January Embers Read online

  Chapter 3

  MIKAIYA

  “You seriously cannot believe how many lesbians there are in this town.” Skylar followed that up with laughter as she moseyed from the kitchen into the living room. Behind her, Mikaiya rooted through the pantry, taking stock of what her grandmother already had and what needed to be purchased at the market later that day. “It’s a veritable Lilith Fair, 24/7. I seriously heard Melissa Etheridge playing in the town square. Yes, they have a town square! You’ve gotta come see it!”

  Mikaiya rolled her eyes. She didn’t know who Skylar talked to on the phone, nor did she care. Hearing that was enough to make her retreat back into the pantry with her cell phone. The notetaking app was filled with food they desperately needed now that there was a break in the weather. Ever since coming into town and seeing that car wreck first thing, she had been wary of driving while the rains continued to pour and the wind whipped up the trees into a frenzy. In Portland, she could hop a bus or walk a few blocks in the rain. Here in Paradise Valley, she had to drive if she wanted to avoid getting drenched – or twisting her ankle on the uneven sidewalks.

  All right… so I have an ulterior motive for not wanting to go into town. She didn’t know if she might see Ariana. The thought of bumping into her, anywhere, made her want to hurl.

  “Grandma?” Mikaiya called down the hallway of her grandmother’s ranch house. “Do you still drink Diet Coke?”

  “Does a bear shit in the woods?” came a cracking voice from the master bedroom.

  “Does a bear shit in the woods…” Skylar repeated. “Ha! Love it. Oh, not you, Jeremy. Was talking about Mik’s grandmother. She’s real country.”

  Mikaiya needed to get out of here. Preferably without Skylar on her ass, who was supposed to be looking for a job but instead spent most of her days on her phone. I give her another three months before she’s rushing back to Portland. Sure, Sky was having fun now in a town with nothing but lesbians, but she’d get bored, eventually. Either that, or she’d piss off the wrong people by being Straighty McStraighterton strolling through the town square gawking at the female couples making out beneath the bright blue mountain skies.

  Abby awaited her granddaughter in the bedroom. The old analog TV played Family Matters reruns while Abby futilely attempted to knit a hat. Her wrinkled hands were determined to stay anything but idle while she caught up on her post-stroke bed rest. This was a woman who had grown up on a farm and was used to spending every day of her life being active, both in mind and body. When she wasn’t beating everyone in the daily crossword puzzle race, she was leading hikes down Wolf’s Hill and tending to her vegetable garden. Abby hadn’t moved into town so she could enjoy “town life.” She merely wanted to raise her kids in a place that actually had a school, although Paradise Valley shared a high school with neighboring Roundabout. The high school I went to with Ari…

  Someone saw the look on Mikaiya’s face when she stepped in to talk groceries.

  “About time you’re finally going to the store,” Abby muttered. The pink yarn in her hands refused to bow to her whim. “I thought it would be another dinner of rice and gravy. You didn’t bother with vegetables last night!”

  “I couldn’t find your stores until this morning.”

  “I could’ve told you where they were.”

  “I didn’t want to wake you from your nap.”

  Abby held up her hands in defeat. “Let me take a look at that list. You probably forgot the grass-fed steaks from the butcher’s.”

  Mikaiya sat on the edge of her grandmother’s bed while Abby muttered over the list she deemed unworthy. While Mik loved her grandmother, she could be a real hardass. Just like her son and daughter. Mom and Uncle Jake. There had been no permanent father figure in Mik’s life. Not aside from Uncle Jake, who recruited her working girl hands every school break. He hated Paradise Valley. Enough that he eventually killed himself with a heart attack. Mik’s mother had also died long ago. For most of her adolescence, Grandma Abby and Uncle Jake were her only family. Until Ari came along in high school…

  Uncle Jake had done a good job messing with that, too.

  “By the way,” Mikaiya grumbled, “I ran into Ari the first night here. I thought you told me she was gone.” One of the only ways Mik was coming back to Paradise Valley was if she thought the odds of bumping into her ex were slim to none. There were other people she wasn’t keen on seeing, either, but Ari was Numero Uno on the list.

