Burned

Chapter 17—Explosions



“STOP BEING DIFFICULT and just keep your eyes closed,” Collin laughs in my ear as he holds his hands over my eyes, walking behind me as he guides me through his house.
I wanted a tour of his four-bedroom ranch, but he covered my eyes as soon as he opened the door to me, telling me only that he had a surprise.
After what happened on the phone last night, I fully expected to be overcome with mortification the minute I laid eyes on Collin. I’m willing to admit that I’ve thought about anal sex many times over the years. Jordan even broached the topic once, trying to convince me to spice up our sex life. The thing is, there’s an incredible amount of trust involved in the act, and I never trusted my husband enough to guide us through it. If how fast I came and how loudly I moaned last night at the very mention of him taking my ass are any indication, I have no such misgivings about Collin. As a matter of fact, it’s all I’ve been able to think about since the moment he smiled down at me at the front door.
I hear the swoosh of a sliding glass door and I feel the grass beneath my feet as he leads me into what must be his back yard.
He comes to a stop, turning me around as he removes his hands from my eyes. When I start to open them, he quickly scolds me.
“Nope, keep them closed.”
I huff and cross my arms in front of me. “I hate surprises.”
“Yes, you’ve mentioned that three times already. Stop being a brat,” he chuckles.
I hear him rustling around with something and the slide of what sounds like plastic against concrete.
“Okay, open your eyes.”
I blink them open and see him squatting down on his patio next to a large, blue plastic tote.
Looking between him and the tote in confusion, he jerks his chin towards the covered box. “Go ahead. Open it.”
With a sigh, I bend down and lift the lid. When I see what’s inside, my hands start to shake and my heart thumps erratically inside my chest.
This can’t be what I think it is.
Swallowing thickly, I slowly reach my hand into the tote and wrap it around a folded piece of Japanese hemp paper and pull it out, holding my breath as I unfold the poster-size piece of paper and lift it up in front of me. My eyes fill with tears as I look at the gunpowder design I created the day Collin and I met in my parent’s backyard. It’s one that I had been working on for weeks and it had never come out right until that very moment. I gaze at my rendition of a Japanese pagoda in a garden, completely caught up in the past.
Shaking off my memories without a word, I set the paper down on the concrete and begin pulling out page after page of hemp paper filled with every single design I created over the two years Collin and I were together. They are the exact same ones he wallpapered his old bedroom with, the ones I always assumed he trashed after he broke up with me. I never thought I’d see them again or feel this incredible sense of longing until right this moment. My fingers itch with the need to play in a pile of black powder and my heart swells with the notion that Collin kept my work for all these years.
“I can’t believe you kept these,” I whisper as a tear rolls down my cheek when I get to the bottom of the tote and pull out the one that I was most proud of. It was a silhouette of Collin standing in front of the town fire station like he’d done so many times when we were together.
“Of course I kept them,” he says, standing up in front of me. “They’re brilliant and I always expected to see ones just like them hanging in a gallery one day.”
I swallow down the embarrassment I feel over never mustering the strength to follow through with my dreams like he did. When we broke up, it was just easier to push them aside. Every time I looked at the pile of hemp paper and the bucket of gunpowder my parents stored in their garage for me, it reminded me of him and I could never bring myself to create another one. A few years after Jordan and I got married, my parents brought over a truckload of my old things when they cleaned out their garage. When Jordan asked about my art supplies and I tried to explain to him how it all worked, his eyes glazed over in boredom. A week later, he had thrown everything away because it was taking up too much space in our garage.
“Why didn’t you do it, Lee? Why didn’t you go to art school and pursue this?”
He’s asked me a few times about my art during the phone conversations we’ve had, but I always changed the subject. I wasn’t ready to look that deeply inside of myself and tell him how much of a coward I was back then. I also didn’t want him to feel bad that he was one of the reasons I let that dream fade away.
“Because some jerk broke my heart when I was seventeen,” I joke.
Collin stands up and takes the last piece of paper out of my hands and lets it flutter back down inside the tote. “That guy was a total a*shole and had no idea what he was letting go. But that shouldn’t have had any bearing on your dreams.”
He rests his hands on my hips and I place my palms against his chest. “Well, it kind of did. You were my fire, Collin. I lost the desire to play with it when you left.”
He closes his eyes and sighs and I can tell he’s going to start blaming himself. He needs to know that there were so many other factors that contributed to my not pursing a career in art.
“I took a few art classes in college and quickly realized that my unusual skill would never pay the bills as an adult. When I took an internship at a marketing firm, I really enjoyed the work. Not as much as art, but enough. I switched majors and when I graduated, I was offered a good job with the firm in town as a marketing manager. Jordan and I were already living together by then and the bills were starting to pile up. It was good money and I couldn’t turn that down regardless of the fact that I knew I wanted to be doing something else.”
Collin shakes his head sadly. “You were so talented, Finnley. Didn’t Jordan see that? Didn’t he encourage you to do what you’d always dreamed of doing?”
“I tried to talk to him about it a few times, but he wasn’t really interested in my work. He was too busy trying to become an artist himself. He always told me that he wanted one of us to have steady employment and when he was established in his own tattoo shop, it would be my turn. Since his dream never came true, he probably thought mine shouldn’t either. Now that I look back on it, I think he was jealous. He’d heard my parents mention how talented I was several times and I don’t think he wanted to compete with me.”
