the steaks to make a quick butter sauce when they were done. I checked the table and saw it was set nicely. I thought about candles but quickly put them away, thinking that it was too formal. I wanted Travis to feel comfortable, without any pressure.

  I heard a knock on the screen door and practically jumped in the air. I took a deep breath and walked towards the door and saw Travis standing there, smiling.

  I opened the door, and Travis walked past me, still smiling. I got a quick whiff of the manly cologne he was wearing and felt my knees get weak again. I had forgotten how much I missed the smell of a man’s cologne near me, and it had been a long time since I had experienced it.

  I turned to look at Travis, standing in the living room in his long-sleeve shirt and jeans, the stubble on his face, and those amazing emerald eyes looking back at me.

  “Right on time,” I said to him as my mind was suddenly blank of what to say.

  “I got these for you,” Travis said to me, as he handed me the flowers, a beautiful mix of pink roses and white daisies.

  “Oh, daisies. They’re my favorite,” I cooed as I inhaled the sweet aroma of the flowers. “You remembered,” I said fondly.

  “Yes,” he said to me softly. “I remember at school I always used to steal them from the quad and bring them to your dorm room,” he said with a laugh. “The groundskeeper used to chase me every time he saw me.”

  I laughed and went into the kitchen to put the flowers in a vase. I felt Travis’ eyes follow me as I walked past him. I got the vase off the windowsill, put some water in it, and placed the flowers inside. I carried the vase back out to the living room and placed them on the small coffee table I had in front of the couch.

  “Your house looks nice,” Travis commented as he looked around.

  “Thanks,” I told him. “It’s small, just two bedrooms, but it’s perfect for me. Just the right space, a nice front porch, a small yard… that’s all I really need.”

  We stood together in the living room, neither of us saying anything for a moment, just stewing in awkward silence.

  “I can start dinner now if you want,” I said to Travis, “or we could sit and relax for a little bit if you’d like.”

  “Let’s sit for a bit,” Travis answered as he sat down on the couch. I untied the apron in the back and pulled it over my head, leaving me in my white dress.

  “Wow,” Travis said as he stared at me. “You look… you look amazing.”

  I felt proud of myself as I blushed a bit and watched Travis’ eyes travel over me in the dress.

  “Why thank you,” I said as I sat in the lounge chair just to the right of the couch, folding the skirt under me as I sat.

  Travis sat back on the couch and winced a little as he crossed his right leg over his left.

  “Are you okay?” I asked him, concerned.

  “Oh, it’s just my leg,” he said to me. “I was injured during a fire a couple of months ago. I fell through a weak porch, and it tore up my leg pretty good. I was stuck in there, and they had to pull me out.”

  I gave Travis a look of concern. “That sounds terrifying,” I said to him.

  “It was scary,” he told me, looking like he meant it. “It was a bad fire. We lost one of the guys in my company, and the woman who lived in the house with a little girl.”

  “Oh, Travis, that’s terrible,” I replied. “I’m so sorry. Was the little girl okay?”

  He shifted on the couch, seeming uncomfortable with answering. “She was fine. I was able to get her out before anything happened.”

  “Then you’re a hero,” I said with a smile.

  “Hardly,” he told me, recoiling at the thought. “I was just doing my job. If I did it well, I would have saved two more lives.”

  I felt bad for him. “Sometimes… sometimes we can’t save everyone, Travis, no matter how much we want to,” I told him, reaching over and putting my left hand on his right knee.

  Travis looked over at me and nodded. I slowly pulled my hand back and sat back, trying to think of something else to say. We had a lot of topics I wanted to cover, to help clear the air, but I didn’t know where I should begin.

  “Tell me a little about your daughter,” I asked him nervously. I knew this was likely going to open things up, but we had to start somewhere.

  “She’s smart as a whip and twice as sassy,” Travis said with a laugh. “in that respect, she is a lot like her mother was.”

  “Maggie said you raised Abby on your own,” I mentioned. I could feel myself gripping parts of my skirt in my fingers, feeling nervous from all the questions.

  “ I did… I mean I have,” Travis said as he sat forward a little bit. “Are you sure you want to hear about this Sophie?”

  “I do,” I said honestly. “ I want to know what life has been like for you.”

  “Okay,” Travis said as he sighed. “I met Brenda a few months after I started training to become a fireman. She was a waitress at the diner a bunch of us hung out in. She was young like me, barely nineteen. Brenda Flannery was her name. She was a pure Irish girl, through and through – the red hair, green eyes, freckles and the Irish brogue to boot. She had moved from Dublin when she was sixteen. One night we were there late and hung out at the diner all night long talking. One thing led to another, and we ended up back at her place, and, well…”

  I looked down a little bit as he looked at me with his pause.

