Ember Boys - Gregory Ashe Page 0,3

at all. I’d left—without burning the hair off his balls, thank you very much—and the next day, he’d sent an apology and marked the job complete. But he kept sending job requests. Always landscaping, like he needed somebody out there raking that rock garden immediately.

The thing was, Tim wasn’t a bad-looking guy. Sleazy, yes, but God, I was past the age where sleazy could hurt me. He had money. He was interested. Maybe, if I asked, he’d let me stay the night, and I’d sleep in a bed for a change.

Emmett would have laughed, of course. He would have said I needed a good lay. He would have said a computer programmer with a fuzzy little goatee might be just the thing. He would have laughed and laughed. Not that I cared what Emmett thought; we were almost fifteen years apart.

Not that the age difference was the real barrier. It could have been five months instead of fifteen years. I’d been his teacher before everything that happened in Wyoming. I’d been responsible for him. And now, here we were, both of us in this tiny town of stone and stucco, where the wind and the fog and the salt tang were constant. Age didn’t matter because some things were never going to happen.

By the time I reached the section of beach I thought of as my own, I was tired. My feet hurt; my right sneaker was coming apart, and cold air seeped through the torn stitching. This stretch of the coast was built with mansions—new money, old construction. Tech giants had taken over from oil and newspaper. But money was money.

I’d stumbled onto this stretch by luck; I’d been coming home, drunk off my ass, and fallen. I went into the thick stand of coyote brush next to the sidewalk, rolled, and banged my chin on cement.

Steps. Hidden by the brush, but in decent condition.

Following the steps, skunked, had been a bad idea, but it had turned out ok. I had made it to the bottom of the cliff, wormed through the branches of a pair of stunted trees, and stumbled out onto sand. The ocean had been roaring in. Somewhere the little dots of light on the water became dots of light in the sky. Every breath felt heavier, fuller, like the air was supercharged with something.

I had come back the next night with the pup tent I’d bought at an REI yard sale. I did the stairs a few more times, humping supplies and gear down to my new spot: a depression in the cliff’s face, not deep enough to be called a cave, where I set up the tent and warmed a can of beans over a driftwood fire. It was like being a hobo during the Dust Bowl. I looked up at the same mansions that I imagined they’d looked at, little globs of light and warmth and money dotting the coast.

Ever since that night, I’d slept on the beach. I took the stairs now, emerging onto the sand with a feeling almost like relief. I was surprised to see a second tent joining mine in the depression; Rosie came sometimes, but not often. As though on cue, she emerged from her tent.

Her hair was cut shorter than mine, and it was the color of a good nail. When she saw me, she raised a hand, but her real attention was on the driftwood fire she was building. She squatted, struck a match, and the sea air snuffed it out. She tried another. And a third. I could have lit it. Once, not that long ago, I could have burned the mansions on either side of us to the ground without taking a step. But the last few months had changed me, affected my powers, although not to the same degree that Emmett had experienced.

On the fifth or seventh match, tinder caught, and Rosie breathed the fire to life. Then she dropped onto her butt and held out her hands. She was wearing Patagonia coveralls, moccasins with a hole in the sole, and a flannel shirt that was the same color as her hair, although I didn’t think it had started that way.

“You got dinner?” she asked as I walked up.

I shook my head.

“I got a couple of wieners, you want some.”

Emmett would have laughed. Emmett would have said something clever.

“I’ll be all right.”

“You have one or two. You’re skinny.”

She crawled into her tent, got an Igloo cooler, and set it next to her on