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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

DAYTON

My job had been a little too simple lately. It had been easy to forget it wasn’t just rescuing kittens and showing up to fender-bender accidents or the occasional toaster fire in a kitchen. Sometimes, it was bad. Sometimes, it was shake you to the core, not everything survived bad.

It had been a good, long while since I’d stood under the heavy spray of the station shower, trying to scrub soot from the insides of my ears and the roots of my hair while doing my best not to hear the devastated cries of the victims repeating over and over in my head. But my job wasn’t over after this.

No. I had to get dressed, put on my game face, and check on everyone.

Nash in particular.

He’d been the perfect EMT on the call, of course.

He’d graduated to driving the ambulance, and he’d done it with a focus that many of my people didn’t necessarily have, following close behind us.

On site, he’d taken a command role in a subtle way, and he had an instinct about where people should be, so I’d followed his lead.

We got the fire out, and while not all the injuries were minor, everyone in the townhouse had lived. Even the three cats and two dogs.

But it was a total loss. Everything these people owned was ash and char, and the man in the house wouldn’t walk away unscathed. Nash had been the one to get him on the stretcher after we got him out. He’d been trapped by a fallen beam just outside of what had been his office.

I’d seen Nash dressing the man’s burns before they loaded him into the ambulance, and his recovery was going to be bad—painful, long, and expensive.

And then I’d seen the look in Nash’s eyes: hollow and haunted. He’d managed a smile when I asked if he was okay, and I had believed him when he told me yes. But I also knew it was a half-lie.

He was fine to drive the ambulance back to its bay, which shared a massive concrete parking lot with the fire station. He was fine to use my shower to wash all the soot off himself and get his paperwork finished at one of the dining tables.

He was fine to go back to a cot and lie there for a while after his shift was over.

But he also wasn’t fine.

And it was my job as a battalion chief and as his friend to make sure he didn’t spiral.

Most of the crew were subdued—a couple playing Xbox, some grazing in the kitchen on the pizzas we ordered, a couple dozing in recliners. Nash was nowhere to be found. I poked my head into the bunk room, but it was empty like always after a call like this.

Usually, the crew stuck together. It was easier to process when they were all together, and I thought Nash might enjoy our company, but I wasn’t surprised that he’d gone MIA. And I had a feeling I knew exactly where he was.

The spiral staircase was hard on the knees, but I liked the aesthetic it brought to the station.

I took them two at a time, then let myself onto the massive second-floor deck.

It didn’t take long to spot him, even in the dark.

It was going on five in the morning now, and there was the barest hint of dark cerulean along the horizon where the sun would start to rise.

That tiny bit of glow caught on his form. He was huddled in a thick pullover, the hood tucked up over his hair, curled in on himself on one of the dining chairs at the far end of the deck. He stiffened when I walked over, but he didn’t tell me to fuck off, so I was taking that as a good sign.

My own chair made a horrific squeak as I pulled it away from the table, and I heard the faintest snort as I sat.

“No one ever accused you of grace,” he said, his voice a little hoarse from the smoke. We all wore masks, but the EMTs were often too busy handling victims to grab one.

“Growing up in a Deaf house,” I told him. “I could be as loud as I wanted and no one cared.”

He turned his head slightly in my direction. “Was it hard?”

“Nah. I mean, not in the way you’re asking.

” The dining chairs out here had a light bounce to them, and I found myself rocking.

The motion was self-soothing, which was exactly what I needed right then.

I fought off the urge to fall into a coughing fit and cleared my throat instead.

“I got to know how awful people could be at a pretty young age, and that kind of sucked. But we were normal. My parents had good jobs, we did Disneyland for milestone birthdays, and I spent my formative, rebellious teenage years smoking weed at the beach five miles from my suburban home.”

He laughed. “I get you.” He paused for a beat. “But it was different, right? Like from how other people lived.”

I had a feeling I knew where this was coming from. I knew Tameron had internalized a lot of what he’d seen at my parents’ house. Needing more to live the same way as he used to would mean changing things in his house.

“I didn’t mean to disturb your peace at home.”

He swiveled his chair around and looked at me. “Why do you think you did?”

I laughed. “Because I know this is about Tam.”