  “A few weeks later she told me she was pregnant. For a while, she was fine with it. We moved in together, took Lamaze classes, set up space for the baby in our apartment, the whole works. I had just joined the department when Abby was born. I thought Brenda was happy with everything. She was home with the baby while I was working at the department nearby in Ridgefield, but it became apparent that she wasn’t happy with how things were going. She would get frustrated with Abby and the crying, and the feedings and didn’t really know what to do. Neither of us did really. We were just figuring it out as went along. One night when Abby was crying a lot, Brenda called me at the firehouse and told me I needed to come home, that she didn’t know what to do.”

  Travis stood up from the couch and started pacing around.

  “I got Abby to sleep when I got home, but Brenda was still hysterical. She said how she wasn’t ready for this, she wasn’t cut out for having a family. I tried to calm her down, and I thought it had worked. I went down to the coffee shop in the morning to get us some breakfast. I wasn’t gone more than fifteen minutes. When I got back, our neighbor next door was sitting at our kitchen table holding Abby. She said Brenda said she needed to go and asked if she would watch her until I got back. I checked the bedroom, and she had taken most of her clothes and a few things, and all the cash we kept in the lockbox in the closet was gone. I asked some guys on the police force to try to track her down, but no one could ever find her. My guess is she went back to Ireland. She just decided she didn’t want to be tied down anymore.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “That’s terrible.”

  “I thought it was too at first,” Travis said as he looked at me. “I didn’t know how I was going to make it work. A single dad, a fireman, trying to raise a little girl. It wasn’t easy, but I had good people around me at the firehouse, and they all worked with me those first few years to help out – giving me better hours, wives and girlfriends rotating to watch Abby, all kinds of stuff – and as time went on I think I became a pretty good father. Then she had to go and hit puberty, and all hell broke loose.”

  I laughed out loud at this. “You have probably heard this a million times Travis, but the teenage years don’t get any better
I’m afraid.”

  “So I have been told,” Travis told me. He sat back down on the couch again and looked at me. “So tell me something about you,” he asked. “What have you been up to all these years?”

  “Wow,” I said to him, shaking my head. “Nothing nearly as dramatic as you. After,“ I paused, trying to feel for my words, “After I went back to school, I finished up my teaching degree. I had every intention of going somewhere else to teach, somewhere away from here. I came home the summer after my graduation, and my mother was all proud I had my diploma. She asked me what was next and I told her what I wanted, and she wasn’t thrilled about it. She thought I should come back here, give back to my community and stay with her. I didn’t know what to do. I felt guilty about leaving her all by herself. The middle school here was looking for a new eighth-grade teacher, so I applied, and I got the job. You know, a hometown girl and all. Mom was happy, and the job was good. Six months later she tells me she was selling the house to move in with her sister down in Naples. I was stunned. Here I was, having changed my life for her, and now she was leaving. So she left about six months later and here I was teaching. I rented an apartment for a while until I saved up some money to buy a place, and here I am.”

  “Do you regret staying?” Travis asked me.

  I thought about the question for a minute. “I think I did, at first. I know I looked at taking jobs at other places, bigger places. But then I saw how much I was bringing to the students here, and to the community here. I realized I was a big help to families here, just like I had wanted, except it was a small town, and I was happy with it. So I decided to stay, and I’m glad I did.”

  We sat quietly again for another minute before I broke the silence.

  “Should I start dinner?” I asked Travis, as I stood up.

  “Actually, I would rather keep talking if that’s okay with you,” he said to me. “But I could use something to drink.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry Travis; where are my manners?” I walked towards the kitchen. “What would you like? I’ve got lemonade, iced tea, and some beer for you if you want one.”

  “Beer would be great, thanks,” he shouted back to me.

  I opened a bottle of the beer and poured myself a glass of lemonade and brought them back to the living room. I handed Travis the bottle, our hands touching for a moment, and his fingers lingered on mine before he pulled the bottle back.

  “Thanks,” he said as he took a sip and sat back down.

  I took a sip of my lemonade and held it in my hand. I knew at some point the conversation was going to veer towards us, I just wasn’t sure when that would happen.

  Travis put his beer on the coffee table on a coaster there and looked at me.

  “Why did you leave me, Sophie?” he asked with a pained look on his face.

  “Oh, Travis,” I said to him. I could feel a knot forming in my stomach again. “When you told me what you wanted, that you were leaving school and what you wanted to do, part of me was excited about the possibilities, but another part of me was too scared. I didn’t know what my life would be like without school, in a new place, far away from home. I was worried about it, and what would happen if you got to a bigger area and decided I was too “small town” for you anymore. Where would that leave me? I wasn’t ready for that. Then when I talked about it with my mother, she was completely against it. She told me that wasn’t part of the plan and I needed to focus on me. I was too confused, too hurt by the thought that you wanted me to give up all I knew. And I was too afraid to do it. I thought the safest thing was just for me to leave, go back to school and give you the chance to forget about me. It was the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life.”

