hotel room, maybe the hot tub, so I was surprised when he went into a tiny hardware store to purchase some kindling and a charcoal lighter.
“What’s the point of being on a beach in Oregon if you’re not going to light a bonfire?” he tells me, sticking the cigar in his mouth and putting a lighter up to it. He doesn’t smoke a cigar very often so I can tell he’s in a celebrating mood.
We walk down a short street to the beach. In the early darkness, a few bonfires are already lit up and down the sand.
We don’t have far to walk before we find a couple of logs facing a burned-out pile of charred wood. I light up the area for Dex with my phone as he scrounges around nearby for some smaller pieces of driftwood.
“Are you sure you can light a fire with that?” I ask him, nodding to the wood.
“Driftwood is the driest wood you can find,” he says. “Also, I used to be in the Boy Scouts. I know what I’m doing.”
I laugh. “Oh, you were not.”
He arranges the wood, sticking the kindling in at various intervals, then squirts the charcoal lighter in the middle. The lighter engulfs the wood in an instant with a big hot whoosh.
“Okay, you’re right, I wasn’t in the Boy Scouts,” he says. “But only because they would have never taught you how to do that.”
He stands there and stares at the fire for a minute, and I watch him closely, loving the way he looks in the glow of the flames, his face a mixture of light and shadow. His eyes seem to sit deeper, almost black underneath his dark arched brows, the shadows under his cheekbones more pronounced, his beard looking thicker.
I start wondering what traits of his the baby will get. No doubt they’ll have thick black hair. Will they have his olive, easily tanned skin tone? Or my pale one (the only thing I inherited from my mother)? Considering I’m short and Dex isn’t especially tall, I don’t see any basketball players in our future, but I do hope they get his athletic ability. Will their eyes be blue or brown? Will they get my small nose or Dex’s strong jaw?
Eventually he catches my eye, the flames dancing in his, and gives me a crooked smile as he takes a drag on the cigar, the embers at the end burning red. He sits down on the log beside me, blowing the smoke from the cigar in the other direction, and hands me the bottle of Jack Daniels.
“Just like old times,” he says.
“We’re really going back,” I tell him, unscrewing the cap with a satisfying snap. I raise the bottle to my lips, having the first swig. “Ahh, burns so good.”
I hand it to him, our fingers brushing against each other, and fuck isn’t it so strange that even the slightest touch still has the power to unleash butterflies in my stomach. Though perhaps it’s all the alcohol I’ve already consumed today.
“Speaking of going back,” he says, turning the bottle over in his hands. “Remember when we were up at Seaside, just before the haunted demon school? And we were talking about the future, and where we wanted to end up? Have you given that any more thought?”
“What do you mean?”
He takes a sip and hands me back the bottle. “I mean, we have the money. We’ll do what we can to honor what we promised Harry, but we have the money and we aren’t giving it back. I know we want to put the apartment up for sale, I know we want to move. But where? What do you really see for us? Where do you see us? Does any of that change if we’re going to have a family?”
I rub my lips together, mulling it over for a moment. “It doesn’t change much for me. I like Seattle a lot. I feel a kinship with it.”
“It’s because you’re a grunge girl at heart,” he interjects.
“True. And a weirdo. Which is why I like Portland too, and it will always be my home, but despite what some people think, I think it’s better that I’m further away from my family. I don’t want to be too far, which is why Seattle works so well. But I don’t think I’ll have a chance to keep growing if I lived closer…though now that I say that, I get why Ada is so mad at me.”
“She’s going through shit,”