Page 121 of The Friends and Rivals Collection

DEREK

It just motherfucking figures that after the last twenty-four hours I’d draw another shitty hand for the overnight shift

First, we’re dispatched shortly after midnight to a rural area after a house fire. The fire department is already on scene.

We arrive too late, and I feel so goddamn helpless.

A candle left burning caused the fire, and the man is dead.

Next, a motor vehicle collision twenty miles away steals our attention.

Hunter and I turn on the sirens, and when we arrive, the cars are tangled together in a metal mess.

We hightail it to the hospital and arrive in the nick of time, rushing the most critical patient into the ER.

Please let us help this one.

“I hope we got him there fast enough,” I mutter as we head to the van after handing off to the docs and nurses. “I’d like to do some good rather than keep coming up short.”

“I hear you, bro. I couldn’t drive much faster. I’ll say a prayer that it was fast enough.”

But will it be?

That’s the question that hangs over me today.

Is anything enough? Is there anything I could have done differently with Perri?

Anything I could have said the other night to change the course of that wretched conversation?

Our talk was like a plane running out of fuel, sputtering from the sky and crash-landing in a charred heap.

I’ve no clue if there was a different button I could have pressed, a different route I could have taken.

As we continue through the night, I hit replay for the fiftieth time on our talk. But still I have no answer.

With darkness still blanketing the sky, we respond to a call from a well-to-do home. A woman’s boyfriend rings 911, saying he fears she’s having a heart attack. She’s young and healthy. Thirty-six. Jodie’s age. “Most likely a panic attack,” I say as we drive, hoping desperately that’s all it is.

“Definitely. That’s what it usually is,” Hunter says, staying chipper. God knows I need it.

We arrive with the fire department not far behind.

But we don’t stay long.

Because she’s not suffering from anxiety. This is the real deal.

We rush her to the ER, and I hope and I pray and I plead for someone, anyone to look out for this woman who could be my sister.

She’s too young to go. Too healthy—on the surface—to be heading to meet her maker.

Anxiety claws at me for the next few hours, and I do my best to keep it at bay as we tend to other calls. I need blinders something fierce today.

“You okay?” Hunter asks at one point.

“Just thinking about my sister. She’s the same age.”

He sighs sympathetically then claps my shoulder. “She’s in the best hands possible, that woman.”

I nod, trying to believe she’ll come through. “She is.”

“Let’s just keep doing what we can, okay?”

“Definitely.”

But an hour later, when we’re back at the hospital, dropping off a skinny dude who had a bad fall at work, one of the nurses tells me the thirty-six-year-old didn’t make it.

My throat squeezes. “For real?”

“Yes.”

I wince, wishing fervently she was delivering some other sentence. This cruel news winds its way through me, tightening every muscle, squeezing every organ.

I tell myself she’s just a patient, just a call, just another day.

But this one hits closer to home. Maybe I’m raw already from last night with Perri. Or maybe it’s the pile-on. Whatever it is, my heart is leaden. My feet are heavy, and all I have left to hope for is that the car accident patients from earlier are okay.

The nurse says they’re stable, and that gives me some glimmer that I’m not a grim reaper, spending a day collecting souls.

When I find Hunter at the ambulance, his face is tense. “What’s the 411?”

“She’s gone,” I say, gritting my teeth.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Me too.”

Even though she has nothing to do with me. I don’t know her from Eve. But this loss is shoving its way under my ribs and setting up camp in my chest.

Battered and bruised when I leave at the end of the shift, I mutter a toneless good night to Hunter before I hop on my bike and head home as the sun rises.

Only, I don’t want to go home. It doesn’t feel like home anymore.

All I want is to see Perri, talk to her, tell her about my day, and then get lost in each other and forget what went down for me and what went down for her. Just be there for each other through the shitty times.

Curl up with my woman, get close to her, and reconnect to the living, to everything that makes us keep going in these jobs that can drain us dry.

I want to smell her hair, kiss her skin, and feel like she’s my reason.

But there’s a big fat problem. She’s not my woman. She doesn’t want me to be her man.

I drive past her house. It’s hers, not mine. I head to see Jodie.