Love in Smoke

by Holly Hall

  “Innocent and unsuspecting?” he asks, raising a brow.

  I ignore the dig. “Just promise me if you end up offing me out here, you’ll do it fast.”

  His sidelong glance makes my stomach do flip-flops. It’s almost becoming a pattern—walks in the woods with Dane stirring up feelings and sensations that life has buried. I underestimate this man daily.

  A trail of worn dirt materializes the further we go, snaking through the red oaks. It appears to be well traveled. We trudge ahead until a looming shape comes into view about midway up one of the trees. The wood is weather-beaten and sun-bleached, the angles too perfect to be formed by nature. It’s a treehouse. Dane’s look of nostalgic awe confirms it as our destination.

  When we reach the base, I deduce that the slats of wood nailed in somewhat even increments up the trunk are a makeshift ladder, but I don’t think I’d trust it to hold anyone over fifty pounds. I take hold of one of the boards and wiggle, but it doesn’t give. That does nothing to reassure me.

  “After you.”

  I look sharply at Dane. “You better have a real ladder in your back pocket or something.”

  He pats the trunk of the tree with familiar fondness. “There’s a perfectly good ladder right here. Trust me, I’ve replaced these boards more times than I can count.”

  “Can you count past three?” That comment earns me a steady, simmering look. Okay, then. Clapping my hands on my hips, I say, “I do not trust these toothpicks to handle all this.”

  Dane scoffs. “If they can handle all this”—he imitates my gesture—“then you’ll be no problem.” He rests his shoulder against the tree, and the look he gives me is daring, provocative. I don’t doubt that at this moment, he could talk me into anything. “You’re looking at my most sacred place. The only place I could be me, in my truest form. You want to know everything?” He juts his chin up toward the tangle of wood and nails that will just have to support me and all my baggage because, with an explanation like that, I’m prepared to climb that matchstick ladder to see what, or who, I find at the top.

  “Trust me,” he urges.

  I wrap my hands around the highest rung I can reach, while at the same time bearing down slowly on another with my foot, but the wood doesn’t budge. So far, so good.

  “Solid as a rock,” Dane says, but I won’t proclaim victory until I’ve made it to the top in one piece.

  I lift my opposite leg higher, alternating grips and steps until I reach the landing, shimmying up through the opening. The room is awash with evening sunlight streaming through windows cut out of each wall, muted shafts dancing over wooden crates and dusty action figures and water-spotted comics. There’s a makeshift bench crafted from a single plank of wood resting atop a few cinderblocks. More boards and cinderblocks create a sort of shelving unit on the opposite wall. As far as treehouses go, this one is impressive. I can see why a boy would rather be up here than on the ground. Hell, I’d probably rather be up here than on the ground most days.

  Something squeezes my foot, and I drag my attention away from the interior to find that Dane’s already summited the ladder, all while holding onto the lantern. Dragging my feet inside, I shift to make room for his breadth. I walk on my knees over to one of the windows and peer out, taking in our surroundings from a squirrel’s point of view. There’s nothing marvelous to command attention amongst the mottled browns and greens of the woods, but it’s peaceful. I’ve learned with age that there’s a beautiful simplicity to peace.

  “That’s it. I have to have a treehouse. But a real one I can actually live in. With a wine-opener. And a retractable ladder so I can keep people out.”

  Dane chuckles softly behind me, and I peer over my shoulder to determine whether he’s being patronizing or not. He’s sitting on the floor, resting his head and back on the wall across from me, elbows propped on his knees. But it’s not his relaxed stature that attracts my attention. He’s looking back at me with eyes filled with a million different things; shadowed thoughts flickering across his irises, the fading light intensifying his expression. Who knew that easygoing Dane could be so . . . pensive? That look sends a wave of electric energy crackling down my spine, spreading from nerve to nerve until, in no time, my entire body feels both warm and alive. Like I have the potential to do anything. It’s a dangerous, intoxicating feeling.