  Abby snorted before handing the list back to her granddaughter. “She is gone. The Ariana you used to know, anyway.”

  “No kidding.”

  “That little scrawny girl hasn’t been around for several years. Ain’t nobody but her mother remembering her that way.”

  “You know what I meant when I asked, though.”

  “So? You wanted to know if the Ariana Mura you used to date was still around. She ain’t. That Ariana is somebody brand-new to you. Not to anyone else in town, but hey, you haven’t been here since Christmas of 2012.”

  A three day affair. Mikaiya never left the house out of fear of seeing somebody else she knew. “She was really pissed to see me.”

  “She was probably working and you interrupted her! Like you interrupted my knitting time!” Abby shooed her granddaughter out of her room. “Go on, get! I want some Ho-Hos for my afternoon snack, and I know we’re out of those. Take that weird friend of yours, too. She’s so loud on her phone that I have half a mind to knit her one and purl her two.”

  However, Mikaiya had no desire to take Skylar with her to the grocery store. Mik needed time to think for herself. To sort out her feelings about being back in town. Skylar only made her stick out more, because Sky was an out-of-towner who drew attention to herself. Mikaiya needed to start blending in again. Wasn’t like the town had changed that much since she was last there. A few buildings had fresh coats of paint, the old hardware store was now a café, and there was a giant pothole at the end of the Marcotts’ street, but beyond that? Paradise Valley, like most American small towns, didn’t change for a shift in the earth.

  That was for the best when it came to blending in and acting like she knew what she was about. That was for the worst when it came to the people. In her four days since being home, more than one older person had come by the house to exclaim that they remembered when Mik was “just this tall.” Too bad she never recognized these people who seemed to know her when she was still picking her nose. As for the kids that were now adults? Shit, they recognized her too, but she sure as hell didn’t remember them! Maybe moving to a city like Portland had colored her ability to remember people. When a woman was constantly bombarded by strangers’ faces every time she walked down the street, she stopped acknowledging anyone. Including her own friends.

  She hopped in her truck and avoided the giant pothole on her way to the market. Luckily, that was the easiest place in town to stick her head down and avoid eye contact. People looking for a conversation quickly found them in other shoppers. That included people who might recognize her. Like the clerk working the only lane open at that time of day.

  “Mikaiya? Mikaiya Marcott?”

  Mik looked up from her wallet as the clerk scanned the groceries and threw them into the canvas bags someone always carried in her truck. “Uh… yeah, that’s me.”

  “Dang, girl, how long has it been!” Bushy brown hair and a smile as wide as Kansas pinged something in Mik’s faraway memory, but she couldn’t remember who this girl was for the life of her. “I haven’t seen you since ya graduated from high school like… ten years ago!”

  “Yeah, it’s been a while.” Mik cleared her throat after sticking her debit card into the chip reader. Well, that’s another change in this town. Chip readers. Didn’t stop the person in front of her from writing the longest check in history. “Sorry, I don’t remember…” She caught herself the moment she saw the nametag on the girl’s green blouse. “Anem?”

  “Hell, yeah! So you do remember me?” Anem giggled when she saw t
he nametag on her blouse. “Oh. Right.”

  “No, I remember you. We played softball together at Clark High. Outfield, right?”

  “Not as popular as the best shortstop Clark had seen in a dozen years, but yeah! Gee, you haven’t changed a bit, huh? Bet you couldn’t recognize me because I got my teeth fixed.”

  Right. Anem Singer used to get relentlessly teased for her big teeth and bushy hair. The hair was a little more tamed in her adulthood, but the teeth? Huh. Yeah. Straight as arrows. Mikaiya definitely recognized her now. She also recalled that while Anem was one rambunctious little squirt on the high school softball team, she was also nice. Here’s hoping that remained true.

  “You visiting, or…”

  “I’ve moved back in with my grandma a to help her recover,” Mikaiya said.

