Page 121 of Fire Fight

Aspen sucked in a shocked breath, and I was grateful I couldn’t see her face. I didn’t know what I’d find there, but with my few previous relationships, when we got to this point where I spilled my darkest secret, they always ran. Like the man I was suddenly reverted into the piece of shit I’d been, and they couldn’t stand to look at me anymore.

I considered it a good sign, at least, that Aspen made no move to get away from me.

She bent to blow on my stomach, drying the peroxide before stepping back. “I don’t think it needs a bandage.”

Then she turned on her heel and retreated into the bedroom.

As we’d done countless times over the course of the last month, I gathered her in my arms and reclined us against the pillows, the top of her head tucking perfectly under my chin as she fit herself into my side.

Like she was made to be there.

“Remember how Lane and I interviewed that Chris guy a while back?”

“Yes.”

“I went to see him again. Lane told me he finally made bail yesterday and was released. The timing was too convenient.”

“And? Was it him?”

“No. Chris…that’s not his style.”

“What happened? How did you…”

She didn’t finish the question, but I knew what she was asking.

“I had an accident when I was fourteen. Finn, West, and I had always been hell-raisers, and it got worse after Dad died. That day, we’d been out in one of the pastures dicking around. I got the dumbass idea to ride my horse by standing on his back. No helmet, no reins, nothing to protect me. I managed to stay up for a while…until my horse got pissed and took off into a nearby copse of trees. Naturally, I fell and shattered my fibula and tibia.”

Reaching for her hand, I bent my knee and lifted my pant leg, pressing her fingertips to the silvery scars crossing the shin of my left leg. The intervening years had smoothed them out considerably, but they were still slightly raised.

“It required a few surgeries and a lot of pins to fix, and I got hooked on painkillers in the process,” I continued flatly, Aspen’s touch giving me the courage to plow ahead. “At first, I really had been taking them for the pain, but after a certain point, I craved the numbness they gave me.”

Aspen laced her fingers with mine, curling our hands together and placing them over my wildly thumping heart. I’d gotten through the hard part and she hadn’t bolted, which settled me in a way that told me this thing between us was forever.

Two months in was surely too soon for such wild thoughts, but it came and stayed nonetheless. We’d walked through fire together, and now, there was no way in hell I’d ever her go without a fight.

From there, the exploits of my teenage years poured out of me. How I ran pills for Chris when he needed an extra hand—and was always paid in the form of whatever drug I was pedaling.I’d tried pretty much everything, and only getting hooked on pills versus cocaine or meth had been a miracle. How I fought people because he asked me to, barely graduated high school because I was too caught up in the thrill and emptiness of my addiction to give a fuck about anything else. How badly I broke my mother’s heart for all those years, and how nothing and no one could pull me out of the spiral until it had almost been too late.

“My addiction was bookended by accidents,” I said. “The one that drove me to drugs, and the one that drove me away.”

“What happened?”

“I was almost seventeen at the time. Chris and I were making a delivery on the outskirts of Boise, and things got out of hand. We made the drop, and he decided to stick around for the party. Got caught up in enemy territory, meaning a rival dealer had claimed that particular area as his. Chris had known, didn’t give a fuck, and hadn’t bothered to clue me in. All hell broke loose. I was high as a kite and wasted off my ass, but Chris made me drive to get us the fuck out of there. And…I crashed. Wrapped his junked-out Honda around a tree.”

I shivered, remembering. Even through the haze of pills and booze from that night and the patina of a memory, I could still feel the blood slicking my hands, the shards of glass cutting into my flesh, my shallow, rattling breaths from my collapsed lung, and the sheer agony of my broken leg—the other one that time.

“That’s why you don’t drink,” she said softly.

“It’s a slippery slope,” I admitted. “Addiction is a deep, dark hole I almost didn’t crawl out of.”

“But you did. How?” She shifted to look up at me, and I searched her face for any sort of disgust or pity.

I found none of it. All that radiated from her expression was understanding and acceptance.

“Chief Madden,” I said, smiling as thoughts of my long-timementor and friend assaulted me. “After that accident, he took me under his wing. Got me help and took me under his wing.”

It hadn’t been easy. Not on me, my family, or Chief himself. I spent the first month of my senior year of high school in rehab, doing double the work to get myself back on track while still hoping to graduate in time. When I got out, I spent any free moment I had at the firehouse with him, learning the tricks of the trade.

“Thanks to Chief, Mama let me apply for the CFD. She hadn’t been keen on the idea of me entering the fire service, not when I’d just come out of a fire of a different sort. But after some long and emotionally draining conversations, she gave in. We all knew it was a long shot. People get selected for the CFD via a lottery, and the chances of my number ever coming up were slim. But we decided the chance was worth it if it meant I could get out of Dusk Valley and away from all the reminders of the things I’d done. If it hadn’t panned out…I probably would’ve left anyway.”