His lips twitched and he looked like he wanted to say more, but after a beat, he shook his head. “It took me a while to get him to talk about the dinner. He liked it, by the way. He liked your family. A lot. He’s, ah…you know he’s been hanging out at the garage with Dax?”

Yeah.I knew.Dax hadn’t talked a lot about it, and despite wanting to pin him down and force him to tell me every detail about working with Tameron, I’d been good. “Dax likes him. Says he’s a quick learner.”

“He is. He’s a fuckin’ brilliant guy. All my guys are.” His voice went quiet, and I knew he was dealing with more than just Tameron wanting things to be easier at home. “I don’t like letting people down.”

I leaned over the table and stretched my arm out so I could squeeze his. “Do you think you’ve let any of them down?”

His eyes met mine, and he didn’t answer that question. “You know how hard it is to be the one in control. Whatever goes right is on you. But whatever goes wrong…” He trailed off.

The weight in my chest was heavy and I fought the urge to touch the scar on my stomach.

I knew. I knew how wrong it could go when someone made a bad call.

The scars were one of the many reasons I wanted to become a chief.

I wanted to be better than the one who’d given me an order that had scarred me.

“I thought the weight of being in charge would ease once we were here. Civilians again,” he said, then laughed. “Ridiculous. I mean, I doubt we’ll ever really be civilians again.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. People like my family had been banned from serving—even in times of war, they were always seen as less than.

I’d never done anything except register for the draft at eighteen.

I had a couple of friends who’d been in ROTC in high school, but I had no plans to give myself or my life to an organization that treated the people who raised me like they were second-class.

But getting to know these guys, I understood the nuance now. There was the military system, and then there were the people who served in it. Whatever their reasons, whatever their background, they were people who had suffered.

They were men like Nash—good men who would never be able to fully shake the pain of trauma and loss and would probably always struggle to talk about it.

“Was tonight too much?” I asked.

He looked startled, then laughed. “No. I—ah. I feel like I owe you an apology. It’s still kind of instinct for me to take over.”

I grinned at him and squeezed his arm once more before settling back. “You were good on that call, and I don’t mind being bossed around by EMTs who know what they’re talking about. And you do. I can see you getting into leadership sooner than you think,” I added. “If that’s what you want.”

He looked torn. “It’s a lot of responsibility.”

“It is.”

Silence settled around us again. The sky began to lighten even more on the horizon.

“I want to know I’m doing right by them,” Nash said quietly after a long, long while. “My guys. I want to know that when they leave, they won’t need to come back because I did everything I could to get them to the point they were ready to be on their own.”

“Who’s leaving?” My heart began to thud. Who and where are they going? I wanted to ask. Was it Tameron? Did he want to go back home—wherever he was from?

He took a while to answer. “Bean’s gettin’ married. And Creek wants to move in with Heath. That one stings less. Heath got himself a new place to live just up the street. Doubt those two fuckers will be cookin’ for themselves most nights. But Jarek lives near the Bay. In the city.”

An hour wasn’t an impossible drive, but it was a long distance. I basked in the relief that it was someone besides Tameron. I had no say over him, of course. We weren’t dating. There were no strings, as much as I wouldn’t mind being tied down.

But I wasn’t ready to give up yet on what could be.

“You gonna retire from here when you’re old?” Nash asked, interrupting my thoughts.

I cleared my throat, then finally gave in and let myself cough for a few seconds. My mouth tasted like ash. “Maybe. I don’t know. I like teaching at the gym, and I might want to do that before my joints are too fucked to be good at it anymore.”

He grinned and pushed his hood back, turning his face toward the sky. He took in a deep breath that ended in his own coughing fit, and he swiped his hand over the back of his mouth. “Tastes the same.”

“Mm?”

“The smoke.” He’d been close enough to the fire to get a good lungful, and I remember what that was like—my first call to a fire. The taste didn’t leave my mouth for weeks.

He turned his chair toward me a bit more. “How can I make his life easier? What can I do at home so he…?” He stopped and swallowed back the words he clearly wanted to say. So he doesn’t leave ? “So it’s easier for him?”

I smiled gently. “Why don’t I make you a list?”

His body relaxed and he settled in his chair once more. “Thank you, Chief.”