  “Riiiiight, I heard about that! Tell her get well for me, will ya? She once gave me some fresh veggies from her garden, and I still think about them all the time.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Mikaiya grabbed her bags and high-tailed it out of there before other shoppers realized who she was. Her truck was parked in the back of the lot, however, because she always hated getting so close to the door that pedestrians blocked her way when she tried backing out. It had been a bigger problem in cramped Portland parking lots. Here in Paradise Valley, however, she was more likely to bump into someone way out in the boonies.

  Someone like Ariana Mura.

  There she was, jumping out of her old pickup, dressed in the same jeans and boots from the other night, but now wrapped in a thick black sweatshirt that covered her muscles and showed off the undercut gracing the top of her head. Jesus. I still can’t believe that’s her.. The Ariana Mik dated ten years ago was a slender girl who wore threadbare dresses and kept her dark hair in loose ponytails. She experimented with makeup because, as she liked to say, “I want to know the perfect shade of lipstick for kissin’ you with.” Grownup, EMT Ari looked more like a big, burly sister instead of the sweet little femme Mikaiya used to bring to her uncle’s farm for some privacy.

  Ari must have sensed Mikaiya’s presence, for she stopped halfway across the parking lot and turned to meet her gaze.

  A chill thundered down Mik’s spine, zapping her in the ass and kicking her right in the crotch. Jesus. Mary. Joseph. That was the holy trinity she called upon when she met those ferocious blue eyes from only a few feet away. She’s prettier than I remember. Maybe that wasn’t the right word to think as she watched Ari slowly make her way across the parking lot and into the store, but Mikaiya couldn’t help it. Ariana Mura was still as gorgeous as the last day Mikaiya saw her smiling.

  Man, fuck this town. Mikaiya hopped into her truck and refused to leave her grandmother’s house for the rest of the day.

  Chapter 4

  ARIANA

  Ari popped open a beer and settled into her side of the couch. “C’mon, man, skip all that commentator fluff,” she scoffed before bringing her can to her lips. “I wanna watch the game before I crash.”

  Roommate (and coworker) Brendon hit the fast forward button on the remote. The talking football heads animatedly yucked it up while the couch sank beneath the weight of another person. Both Ariana and Brendon propped their feet up on the coffee table and leaned back with their beers. Cold pizza chilled on paper plates. Ari was so damn tired that she didn’t have the energy to grab a slice of last night’s leftovers. Was it really last night when we grabbed pizza from the parlor? Because it feels like earlier today. Make it stop. Why was Ari so tired, anyway? Not like work was any worse than usual. She responded to her fair share of car wrecks along the hallway – and one fender bender in town that gave a guy whiplash – but most of her shifts had been sitting around waiting for something to come in. When Ariana wasn’t figuring out her schedule for the required training, she was scrolling through Instagram or forcing herself to read that month’s Stephen King Book Club selection. I can’t only read It so many damn times. Clown. Kids. Some weirdly uncomfortable scenes that will be all anyone talks about at the meeting this week. She wasn’t reading it as much as she was giving herself a refresher. It was one of the first King books she read back when she was in her depressive funk, and the one that made her read more until she was convinced to join the book club at the library.

  Mikaiya. That’s why I’m so freakin’ tired all the time.

  How could Ari get any decent sleep when her ex was back in town? Someone might as well put a bullet in her chest and stomp a steel-toed boot into the back of her neck. That’s what it felt like every time she crossed paths with Mik, and it happened more than once in the past week.

  The grocery parking lot. The post office. At the four-way stop on the edge of town. I got there first, but she went on ahead! That had been the last straw. After that, Ariana sequestered herself in the house she shared with two roommates when she didn’t have to be at work. If she and Mik were going to share the same town, she would need a little time to practice her reactions.

  Too bad she didn’t have a hot girlfriend at the moment. One badass enough to make Mik quake in her fancy Doc Martens and realize what a fuckup she was, anyway.

  “You okay over there, Sleeping Beauty?”

  Ariana grabbed her slice of pizza and sighed. She had been staring at Monday Night Football for the past hour, yet not a single play or commercial had registered in her brain. There was only dissociating from one of the worst nights of her life.