  “What did you used to do up here?” I ask, looking around at all his old things until the rush disperses. There’s a cracked baseball glove, some tattered playing cards, and a few worn ballcaps amidst all the other boyish mementos. What I didn’t notice earlier is that everything seems to have a place. Instead of being spread in careless heaps, everything is arranged in neat stacks, tucked into crates, or up on the shelves. It hardly resembles the no-girls-allowed clubhouses written about in the middle-grade stories.

  “Hmm. What did I not do?” he muses, his eyes unfocused as he thinks back. “This was the site of sleepovers and the base for hide-and-seek. It was where a million games of ‘truth or dare’ and ‘never have I ever’ were played. It was the place to plan the future—where we’d go to college, which baseball teams we would be drafted to . . .” he trails off.

  “Did you do any of those things you planned?” I ask, suspecting I know the answer before he confirms it.

  “No.”

  I lift one shoulder in a shrug. “Just so you know, college is overrated. I went for a semester and a half before finding out it wasn’t for me. It felt like my insides were clawing their way out when I was there. I hated it.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I think I followed what everyone else was doing, what I thought you were ‘supposed to do,’ before realizing that maybe the path everyone else was taking might not have been the right one for me. I enrolled in dental hygiene school and haven’t regretted it since. What works for some doesn’t always work for others.” I trace circles in the dust on the wooden bench, considering my past. So many events I hadn’t accounted for, unexpected relationships formed—Jenson, namely. Can I really say I harbor no regrets about all of those things too? There have been so many diversions from the journey I expected to take through life, but perhaps there was a lesson to learn in all of them. There’s something peaceful about realizing that. Maybe it’s this place. Maybe it’s this man.

  “Maybe that’s what you did—took a detour from the path you thought you were supposed to take. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it,” I say softly.

  “Oh, there was plenty wrong with some of the things I did. And I didn’t just take a detour. I ended up on a dead-end road to nowhere.”

  On the inside, I brace myself. “Why do you think that?”

  He blows out a breath, shrugging like he doesn’t know where to begin, or maybe because he doesn’t want to.

  “You told me before that you have to earn the right to leave. Does that have something to do with it?”

  It doesn’t take a genius to see that he’s conflicted. His struggle is depicted in his pulsating jaw and fidgeting fingers as he debates how much he wants to tell me.

  “Yes. God, how do I say this?” He lets his head fall back against the wall, staring at the ceiling like there’s nothing he’d rather avoid more. It makes the hairs on my arms raise. “Trey has something on me. Something to keep me here.”

  My brows furrow, but I don’t speak. I don’t want to disrupt the fragility of this moment.

  “Something he can use to tie me to a crime I had no involvement in.”

  As if the foreboding pitch of his voice didn’t worry me enough, the finality of his words seems to strike me physically. My blood freezes, moving at a glacial place through my veins. “Something like, what, information? Would that even hold up in court?” I ask.

  He’s withdrawn when he answers. “Evidence. It’s pretty indisputable.”

  Inside, my heart seems to punch my chest wall. I scramble to remember all the seemingly inconsequential details from the crime shows I’ve watched. There’s a lot that g
oes into solving a crime. Innocent until proven guilty, right? “But you didn’t do it. You weren’t there, were you? So what kind of evidence could get you convicted, Dane? Especially after so long?” I’m blabbering. If I thought his other confessions were shocking, I was sorely prepared for this one.

  “It’s a gun, Raven. My gun. Registered to me, with my fingerprints on it,” he says. His answer knocks the wind out of me.

  A gun. But for what, robbery? Murder? I want to know, but at the same time I don’t.

  When I find my voice, I ask, “But how is that possible? Not that I don’t believe you, I’m just having trouble understanding.”

  “Someone had to have used it purposely, knowing that I’d be taking the fall.”

  “Isn’t there a time limit for something like that?”

  “Not for a crime like this.”

  The temperature seems to drop a dozen degrees, and my voice is wracked with desperation when I say, “But it’s safe with Trey, right? He’s your brother.”

