The Firefighter's Match Read Free

was thinking about it; he could see it in her face. After a long moment, she pulled a marshmallow from the bag and positioned it on the end of her stick with entirely too much precision. “Golden brown,” she said. “No charring, just gooey.”
    She sat down, hugging her knees to her chest as she held the stick over the orange embers.
    “I’m Alex.” The words jumped out of his mouth of their own accord, shocking even him.
    Her eyes flashed up toward him, wide with surprise before they narrowed again. “Alex for real?”
    The question held an inexplicable weight. “Alex for real.” He felt exposed for no reason. He stared at her, wondering if she’d share her own name. Any such wondering was squelched when his marshmallow burst into flames, a tiny black torch burning against the darkening sky.
    “JJ,” she said as he blew it out. The thing was too burned, even for him, but he knew he’d eat it anyway. Alex wondered if he’d ever know what JJ stood for or why such a thing should matter to him at all.
    “You’re not really going to eat that, are you?” Behind her scowl was the barest hint of a smile.
    “Blackened. The best kind.” Alex smacked his lips for emphasis as he squished the lavalike confection between the cracker and chocolate. “Savory.” He bit into it, tasting nothing but burned sugar. “And crunchy.”
    JJ assembled hers with the attention of a chef. She ate it just as carefully, in strategic bites, whereas he’d just stuffed the whole thing into this mouth in one gooey-black splurge.
    “You’re a careful person, aren’t you, JJ?”
    She bit another precise corner off with an assessing glance. “You’re not.”
    They went on for hours. Talking about little things—ice cream flavors, whether or not barista coffee was really worth the cost—and big things—why nature calmed the soul, what was going to happen to little places like Gordon Falls, why the high school version of who’d they’d be when they grew up had proved to be nothing close to the truth. The subjects seem to go deeper as the last traces of sunlight faded. Without ever speaking of it, they’d come to some sort of no-detail pact between them. No last names, no careers, none of that stuff. Wonderfully, effortlessly mysterious. A dark, luminescent bubble in the middle of nowhere.
    “Alex,” JJ began, and he found himself wallowing in how she said his name, “why are you here?”
    That could require another six hours of conversation. How do you explain being confounded by success, losing focus when focus was once your stock and trade? Really, what kind of person gets weary of their own supposed genius? Part of him was ready to spill it all, and part of him felt like he’d emptied out half his soul already. “I’m trying to figure out why it doesn’t all fit together anymore and what to do about it.” It was true, but nowhere near the full of it. He was here to figure out if he had to lay down Adventure Gear, the business he’d once loved and now hated. Only he couldn’t tell her that. To speak it out loud would bring that mess here, and he wanted all those problems to stay far away.
    He looked at her, pleased to feel so startlingly close to her despite not even knowing her last name—or even what JJ stood for. “Why are you here?”
    She sighed and looked out over the water. It was now full dark, and a perfect crescent moon cast sparkles on the water where she swished one foot into the river. “Because I don’t feel like I belong anywhere else. Anywhere at all, actually.”
    He laughed softly.
    She scowled. “It’s not so funny, you know.”
    “No, it’s just that I’ve felt like I belong everywhere for so long, that actually sounds nice. I know it’s not—I mean, not for you—but isn’t it crazy how God skews the world for each of us?”
    JJ hugged her knee again and propped her chin up, looking childlike and elegant at the same time. “So you believe in God, huh?”
    Alex leaned back on his elbows