Blazed(36)

" 'Good enough'?" He raised his hand when I tore my eyes away from him, showing me that he didn't need the clarification. "If it makes you feel better, you're perfect for me. I wouldn't change a thing."

It did. Regardless of everything else that had happened since our night at The Roses, he pulled me out of the eye of the storm into the swirling winds of the squall that would toss me around like a rag doll until such a time it spat me out and let me crash back to ground disgracefully. I had a feeling that Blaze would be crashing with me.





Twelve





I GROANED, PLEASANTLY stuffed, and fell lax backwards into my seat. The first part of Blaze's working holiday aka 'wildfire season' had passed too quickly, without dramatic incidence and at great penalty to my waist line. A further shopping trip had been necessary and had played out exactly the same way as last time, minus the fraught recollection of scattered wits and scuppered self-imposed trends. Blaze had picked out my second new wardrobe as he had the first, compensating for my lack of fashion sense, and dressed me almost every day in a way that made me look quite the model's glamorous girlfriend. It was a miraculous transformation I only ever could have dreamed of, coupled with the comfortable adjustment to what some might have called a fairly average life.

The warm fuzz of wine I really should not have been drinking in my lunch break made the man who sat across the table from me in the inconspicuous Italian bistro almost glow incandescently. He looked mighty fine in a fitted dress shirt and smart-casual pinstripe trousers he'd donned purposely to drive me crazy. And as ever, he was wolfing down food like it had gone out of fashion, barely pausing for breath to notice me contemplating him, one finger running in circles around the haloed rim of my wine glass.

"You're such a voracious eater." He swallowed his mouthful before grinning at me, eyes flaring with recalled scenes of eating something that didn't appear on the bistros menu. The heat behind his look forced that familiar blush to my cheeks, which made him grin wider.

"Food is a passion of mine that comes second only to you, Emmeline, though the line where you end and food begins often becomes blurred."

"I'd noticed." I coughed through the lump that knotted in my chest every time he gave me that molten glare. I'd learned to stop apologising after being told repeatedly from multiple directions that I was reading it wrong. When I saw it now, it seemed almost like he forced himself to soften for my benefit. Whatever thought came with the look, I knew he was reigning himself in.

This lunch date had been one of many over the past two weeks and was rapidly becoming a hot commodity. With Hunter still incommunicado and sulking, it had been easy to push him to the back of my mind and focus on the one remaining man in my life. Being 'with' Blaze was a surprisingly easy pill to swallow, made easier by the fact he had his own plans some evenings to give me the breathing space I still sorely needed to fend off the feeling of suffocation.

That didn't stop him messaging me through the separation though. With free time in the week such a rarity, he wore himself ragged trying to catch up with absent friends and entertain me all at once until I told him to relax. Coming from one of the most highly strung bachelorettes in London, he knew that it wasn't an order to be sniffed at. We had a finite amount of time together, even if it was just weekends most of the time, and I needed him fighting fit. I made unfair demands on his body as he did mine, and feeling what I did for him could be draining at times. I didn't know if that much was mutual, but I knew that I was falling deeper in love with him with each passing day.

I was at least at peace with being a part time lover. Full time was probably too much. Still, this wasn't quite enough.

"Stay with me tonight. Properly." I spoke so quietly it took Blaze seconds to decide if he'd heard me properly. Leaning over to pull my glasses down my nose, his mouth twisted ruefully as he checked for signs of deception or narcotic euphoria.

"Fuck my life." He sagged back in his seat and regarded me with interest, confusion, and that twang of hunger that always graced his emerald irises when I was in his line of sight. "You're my Big Bang, Emmeline."

"Explain."

"Well from the moment we met, you were a statistical anomaly. The conditions had to be perfect, a once in a lifetime experience." He tried to frown at the amusement I took in his flowered up compliments but couldn't. Making me smile was a supplementary third on his list of great passions.

