Second Hand: A Tucker Springs Novel 2

tiger.”
El wove his way through the backyard and the house. He was done pouting and being determined that Paul was going to go back to women or simply get tired of him. He’d find a way to make it work. He’d wait until Paul was ready to let go of the ring and anything else.
He’d adopt fifty dogs and maybe even a cat, if that’s what it took.
His mother protested when he kissed her goodbye. “You just got here,” she complained. “And Miguel already had to leave because he had to go to a fire.”
“I know, Mami, but I’ll be back tomorrow.” He squeezed her hand and smiled, though it was a little shaky. “Maybe with a handsome young man on my arm.”
His mother smiled broadly and squeezed his hand back. “You do that, Emanuel. You do that.”
He kissed her soundly on the lips. “Te amo, Mami.”
“Te amo, Emanuel,” she whispered back, hugging him tight.
MoJo leaned enthusiastically out the driver’s side window all the way over to Paul’s side of town, and if El could’ve done it while driving, he would have, too. He settled for scratching her behind her ears instead. “Let’s go see if we can find you another daddy, huh, sweetheart?” MoJo barked enthusiastically and wagged her tail.
El’s heart beat hard as he rounded the corner to Paul’s street.
But not half as hard as when he heard the sirens.

chapter 28

“I
    s there supposed to be smoke like that?” Mom asked, pointing.
    I craned my neck around the sun visor she’d lowered and squinted at the horizon just below the mountains, where indeed there was a nasty, black plume of smoke. “I don’t think so. If someone’s burning trash with this drought, they’re going to get one hell of a fine.”
    “That’s an awful lot of smoke to be a trash fire,” Mom observed.
“Maybe the trash fire has already gotten out of hand,” I said, hoping it wasn’t on my block and that if it was, the fire trucks weren’t blocking my house.
But when we turned onto my street, we found out the fire wasn’t just on my block. It was my house.
My house. My house was on fire.
I didn’t remember parking the car, only that one minute I was looking at fire roaring out of my house’s windows, and the next I was on the street, a female firefighter holding me back as I stared, dumbfounded, at my life going up in flames.
Suddenly someone was hugging me hard and sobbing. It was Stacey.
“Oh, Paul.” She buried her face in my shoulder. “Paul, our house!”
“Stacey, why are you here?” I wasn’t even sure she actually was. Everything seemed muted and far away.
“I came over to talk to you, and the house was on fire! Oh, Paul, how could you let this happen?”
She was clinging hard to me, and I didn’t like it. I pushed her off, and before she could reattach, my mother swooped in and drew her away. Thanks, Mom.
I went back to staring at my house, watching it burn.
It felt . . . oddly good.
Really good, actually, and the longer I watched, the better I felt. Things. Just things, El’s voice whispered inside my head. All my things were burning up, and Stacey’s too, everything we had built together, everything that was nothing more than a lie I never needed to have told. That and a couple of pairs of scrubs. And my phone. And my iPod.
Things.
I laughed, quietly, raising my hand to my mouth to hide my smile.
“Paul.”
It was El’s voice again, but this time it wasn’t in my head. It was behind me, and when I turned, there he was, face pale and eyes wide as he ran toward me, his shoes slapping against the water in the street.
“El,” I said, smiling. “You’re here.”
You’re here, and you’re the only thing I really need.
He crushed me to him, holding me like he would never let me go. “You scared me half to death. I thought you were in there. I even called you, but you didn’t pick up your phone.”
“I left it in the house.” I shut my eyes and pulled him closer. “El, I’m so sorry.”
“You should be.” He was shaking. “I thought I’d lost you.”
“Paul?”
We both turned to Stacey, who stood next to my mother with eyes as big as her Detroit Daisy, watching the two of us embrace.
“That’s Stacey,” I told him.
He snorted. “You can so do better.”
I shut my eyes and leaned into him. “I already have.”

    Mom and I went back to El’s place that night. My landlord, who’d heard from the fire department that it had all started because of faulty wiring, looked very pale and kept trying to put us into a nice hotel. But