Collin pulls me into his body and wraps his arms around my waist, holding me tight.
“I would have sacrificed everything to make your dreams come true, Lee,” he tells me softly.
Another tear slides down my cheek as I rest my head against his chest, so overcome with emotion that I can’t find the words to tell him how much it all means to me.
With one last tight squeeze, Collin steps back and smiles down at me. “Don’t be mad, but I have one other surprise. Although, after what you just told me, you might not like it very much.”
Before I can tell him that I don’t need anything else from him, he grasps my shoulders and turns me around to face the backyard.
When I see the set-up at the back of his property line, my hand flies to my mouth and I let out a gasp.
There in the grass is a large sheet of blank hemp paper, held down by rocks at each corner and a few scattered through the middle. Next to the paper is the largest bucket of gunpowder I’ve ever seen.
“Watching you work on one of your designs was always the most amazing thing to witness,” he speaks softly behind me. “You’d get this fierce look of concentration on your face and everything else around you would disappear. Considering my current profession and the way I was so obsessed with fire back then, you would think lighting the fuse and watching the explosion would have been the best part. You had so much talent, Finnley. It should never, ever have been stifled.”
I look back over my shoulder at him and he uses his thumb to wipe away my tears. “Will you make something for me? I want a new Finnley Morgan original to hang in my living room.”
I shake my head at him and turn back around to face him. “What am I going to do with you, Collin McDaniels? You make me want things I haven’t thought about in years. You make me dream things I never thought possible.”
He shrugs and uses the tips of his fingers to brush my bangs out of my eyes. “It’s never too late to live your dreams. You just have to want them enough to make them come true.”
Collin takes my hand and pulls me to the edge of his yard, lifting the top off of the gunpowder and sliding the bucket closer to me before silently moving away to give me time to myself. I can feel him watching me from the other side of the yard as an image immediately takes hold in my mind and I can picture exactly what I need to do to make it come to life.
Slipping off my shoes, I sink down into the soft grass and dip my hand into the bucket, letting the soft black powder coat my hands and slide through my fingers. Dipping my fingers back inside, I bring out a handful of powder and begin sprinkling it all over the paper, working quickly as I allow the image in my mind to take shape. Art must truly be instinctual, as I feel every single trick I used seventeen years ago come back to me while I run my palms and my fingers through the black powder on the paper so fast that my hands are a blur of movement.
I have no idea how much time has lapsed and I’m too caught up in my vision to care. I move the powder around until the design is exactly how I pictured it in my mind. When I finally finish, I stand up to admire my work, wiping a bead of sweat off my brow with the back of my wrist, careful not to get black powder all over my face.
I’m almost overcome with excitement and pride as I look down at the paper. I sense Collin’s presence and a spark of desire shoots through me when I feel the heat of his body. Collin being directly responsible for the release of the creative juices I’ve kept bottled up for so long is almost enough to make me want to forget about finishing the project and just take him inside the house and strip hip naked.
He hands me a towel and I slowly wipe as much of the powder off of my hands as I can.
“You ready?” he asks as he holds a lighter up in front of him.
It’s possible that he’s more excited about this than I am and I can’t help but smile at his exuberance. I think he might have been lying before when he said watching me work was the best part. He’s like a toddler right now, bouncing back and forth on his feet waiting for me to give him the okay.
I nod my head and laugh at him. “Yep. Let’s do this.”
With remnants of gunpowder still clinging to my hands and splattered across my clothes, I know I need to move as far back as possible. I walk back to the safety of the patio and watch as Collin sets up the fuse that attaches to the paper and gunpowder, holding my breath as he flicks the lighter. When the fuse ignites, he runs across the yard until he’s by my side, grabbing my hand and pulling it up to his chest. He holds my hand in both of his right against his heart as we listen to the ssssssssss of the flame as it flows down the five-foot length of fuse. We both stare with wide, excited eyes as the spark gets closer and closer to the paper until the hissing suddenly stops as the fuse gathers enough energy to ignite all of the gunpowder. Two heartbeats later, a loud pop fills the air and the paper bursts into flames. Within seconds, the fire burns out and all that’s left behind is a cloud of smoke and puffs of powder.
Our heads turn towards each other and I can’t stop the excited grin that lights up my face when I see the same look mirrored in Collin. We take off running, his hand still clutching mine as we race across the yard laughing at how silly we’re both acting.
We stop in front of the hemp paper and wait until the smoke clears. Collin doesn’t say a word as he stares down at the burnt design, each piece revealing itself slowly as the smoke floats away. I start to get a little nervous that maybe it’s not as good as I thought since I’m so out of practice. He lets go of my hand and bends down closer to the paper, his eyes taking in every detail as I watch him.
“Holy shit, Finnley,” he whispers after a few seconds.
I finally turn away from him and look down at my creation. It’s another silhouette of him, this time wearing a fireman’s hat with a rolled up hose slung over one arm and a wall of fire surrounding him.
“This is absolutely f*cking amazing,” he mutters in awe.
Pride rushes through me with his words and my long dormant dream of doing something with my talent becomes forefront in my mind. Staring down at Collin admiring my work, I’m amazed that that it’s even possible to be this happy after everything I’ve been through with Jordan.