From the Fire IV Read Free Page A

almost shrugged, and gave her a brave boy’s smile
against the dark.
    His energy had been a façade.  Even as she reached to turn off the
last lights, he faded.  His eyes rolled, his head fell away to one side of the
pillow.
    Sophie’s hand froze over the light switch.  She realized,
horribly, that she was checking from a distance to see if he was dead.  But
there he was, fighting sleep.  He blinked his delirium away, he was staring
right through her.
    “Dark’s all right.  Makes it easier.  But if I promise to call you
‘Sophie’ once or twice, will you?  Will you talk to me a little while,” he
whispered.  Beneath the blanket, his hand patted the side of the dilapidated
mattress.  “Please.”
    She crossed her arms.  She wanted to, she did.  But if he made her
cry she felt as if her entire body would fall apart.
    “… All right.”  She could not look directly at him any longer, not
after all that she had seen in cleansing and caring for him.
    I want to listen, Silas.  And I want to tell you everything.
    There were no social barriers, there was no society.  She was
starved for human contact, for sanity.  Just looking at Silas, a real man, she
could feel the voices of Patrice and her father draining away to somewhere much
deeper inside her.
    She clicked the light off.  She walked in nearer.
    She poised herself carefully at the foot of his bed, folding her
legs so that she was certain not to touch him.
    Just being here, Silas.  No more spider-skin, no more nightmare. 
Just being here, being the miracle you are?  You’ll keep me alive.  I’ll
listen, you just be the wonder that you are.
    “There now, sit you down where you like.  It’s good.  Jenny don’t
lie when she tell you, I won’t bite,” he reassured her.  “Good itches, where I
can feel ‘em.  Pain’s deep but it’s not the only.  You’ve got a sure touch,
Mrs. S.-G.”
    “Sophie.”
    “Right, that’s what I say.  Ain’t no arguing with you, I’m
certain.  You go to medical school, Mrs. S.-G.?”
    “Sophie, or I’m leaving you to sleep.”  She smiled.  “If honesty
appeals to you, I did indeed.  University of Colorado doctorate no less, just
for daddy.  And the slim and meager potential for a sliver of his approval.”
    “Oh.  And?”
    “And I flunked out in my second year and almost got married in a
barefoot wedding up in the Flatirons, just outside of Boulder.  Fell in love
with the mountains, there.  Not so much the man.”
    He smiled.  “Damn.”
    She shrugged, her eyebrows raised a little.  She almost looked at
him, in that moment, flicking her gaze toward his pillow.  But she was feeling
something she had not felt in an eternity.
    What was it?
    She was shy.
    It was fascinating to realize just how quickly her mind could
return to those emotions, to the gestures and expressions required for the most
primal of togetherness and distance and human communication.
    “Almost married to the wrong man, you see,” she said then. 
“Not my Tom.”
    “Oh, Hell.  Tom?  Who was the first guy, then?”  Silas groaned. 
He coughed, almost admitting the edge of laughter.  But his voice would not
have it.  “Two barefoot bad boys in this story already?  Kind of private, isn’t
it?  You ain’t supposed to tell me either of that, till you done caring
for me.”
    She did look him in the eye, then.  She couldn’t help it.  “Shush,
you.  I’m confiding.”
    “Oh, I’m shushed.”  A wave of pain went through him, something he
could not hide.
    Slowly he is dying.  Sophie
restrained herself from touching him once again.  If she relented, showed him
just how certain she was that he was fading, what would that do to his
miraculous fire?
    I cannot let you, Silas.  Don’t leave me.  I cannot let you go.
    “So.”  He forced himself to speak and his voice was broken, yet
stronger all the same.  “So, number one.  This Wrong Man.”  Silas licked his
lips.  “Barefoot Not-Tom.  What