Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (easy readers .TXT) 📕

if he’d feasted. To lay open the fragile membrane of each and every cell in his body and draw in all light, all sound, all substance—but not to overlook the dark, quiet emptiness between the stars.

The days since he had fought with Rachel had been like a fast, but even as he hungered for her, Joe was content with what he had. He stood by his choices: to leave home, to live simply, to spend his inheritance on something worthwhile, even if it might mean losing Rachel for good … and now to dispute the choices she was making. If he wanted to be able to live with himself, he had to risk living without her.

Then, one night, he found himself remembering the Jaguar he’d left back in a lot somewhere east of Belle Haven. He remembered the feel of it, the sound of it, the joy it had brought him. A car. A way to get from one place to another. Rubber and steel and leather. Glass and paint. Plastic. Plastic. But he had loved it and missed it for a long time.

He knew then—and realized that a part of him had always known—what Rachel saw when she looked down from her hill and out over the fields. She saw something coming for her. For the house where her parents had lived, where she had made a place for herself. For the trees and the cats and the houses. For the people she knew and loved so well.

She did not see their destruction, or she would surely be nearer flight. She saw, instead, a kind of foreclosure, a species of theft, and she clung on, she dug in her heels and wrapped her fingers tighter, and bared her teeth like even the gentlest of dogs are known to do when threatened.

She had much more to lose than a car.

As Joe walked across Rachel’s front yard that night, pushing her father’s old bike, Pal trotting alongside, he saw her watching him from the porch.

“I’m sorry,” he said, leaning the bike against the porch rail.

She thought about that for a bit. “That’s good. Because the only way I can take you is whole and entire. I can’t just rope off little sections of you and say, well, that part’s no good, so I won’t touch it. That part’s broken, so I’ll leave it alone.”

Rachel watched Joe mull this over. Had she been able to read his thoughts—to know that he was forgiving each word as it left her mouth and promising her time to grow out of her tyranny—she might well have struck him. Instead, she leaned over the railing and offered him her bottle of beer, which he took. “I don’t mind fighting with you, but if you are truly as disgusted with me as you seemed to be the other night, I want nothing to do with you anymore.” She smoothed her hair behind her ears. “Have you gotten over all that?”

Joe sighed and handed back her bottle, sat down on the porch steps. He watched Pal move silently off into the night. “Oh, I don’t know, Rachel. You made me mad with all that talk about letting the fire run around like a rabid dog. I happen to think it’s going to kill some more people. I hate to think about that, or about you being swallowed up like Ross was. Take me down to his house and look at it with me and tell me you’re not scared stiff. Tell me that, truthfully, and I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

They shared the beer. She sat down next to him on the steps.

“I’m sorry,” he said again after a bit. “I should have remembered that you were patient with me once.”

“I don’t need your patience, Joe,” she said wearily.

“Well, maybe not. You’re a grown woman. You do what you have to do.”

He went inside and came back out with a second beer.

After a while, she said, “How do you like living in a parking lot?”

“It’s better than a stick in the eye.”

She laughed and laid her head against his arm.

“The best part about it is the view,” he said, which made her laugh harder. But when he said, “I can see your butterflies from the window by my bed,” she first looked up, confused, and then became still, remembering.

“What about your statues, out in Ian’s woods?” she said after a bit. “Does Mendelson know about them yet?”

“I don’t think so,” Joe said, drinking his beer, running the bottom of the bottle down his thigh. “I barely spoke to the guy. I wonder why he’d want to buy Ian’s place, what with the fire and everything.”

“He didn’t,” Rachel said. “The government did, from a cousin Ian has, had, out in Wyoming. He didn’t want the place, and the government got to him before any of the rest of us even knew the land was for sale. Now Mendelson’s living out there with a few of his crew. He’s supposed to figure out what happened to Ross’s house and plan what to do about the fire, once and for all. He’s the one who’s going to recommend what happens to this town.” She held her bottle with both hands. “Which scares me more than just about anything else.” Neither of them spoke for a while. Then Rachel said, “It shouldn’t be too hard to sneak out to the woods.”

“Sorry. You lost me.”

“To work on the statues.”

“Oh.” He nodded. “I don’t want to sneak out there,” he said. “And I’m not going anywhere near those hot spots again if I don’t have to.”

Rachel frowned. “Think about it, Joe. It’s probably safer out there in those dead trees than anywhere else around here. The fire’s already eaten up any coal in that spot.”

“I suppose.”

She gave a little grunt of exasperation. “Are you saying you don’t want to go back out there? I thought you loved carving those trees. They’re beautiful!”

“Yes, I think so too. But I can carve things right here.”

“You can’t mean you’re going