As ever, I was riveted by the way he could turn the simplest of comments into a complex, poetic metaphor that left me drooling slightly from the mass exertion of my brain cells. "So how is that like the Big Bang?"

"You created a handful of little orbs of opportunity and spread them so sporadically through the universe that it takes a lifetime to travel between them, and then complicated it by sticking bloody great fireballs in the middle of them. Shrink it down to our particular solar system and how long is it before the sun expands and starts burning up planets? How many of those opportune sparkles does it destroy before it fizzles out completely?"

I rocked back onto the hind legs of my chair. "Kinda sounds like you're saying my universe revolves around you there, sport."

"Just this particular section." He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, which he'd left un-styled. It was almost too long, starting to cover his eyes and taking the 'business' edge from a casually urbane look. He'd almost definitely gotten more scrumptious since we'd met, but I tried not to put credence to his previous beauty theory on this occasion. "What I'm really saying is I have plans tonight but don't know when you're going to let your guard drop enough to extend that invitation again. Remember how long it took CERN to recreate the Big Bang? Maybe I should have called you my Higgs Boson..."

I forced an accepting smile despite being disappointed by the rebuff. No matter how nicely he'd tried to break the news, it had taken me a long time to get to a point where I was ready to wake up next to him, confident that I wouldn't go arctic the next morning.

Our time of 'normality' had come with a mess of last minute dashes and close calls relying heavily on my tendency to sleep through alarms. The nights we drank too much together saw him passing out next to me when I'd drifted into a peaceful post-coital slumber, springing up like a jack-in-the-box at the sound of the first of my five alarms and ready to dazzle and conquer. He was much more reliable than me like that, ready to spring into action as soon as his eyes opened while I preferred to hit the snooze button a handful of times and bury my head under a pillow.

When he had plans or a job the next day, he stuck to the soft drinks and left for home to catch a few hours sleep as soon as my eyes closed.

The signs that he was starting to flag manifested in the reddening schleras of his eyes and the yawns he tried to stifle to save me the guilt. I had to be costing him work and his patience had to be waning. Sometimes I woke up not long after he'd left and the bed would still be warm where he'd lain not long before, the sheets crumpled underneath the place I suspected he'd taken a moment to watch me sleep. Every time I rolled over into the space he'd left in a bed that had only been touched by us, I felt that emptiness reflected in the irrational stab of disappointment that he hadn't tried to challenge me by staying anyway, despite my vehement insistence that he needed to leave.

I was ready. I wanted the morning sex and coffee experience with him— every day if I could. I wanted him to bully me into staying awake and share my morning shower, dressing me for work and then mentally undressing me as we ate breakfast together. Seeing him every day wasn't enough. Not taking someone else home on the nights he was out, holding onto the tantalising soreness he'd driven into me before he'd left, wasn't enough of a sacrifice for me. I wanted to give him everything.

Christ. I wanted the full package I couldn't have, but took some comfort in knowing that he wanted it too.

Still, I respected that he had plans so I acquiesced. "It's an open invitation, Blaze. It doesn't have an expiry date." His face flooded with relief and he swept his brow with a light-hearted 'phew' to inject a little humour into what teetered on the brink of becoming a serious moment. He really was humbled that I'd made the offer at all and it was plain on his face for all to see in the softness that hit his eyes like I'd lifted a weight crushing his foot— not crippling but hardly bearable.

Righting myself on the chair, I picked up my fork to shove at my pasta. I really wasn't hungry anymore, but I needed something to distract me from the urge to pry. Fuck it. I wanted to know what was so important that it was stopping him from doing something he'd been gunning after for weeks. "So... are your plans important?"

Blaze picked up his own fork and began to dig back into his meal, smirking as he speared a ravioli parcel. He knew exactly what I was doing. "Imperative." He winked conspiratorially and tortured me with the time it took to chew and swallow his mouthful before he offered any elaboration. "I'm heading out to Birmingham as soon as you're back at work."