  He makes a disgusted sound in the back of his throat. “You don’t know him.”

  I never thought my impression of a person could change so quickly, but just like that, my casual dislike for Trey blossoms into vapid hatred. His smug face appears in my mind, and all I can think of is how satisfying it would be to sink my nails into it. I can’t imagine how demented someone would have to be to hold this above his own brother’s head.

  “How bad is it, Dane?”

  “It’s bad.” There’s a rare flicker of solemn resolve in eyes that have already witnessed so much.

  “So who took the blame if it wasn’t you?”

  “The cops pinned it on someone who was tied to the victim and was spotted in the area that night. I have a feeling that person was involved, but I don’t know who pulled the trigger.”

  So it’s murder, then. The man I’m falling for could be framed for murder. “You could still leave. You could run,” I volunteer meekly.

  Dane shakes his head. “I don’t want to run. And besides, if all this comes to light, I’d have to change my name, my entire identity, everything. Even if I had the resources to do that, what kind of life would that be?”

  It’s difficult to absorb everything I’ve just learned while my mind reels. Is he stuck here? Are all his relationships destined to take place in secrecy, tucked up in childhood treehouses? On secluded trails? “So what are you going to do?”

  His shoulders cave a little. “To explain, I need to go back to the beginning. I never dealt, those days after I lost my mom, but I did other things. Driving, drop offs, meet-ups. When I stopped using and finally got it in my head to get my life together, I told Trey I didn’t want anything else to do with it. I made a few of my own contacts over the years, people who trusted me over my brother, and most of them refused to continue doing business with my family when I dropped out. Trey was so wrapped up in it, even then, that he was pissed. I thought he’d kill me himself. He showed me the gun, used it to threaten me. He told me I could go to prison or we could make a deal. So we made an arrangement, settled on an amount. I’ve been paying him off for a crime I didn’t commit for seven years. It’s the only way he’s left me alone for so long.”

  Nausea rolls through me, and I drop my head between my knees in order to breathe. Part of me suspected he was staying here because he was too scared to leave, because he didn’t want to start over in a town where his name didn’t hold the same weight it does here. I feel sick for that misjudgment, and even sicker that he’s been shackled here, dealing with the consequences of someone else’s malicious decision, for years.

  “So if you’re wondering how I spend my time when I’m not with you, just know that everything I’m doing is to get out. Any way you twist it, it’s still wrong; I’m still affiliated with criminals. But I’m working my ass off to dig myself out of this thing. If I leave, I want to do it straight. No strings attached.”

  I open my eyes, search him out in the growing darkness. “Is there a straight way out of a crooked business?”

  Dane focuses on where he’s picking the calluses on his hands like he’s trying to shed the layers of his past. “I don’t know, but I have to try.”

  Feelings I expected and didn’t—heart-wrenching sympathy and admiration and something that feels a little like lust—swirl together in my mind, distorting everything I thought I knew. I didn’t want to be involved in anything this town had to offer, but now I feel inexorably invested in this man and his story, unable to separate myself without damaging a little of him and a little of me in the process. I feel a sad sense of déjà vu: this is something I can’t make right.

  When my eyes find Dane’s again, he’s studying me. Just watching me process with that determinedly grim expression on his face. Like he knows there’s a possibility I could leave and he wouldn’t blame me if I did. It hurts to see him so bleak.

  “This treehouse is like truth serum, you know. Kind of like your eyes.”

  “My eyes?” he asks.

  “I feel like I can tell you anything when I look into them.”

  “You’ve done a good job deterring me, then. Me and my truth-serum eyes.”

  “It’s been difficult, trust me. But I have nothing more to hide.” He nods slowly in agreement. “Tell me another truth. A nicer truth.”

  He pulls in a breath, and with each second he spends releasing it, his face seems to relax. Relief smooths the creases in his forehead and the grimness in his eyes, and his expression slackens into something much more familiar. “Every second I’ve spent with you feels . . . big. I don’t know if it’s because you’re so different from anyone around here—because you’ve seen so much and somehow chose this place over all the others—but somehow I know the newness will never wear off. I can’t explain it.”

