Read August Burning (Book 2): Survival for Free Online Page B

. Just do without thinking. As long as it meant I didn’t freeze up.”
    “I can’t even imagine you frozen by fear.”
    “One time I was slapped in the face, at lunch. Scrawny little me didn’t do a thing, in front of fifty kids, all staring at me. Gave them something to talk about for a few weeks. Told myself I took the high road. Don’t accelerate the fight. I was being the bigger man.” Jaxton sighed, his tired eyes wrinkling slightly. “That’s bullshit. Cowards don’t strike back. Cowards don’t act.”
    “One slap when you were 14 doesn’t mean a thing.”
    Jaxton kept talking as he moved his pieces around the map. “But that was the problem with our generation. Our parents were obsessed with pacifism, and lawsuits. They were the kids that grew up in the 70s. Don’t. Hit. Back, they said. That’s what I grew up believing.”
    “So you started fighting back…” Adira said expectantly.
    “Of course not! I’d have been sued, or expelled. Kids fought wars with words, dripping with sarcasm and insensitivity. I was never good at that. I would stumble over my words in shame. They were never very sharp. Never very cunning. My instinct, suppressed of course, was to answer physically. Society suppressed my instincts, and I suffered for it.”
    “Your greatest fear. It’s shame?”
    He looked at her, nodding with his green eyes sharp in the soft firelight.
    “That’s why I love this place. This time. Because the rules that forced me to use cunning or hold my fists at my sides are gone. Because I never have to confront that shame. I’m good at doing things with my body. If someone insults me, I hit them.”
    “I don’t understand it. But I love you.”
    Jaxton pressed her hips against the table, sure in that moment he felt as she did. He didn’t say it, though. In the back of his mind, he knew it could change so quickly. He had been here before. But it didn’t matter. Not now.
    He broke off their kiss. “2003 was a great year for music.”
    Adira laughed, confused. “What the hell are you talking about?”
    He held up a finger, and drew something out from under the oaken table.
    “Oh my god! Where did you find that?!” Her fingers explored the vintage boom-box system, marveling at something they wouldn’t have given a second look six months ago. “But we ran out of batteries in August didn’t we?”
    “I found it in one the houses.” He popped open the back. “Yeah, unfortunately you need six of those big batteries.”
    Without another word Jaxton dropped a handful into her hands.
    She counted them. “There’s six here.” He smiled. She stuffed them into the ports eagerly; she hadn’t heard music since before the fall of man. “But it takes CDs!”
    Jaxton drew a single case out of his jacket pocket. “Perhaps you thought I had forgotten what you told me in June, when we both got far too drunk off that $200 whiskey. You told me about that instrumental music you used to listen to, the songs that could almost move you to tears if you let them.”
    “I still think about it, and how much I miss hearing it…but this is it… you found it.”
    He rose and shut the single door. The candles continued to flicker. He sat close to her, so she could feel the heat radiating from him. Aside from that, they didn’t touch, but it was enough. Adira let the volume roll over her, taking her to another time and place entire. Her mind raced and swayed, so long had it been bereft of dreaming. She gorged on it, feeling her heart sweeping as the music played. In an instant she remembered all the times she had been moved by a song, by a film, by a vista, by a touch. She opened her eyes slightly in a final moment of self-consciousness, to peer at Jaxton. His eyes were clamped shut, and he clenched her hand. Overjoyed, she closed her eyes once more. The music had never been more pure, more powerful. Her spine tingled its excited retort, and she felt overjoyed. Never in her whole life, had her own heart been