  “You could have come with me,” Travis said, rising up from the couch. “I would never have abandoned you like you thought I would. You were my world, Sophie. You meant more to me than anything else. And you just tossed me aside without even a goodbye. That was hard to live with.”

  Travis walked over and looked out the front window onto the quiet street. I walked up behind him, feeling a mixture of sadness, but also some anger myself.

  “You could have come after me too you know,” I said to him with a raised voice. “You never once even tried to contact me after that. Not at school, not here, not anywhere. All this time Travis, I have been right here in our hometown, and you never once came looking. What was I supposed to think? In my mind, you were gone.”

  Travis turned to look at me know, and I could see some of his own anger on his face.

  “Me? What about you?” He said with a raised voice. “You’ve been living in the same town with my mother for the last eight years. You know her, know where she is, and you never asked about me either, about where I was or what I was doing. Maybe if I knew…” His voice trailed off.

  “If you knew what Travis?” I nearly yelled.

  He stepped right up in front of me and gripped my upper arms in his hands.

  “If I knew you were here, I would have come back sooner,” he whispered. “ I would have come back to do this.” In a flash, he bent down and gave me a deep kiss. I could feel myself melting into his arms as I resisted just for a second before I threw my arms around his neck and kissed him back.

  The kiss was long, slow and sensual, When we slowly broke from the kiss, my eyes were barely open, looking up into his eyes.

  “I never stopped thinking about you Sophie,” he said to me. “Not for one day. I always figured you met someone else at school, someone perfect for you, and you just moved on. That’s why I never came back to Canon. I couldn’t bear the thought of hearing about you being happy with someone else.”

  I embraced Travis tightly, holding myself against him. I could feel my eyes welling with tears.

  “That’s why I never asked your mother about you,” I said, choking back the tears. “I didn’t want to know that you were doing well, with someone else. The thought broke my heart. There’s never been anyone else, Travis. It’s always been you.”

  Travis broke our embrace and kissed me again, even more passionately than the first one. He put his hands around my waist as he kissed me over and over, and I never wanted that to end. We slowly walked each other over to the couch, where we sat down next to each other and kept kissing. I could feel my body getting warmer with each touch and embrace. Every time his lips touched mine I felt like it was taking my breath away. Travis began to kiss my neck, and I could feel the light stubble on his face rubbing against the nape of my neck. I felt myself lowering myself down onto the couch, so I was laying down, with Travis practically on top of me. My body was pressed against his as he kept kissing my lips, cheeks, and neck. I could also tell that he was clearly aroused himself at this point.

  “Travis,” I whispered breathlessly as he kissed me again, “let’s.. let’s go upstairs.”

  Travis looked up at me and nodded and got up from the couch. He took my hand and helped me up, and I led him up the stairs to my bedroom. I flipped the light on as the sun was practically set now and the dusk could barely light the room on its own. I stood in front of the bed, staring at him, and pulled him closer to me. I began to slowly unbutton his shirt, my hands trembling as I moved from button to button until they were undone. I pushed his shirt open and could feel the ripples of muscle on his chest. He shrugged out of his shirt, and I saw that he was in amazing shape. A smile crept across my face as I placed my hands on his chest and moved them down over his rock-hard stomach, feeling each muscle with my fingers.

  Travis stepped back a bit and took off his boots, and then moved back toward me again. He bent down to kiss me once more, and as he did, my hands unconsciously went towards his belt buckle. I opened his belt and the button on his jeans and began to unzip them. I felt Travis’ hands go to the back of my dress and unzip it easily. I heard and felt the zipper sliding down my back to the top of the skirt part of the dress.

  We separated briefly from each other as I watched Travis tug his jeans down, leaving him in his tight black
boxer briefs. I slid my dress off my left shoulder, then my right, and slowly shimmied the dress down my body until it fell at a pile at my feet, leaving me in my white bra and panties. I thought it would feel odd having a man look at me in this state of undress, but nothing felt weird about this moment.

  “My God, Sophie,” Travis said lightly to me. “You are so beautiful.” Travis walked up to me and kissed me deeply again, letting his tongue mingle into my mouth. I kissed him back deeply, pressing my body as close as I could get to him.

  Travis leaned forward and was on top of me on the bed. Our hands eagerly explored each other’s body, I could feel his hardness pressing tightly against me now in his briefs. He moved his lips from mine, and they went down to the tops of my breasts, kissing each one lightly as he went along. I felt his left hand reach behind me and deftly unclasped the bra, and he gently pulled it over my shoulders until it was off my arms. He tossed it aside and hungrily went back to kissing each breast. Electricity shot through me as he took my left nipple into his mouth, kissing it and gently taking it between his teeth, while his right hand caressed my right breast. I could feel my body getting hotter and hotter with each thing he did to me, and I was grinding my hips against his to get more friction between us.