  I look away and bite my lip, suddenly self-conscious. It’s hard for me to see the woman he does when he looks back at me with that latent intensity. The magnitude of the situation begins to settle in—the remote treehouse, the darkness, the fact that there’s a man sitting across from me, silhouetted against the incoming moonlight, that I was only resisting because I thought his history was much too twisted to get involved with. Maybe it is. Maybe I should go running in the opposite direction. Then again, maybe it’s a soul like his that mine’s been craving.

  “Don’t do that.” The gently insistent tone of his voice lures my focus back to him.

  “What?”

  “Hide from me again. After everything I’ve told you, there’s nothing you ever need to be ashamed of. Nothing, Raven.” I scoff, but he’s shaking his head in a way that makes my mouth snap shut. “I’m convinced that every single thing about you is beautiful. Especially your scars. So don’t be ashamed of them.”

  I feel my bones dissolve, melting into gelatin. Ever since I moved here, it seems like all I’ve done is hide. I’m sure it began long before that, when I lost my baby girl and it seemed like everybody in the world was gauging my grief and judging my anguish. Then, after, with my and Jenson’s troubles. It seemed easier to conceal who I was instead of allowing people to see the person all my life experiences have culminated into. I never knew the weight of the disguise I was wearing until Dane somehow convinced me to take it off.

  I look at him timidly, unsure if I can withstand much more. He raises his chin and says, “There is something undeniably sexy about someone who’s experienced so much and still finds a reason to smile on the other side.”

  With that, what little remains of the carefully-constructed defenses around my heart shatters. For once, I let them fall. I drop from the low bench onto my knees, walking my way over to him. And he’s ready. His legs part, and he opens his arms, intercepting me as I drag each of my knees over his legs to straddle his hips. When our lips finally meet again, it’s like taking a long drink of water after a journey through the desert. This kiss is sustaining, fulfilling, electrifying. His stubble crackles beneath my hands as I drag them over his jaw and into his hair, smooth as silk thro
ugh my fingers.

  When he cups my backside roughly against him, I instinctively tighten my grip on his hair and he groans into my mouth. That primal noise sparks the need in me, amplifying the intensity. Our kiss tiptoes the line between passionate and desperate, sometimes crossing it entirely. Tongues intertwine—tasting, sucking. I’ve never experienced anything like this. It’s like watching the meeting of two storm systems; a collision of opposing forces that cannot be restrained. It’s infectious, and I match his haste move for move. We’re as close as we can get and yet, if you fused our skin, bound our cells and bones, I’m still not sure it would feel close enough.

  Before I can prepare, he’s up on his knees, holding me against him, then he’s laying me back on the floor of the treehouse and suspended above me. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so frenzied, so hyper-aware of the hands beneath my shirt, stroking my sides and my belly and my breasts; the sucks beneath my ear that send daggers of desire firing through me; the key to his undoing pressed against me, between my legs. I arch up to meet him and I’m pleased when he responds, rolling his hips.

  When I reach between us and find the button of his jeans, he stills, and the sudden cease in motion makes me pause. He hooks a finger into the scoop-neck of my shirt and drags it down, exposing my collarbone to his lips. Murmuring against my skin, he says, “I don’t know if you want to do this here.”

  I glance down, meeting his darkened eyes, convinced I’ve never been so sure of anything when I respond, “I don’t want to wait.” I fist my hands in his shirt, as far down as I can reach, inching it up and over his head.

  “Neither do I,” he says, and our lips crash together again. I lean up so he can take off my shirt, comforted by the fact that it’s so dark. Still, he pauses as if to drink me in, then runs his lips from the hollow of my throat down between my breasts to the soft, responsive skin of my belly. Peeling the waistband of my jeans down, he kisses from one hip bone to the other, and my breath catches. It’s been a long time since I’ve been intimate with anyone, and his proximity to the place I’m most self-conscious about makes me uneasy.