  Who knew she had been that traumatized? Ari hadn’t acted like this about her first major breakup since it happened. Was Mikaiya some kind of unwitting trigger? Then again, Ari wasn’t convinced her ex had a soul, so…

  “Sorry,” she said to Brendon. “Thinking about stuff.”

  “Like your ex-ladyfriend being back in town?”

  “How the hell did you hear about that?” Ari snapped.

  “It’s a small town. Word gets around. Everyone knows.”

  Of course they did. Who narked? Was it Greenhill to her wife? Sally Greenhill was the biggest blabbermouth that side of the Willamette River. Then again, it could’ve been anyone. Mik had been out and about, obviously. She had probably bumped into and talked to lots of the townspeople she once knew so well. Who didn’t know about their history? Even newcomers who settled in long enough eventually heard about what “the cute EMT” went through in high school.

  “What really happened, huh?” Brendon asked. He was one of those more recent newcomers. Only three years in Paradise Valley, and he still didn’t know the Ballad of Mikaiya Marcott and Ariana Mura. Then again, this was a guy who often forgot that Ariana once had a ponytail and a closet full of dresses.

  “You’re gonna ask me that and not watch the game, huh?”

  “We’re up twenty points. You think I’m that entranced right now?” Brendon chuckled. “I’d rather hear about your high school drama.”

  “It’s not that funny, honestly.”

  “Geez, sorry.”

  Sighing, Ari put aside her meager dinner and attempted to watch the game. It immediately went to commercial, and it was all she could do to keep from screaming.

  “Fine,” she said, “but if I tell you, you gotta promise to not tell anyone. Ever.”

  “But everyone already knows, right?”

  “There are lots of different versions to the ‘story’ out there, Bren.”

  “Uh huh. So, which one’s your favorite?”

  Favorite? Favorite? Like she could stand to talk about it, let alone entertain the versions where Mikaiya dumped her because of a boy? It’s bad enough everyone talks. They have to insult me while they do it? Of course they did.

  “Mik and I went to high school together.” Clark High School represented both Paradise Valley and neighboring Roundabout. Back then, Ariana’s family lived in Roundabout, so she never had the chance to meet Mikaiya until then. Probably for the best. Considering how hard their chemistry hit once Mik got out of a relationship with another girl and Ariana approached her at school, meeting any younger may have prov
ed detrimental to Ari’s health. “We dated for two years, from the summer before junior year until graduation night. She was my first.”

  Brendon didn’t ask questions, but his raising eyebrows made Ari shake her head. Can’t believe I told him that.

  “Dunno what to tell you. It was typical teen stuff, man.” Going to the only movie theater in town, driving to the beach as soon as Mik got her license, hanging out to do homework and watching every softball game in the county… for a pair of girls who grew up in a school district populated by lesbian moms, it was about as good as it got. The only hang-up was Mikaiya’s uncle, Jake. He was an atypical homophobe in a place that did not cater to them. Whenever Mikaiya spent her summers helping out on the family farm, she was explicitly told to not bring girls over. Yet she did, anyway. Did he think he could keep Mik from seeing her girlfriend for a whole summer, when they were so close, anyway? Yeah, right. Ariana was always sneaking out to the farm to fool around when Uncle Jake wasn’t around. Sometimes she helped out, too. Mik always brushed off the heat hanging above them as if it were nothing. As if Uncle Jake hadn’t already spent a few nights in the county lockup because he assaulted women he didn’t “agree with.” Ariana didn’t have a grand imagination, so when her mind wandered to what Jake might do if he ever caught her on the farm… she didn’t think it was too farfetched.

  I could take him now.

  “Kids in love do dumb stuff, right?” Ari continued. “Well, we were the dumbest. After I had a freak out that she was going off to college and I wasn’t, we decided to get married graduation night. We were going to ditch the lock-up and drive all night to Vegas. You can see how stupid we sounded, because I don’t think you can drive from here to Vegas in one night.”

  “No, you sure can’t, Ari.”

  “Well, graduation day came. We had the pomp and circumstance, but when it came time to meetup to head out of town, she never showed up.” Ari shrugged. “That was it.”