Burning Fire

Tabby was sitting in her bedroom scrolling through her social media feeds when her brother walked by on his way to see his girlfriends. He'd invited them over for some sort of casual get-to-know-each-other party, something Tabby's mother had been quite excited about.

“Stay in your room tonight, dear,” Tabby had been instructed, “your brother and I will be entertaining tonight and it might get a little… hot…”

Of course Tabby knew what that meant, and she would be lying if she didn’t admit that she was a little jealous. Not that she’d ever do anything about it. Yes, her brother was a drop dead hottie, but he was still her brother! Even when he walked past her door, dressed in his Playboy bunny outfit, looking like the type of beefcake on the cover of a Harlequin romance novel, she fought her urges to lust over him. A sister feeling the way she did over her brother was obscene, and her family would be horrified to find out about it.

Too many nights Tabby had lain alone in the dark, listening to the sexual fervour between Tim and their mother, screaming each other’s names, headboard of Tim’s bed pounding away against the wall. Maybe one day Tabby would find a proper relationship like the one they had, not like the perverse one se fantasized about. One day…

She scrolled on her device and noticed an article a friend shared about a woman being arrested. Then another friend shared the article. Then a third. The fifth time the article appeared, Tabby clicked.

Florida Woman Arrested in Crime Ring

The article described an unlikely scenario: a young woman who, through what seemed to Tabby to be an unlucky turn of events, was indicted as the leader of a vast criminal network. Thefts, murders, kidnappings, it had the markings of a Hollywood movie. After police killed her boyfriend, the woman was found possessing evidence that lead to her arrest. On searching her apartment, they found even more evidence linking her to so many more crimes.

As luck would have it, she had dressed that day in the exact clothes that matched the description given by the victim of a robbery that morning. Also, as luck would have it, someone had reported a car that looked like hers in a hit and run that killed three people just a week earlier.

It went on like that for a while. The list of things the woman was accused of was farcical, and yet the police seemed to be taking it seriously. Very seriously. She had only been arrested hours earlier, yet the district attorney had already released a statement that they would be pursuing the maximum sentence possible for such a hardened criminal.

This was too much. Tabby couldn’t just keep this to herself. Tim had just passed by her doorway, maybe she could catch up before he started his party, get his take on things.

She darted into the hallway and in the direction her brother had been headed. Just as he reached the living room, she caught up to him. Holding her tablet out, she spoke.

“Did you see this bullshit?” She said, before she felt it. Staring at her brother, her sexy brother, her incredibly hot brother, Tabby could feel a fire growing inside, one that was familiar, yet so much bigger. The lust she had felt for him had been a match.

This was a forest fire.

And it was for Tim that she burned.