Strings of Fate: The First Loop

CHAPTER 17

The sand was cool beneath me, still damp from the tide that had pulled back an hour ago. My toes were half-buried in it, curling into the grainy softness like they were searching for something to hold on to. The hem of my navy rashguard clung to my waist, still a little wet, salt-stiffened, and faintly scented of ocean and sunlight. Every time the waves crashed and rolled in—then fizzled into foam—I felt a tug in my chest, a strange kind of homesickness for something that never really happened.

That dream in the van.

The one with the boy in the water. The way his laugh echoed across the shore, the way we splashed at each other like kids, like we hadn’t been cracked by anything yet. It was warm, that dream. Gentle. Nothing like the ones I used to have—those haunted, half-colorless memories of shadows and guilt and voices I could never reach in time.

Now, I sat still. The horizon stretched out in front of me, wide and blinding. The sky was a thousand colors bleeding into each other—orange like fire, pink like pressed flower petals, lilac like the inside of twilight. But just above that beauty, a ceiling of heavy clouds loomed dark and low, warning us in silence.

Then I heard the crunch of footsteps behind me. Tim sat beside me with a sigh that sounded like he was trying to exhale something he couldn't name.

“She still didn’t talk to you?” I asked softly, not turning, just keeping my eyes on where the sun met the sea.

“Nope,” he said, and for a second that one word held more ache than a paragraph. “I just hope she understands... how she scares me. She’s bright, B. Too bright. That’s why I’m drawn to her like a moth to a flame. She’ll burn me. But the weird part is, I think I can live with it. I think.”

I turned and looked at him, really looked. His hair messy from the wind, skin tanned unevenly, his expression raw. There was something disarmed in him—like a boy no longer performing the role he had rehearsed too long.

I never thought Tim could be this sentimental. He was always the teasing one, the buffer in the group. The boy who joked when things got heavy. The boy who seemed to always be running from something, or pretending he wasn't.

“She loves you,” I told him, my voice quiet but sure, my eyes drifting back toward the ocean.

He clenched his jaw, lips pressing together as he stared at his bare feet. “I-I don’t want to be the reason she loses her flame.”

I swallowed, thinking carefully. “Do you like her?”

He nodded. A simple movement, but it felt like a confession.

“Then she might not mind dimming her fire a little to share it with you, Tim,” I said. “She’s Inez. We all know how she is.”

I wasn’t even sure if I made sense, but the words tumbled out with an odd kind of certainty, like truth wrapped in metaphor. Maybe that’s what love was. Maybe that’s how it worked.

I’d seen it in my parents. I’d seen my mother’s flame—bright and unafraid—and the way my father always reached for it like it was his guiding star. Maybe love was about sharing the flame, passing it back and forth like a secret between hands. Not snuffing out. Just adjusting the warmth. Just making sure someone had enough fire to carry the other through.

Because what happens when one person’s flame goes out?

The other burns twice as hard.

At least... that’s what I believed. Until I thought of my dad, sitting alone at the dinner table night after night, cooking meals for three out of habit, his smile more hollow now. He still held the candle. Still lit it. But the fire… maybe it had gone out a long time ago. And now all that was left was the smoke rising gently from the wick, curling in the air like memory.