Page 35 of The Burning
Which made me smile. Seeing her, angry or not, shifted my mood drastically. Without the audience of her brother or Mendoza, I felt much more at ease with her—enough to talk to her at least.
“What areyoudoing here?” she asked, her eyes suspicious green slivers.
“Me?” I asked her. “I come here all the time. You clearly don’t,” I teased, looking down at her bare feet.
Her lighter hair color brightened her eyes, and something was different about her face. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and I could see the little pool of freckles on the tip of her nose. I studied her as she looked down at the boots on my feet.
“See?” I said, stomping my foot lightly on the loose dirt.
She looked at me with an expression that was exactly the same as rolling her eyes, without actually moving them. Since it was an outdoor market, the ground of the entire setup was dirt. There was some occasional large gravel, which wouldn’t be fun to walk in with only half an inch of rubber separating your skin from the ground. This time of year especially, the older stalls near the back fence had mud puddles the size of human bodies in front of and next to their tables and signs, even if it hadn’t rained in days.
In general, the ground of the market was filled with dips and holes, random wooden posts, abandoned stalls . . . The place wasn’t in the best shape, but that was part of why I liked it. We had that in common. Both of us were battered to hell.
“What are you doing here?” I asked again, still processing that Karina was actually there.
She finally stopped torturing herself and sat the plants down on the table in front of her.
“Fuck me,” she groaned, wiping the dirt off her palms and onto her tattered gray T-shirt. She shook her arms in front of her body, and I couldn’t stop myself from laughing as she assessed the damage to her skin. Her arms had some cuts, but nothing a little peroxide and a Band-Aid wouldn’t fix.
“Me? What areyoudoing here?” she asked.
I pointed at her. She was in the mood to play games, obviously. “Well, me? I come here every weekend, so I know you don’t. Are you going to take that as my final answer, or ask again? Now, your turn. What are you doing here in flip-flops and shorts?”
She frowned, making her brows move, and I noticed she just looked different. Well rested, maybe?
“So, what, now you’re talking to me?” she snapped.
“I wasn’t not talking to you before,” I lied. She nearly growled at me, and it made me oddly excited. “So, how did you even find this place?”
She shrugged. “I found it on Yelp. And I need some stuff for my house, so I drove out.”
“What are you looking for? I know most of what they have and who can give you the best deal. Did you get your plants from Kathy at the Airstream?”
I knew she had; we were only a few feet away from their sitting area.
Karina shook her head. “I don’t know her name, but the Airstream lady, yeah.”
She shaded her eyes with her hand and the purple paint on her nails caught my eye. She’d clearly been busy over the last few days giving herself a makeover, not that she’d needed one.
“Cool, she’s been here forever. Her husband comes some weekends to help out. Nice guy.”
What I didn’t mention was that Kathy’s husband had gone to Vietnam, and her son was now serving in Afghanistan. Serving in the military happened to be a family affair more often than not, but I didn’t want to remind her of her brother’s enlistment. Not while she wasn’t throwing daggers at me for once.
Karina looked around at everything but me. I tried to do the same. I was in the middle of trying to detach her from my mind, too. I think I had gone most of the morning without thinking about her. Of course, I’d slipped a few times, but hey, no one was perfect. Running into her here of all places—it was wild, it threw me off, and I knew it was better for both of us to get through this awkward, random encounter as quickly as possible. But if I was being honest with myself, seeing her just felt so good. This was the second time in less than a week that we happened to be in the same place at the same time. She felt slightly less distant now than she had at the hospital, and I felt much more relaxed being somewhere familiar to me that wasn’t to her.
“That’s cool,” she replied awkwardly. I nearly forgot that we were talking about Kathy’s husband.
We stood in silence as people walked past with steaming coffee mugs and an older man carried a huge wooden door on his back across the grass. One of us would need to pull the trigger and say goodbye first. I looked over at her to see her staring directly at me. I certainly wasn’t wearing my Sunday best, just casual clothes and my Army boots. She wasn’t, either, but she looked fine as hell. I couldn’t help but continue to stare at her legs, her hips, the sweat gleaming on her neck.
A couple more seconds of silence passed between us. Like the sun and the moon, dancing around until one gives in and tucks away for the night.
I waited, sort of hoping she would start going on about the plants, or she would yell at me for being a dick at the hospital, or her brother’s enlistment. Something. Anything.
I finally broke the tense silence. “Well, nice seeing you. I’ll let you get going, I need to meet a guy about some wood, anyway.” I laughed a little so she would maybe get the “gotta see a man about a dog” reference I was going for.
She smiled at me, but it was vapid. No emotion behind it. A skilled chameleon who wasted her powers by using them against me. I needed to be the one to end the exchange before she had the chance to blow me off.
She cleared her throat and reached to pick the pots up again. “See you around.”
