The Burn Our Houses Down Series: Burn Our Houses Down (#1)

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

        "Hey, get up already!" Xavier yells. He throws his pillow at my face which jerks me awake quicker then his voice. "Come on, I made breakfast," he says before exiting the tent.

        I sit up, feeling the pains and aches march their way across my back. The sun burns my pasty skin as I exit the tent.

        "Fish," he says. "Caught a couple this morning."

        "Please remind me, Xavier. Why didn't you let me bring my air mattress?"

        "Cause that's cheating."

        "No, it's called being able to stand up straight," I respond cracking my back against a tree.

        "False. It's camping cheating," he says. "It's in the camping rule book."

        "Bullshit." We stare each other down until his mouths slips into a smile.

        "All right, well it was in the Boy Scout's system."

        I sit down on a stump across from Xavier and breathe in the smell of pine and burning wood. The birds barely sing in the forest here. I close my eyes and try to hear something, but there’s nothing other than silence. The lack of noise was one of the things I missed after I moved to Queens.

        "Trying to listen to the trees?" Xavier whispers.

        I open my eyes to see his blue gaze studying me. I laugh and feel heat rise to my cheeks. "Not to the trees, but—just listening."

        "I miss this," he says. "The forest, campfires, my best friend."

        I can't stop myself from tensing when he says it. Being his best friend hurts me more than spending the rest of my life sleeping on the tent floor in that sleeping bag.

        "Why did you leave?"

        I look up at him. His eyebrows are angled downward, but not angrily. He really is wondering why I left after college? Why I went two hundred miles deeper into the pit of New York trying to find its heart? "I—" is all I manage to say. I push my bangs out of my face and mess up my hair trying to relieve the tension inside my skull.

        "Cassie always would ask me that," Xavier continues. "And it killed me because I never had an answer."

        Oh come on—throwing the Cassie card in there? That’s cheating. I shake my head and shrug my shoulders. "I needed to be on my own for a while," I say; the bullshit that I could come up with sometimes to make someone believe I was ok.

        "Liar," he mutters and pokes at the fish on the makeshift grill.

        I bite my lower lip and watch the scales slowly peel off the fish's body.