Page 2 of Up In Flames

Oren

Seven Months Later

M y first month at Preston and Sharpe Contracts had been successful, as far as I could tell. Currently, I was being given cases that took a lot of leg work the partners didn’t want to do. Another lawyer at the firm called it busy work. I called it a lifeline.

Without Byron and Rita, my life had a gaping hole in it that had been impossible to fill.

My throat constricted whenever I thought about them, but at least now I could think about them.

For the first couple months after the accident, I spent a lot of time lying down and crying until my head split open and my brains leaked out my ears.

That’s how it made me feel anyway. The concussion I’d suffered was a bitch, and even now I still got the odd headache if I pushed too hard.

The partners knew about the car accident and what it had cost me.

Rita wasn’t supposed to drive and, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t called an Uber.

I was too drunk to stop her. So was Byron.

So, the partners gave me the so-called busy work, tasks that were necessary but irritating.

It was just what I needed. Before I landed the job, I’d been rotting away in my apartment, cycling between tidal waves of grief and dreams of a pair of kind blue eyes and the memory of a voice that belonged to an angel.

I hadn’t been able to get that firefighter out of my head.

I’d even gone so far as to track down what firehouse had responded to the accident.

Sometimes, I thought of showing up there.

But why? I could never make myself answer that question.

What would I say after I said thank you?

Part of me knew that I didn’t want the interaction to end there, but even my imagination couldn’t conjure anything up.

In the months since the accident, I’d moved out of my former apartment and into something closer to the firm where I now worked.

It was a bit of a walk, and I could take the bus in bad weather, but I hadn’t been able to convince myself to get behind the wheel of a car.

My therapist assured me that was normal.

A natural reaction to a traumatic event.

My best friend Liam had made the trip to help me move.

I had no siblings and my parents were out of the picture.

I’d been ready to hire movers, but Liam had shown up on my doorstep like he’d done after the accident first happened.

He helped me move, stayed for a night, and bought half the menu at the Thai restaurant around the corner, and was gone again in the morning, back to his life.

“Are you coming for drinks?” Hal, one of the other lawyers asked. He’d asked every Friday for the past month that I’d been working there. He was older and rounder around the middle, and everyone seemed to love him.

How could I tell him that I didn’t drink? Not anymore.

“You don’t have to drink, but we’re going to Molly’s this week instead, and they have burgers the size of your head. It’s on Simon, the senior partner. It’s his favorite place and he only takes us there when he wins a big one. You have to come. It’ll do you good.”

Hal had somehow crossed the room and closed the file folder I’d been staring at for the past thirty minutes. I was pretty sure that I couldn’t tell you what was in the file if you put a gun to my head.

I’d heard people describe some men as golden retrievers, but Hal was more like a gentle sheepdog because suddenly I was on my feet, following him down the street to a local pub.

It didn’t look like the kind of place a bunch of lawyers would hang out in from the outside.

There was a sandwich board on the sidewalk and a couple tables with cheap red and white checkered tablecloths on them.

Umbrellas open to shield the tables from the sun.

“Everyone is already here.” I said as we walked in.

“Of course they are. They went on ahead while I went to pry you away from your desk. Simon wanted you here tonight.” Hal clapped me on the shoulder and steered me toward the crowd of slightly familiar faces.

Everyone was still dressed for court, but we’d all loosened our ties.

Except for Simon, who always looked like he was ready for a photo shoot.

Not a hair out of place. Not a single wrinkle in his shirt.

The chair next to him was empty, and I realized when he flicked his gaze to it, that he meant for me to sit there. Hal steered me there and abandoned me. The sheepdog had fed me to the wolf. I swallowed down a bundle of nerves.

“Thank you for inviting me, sir.” My gaze drifted quickly down the table and back.

“Order whatever you want; it’s on the firm today,” Simon told me. He lifted a glass of what looked like whiskey to his lips and took a sip.

A server came over to the table and asked what I’d like. I ordered a lemon-lime soda and a burger, and no one cared when my non-alcoholic beverage arrived. I hadn’t drank since that night, and I didn’t plan on ever drinking again. I was just thankful that no one batted an eye at my choice.

Being out in a pub made my skin crawl at first. The laughter from other tables threatened to morph into the sound of shattering glass and screams. Then Simon leaned in.

His hair was a shocking silver color. Not a shred of youth remained in his hair, but his face was deceptively young.

I knew he was fifty, but truthfully he looked like a thirty-five year-old who’d gone grey early.

“Garrett tells me you’ve been working your ass off this month.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Simon.” He clinked his glass against mine then took a sip. “And how are you getting on?”

I’d been honest in the interview about the fact that I was in an accident and was in therapy every week because of it. Though Brett, my therapist, had recently graduated me down to once every two weeks. She was happy with my progress even if I wasn’t.

No matter how many times I talked about it in therapy or rehearsed at home, I still didn’t know how to answer questions like that.

I was alive, and that was more than Byron got to say.

Or Rita. Even though the accident was unequivocally her fault, she didn’t deserve what happened to her. Neither did Byron.

Don’t you think you should include yourself in that list?

Brett had asked and I’d answered why would I?

I lived, didn’t I? Nothing happened to me.

Rita and Byron died, and I’d lost them. But I’d walked away with barely a scratch.

The head wound I’d suffered bled heavily, but that’s what head wounds did.

The concussion I suffered still bothered me from time to time, but even that wasn’t permanent.

The biggest change was the way I couldn’t stop thinking about the firefighter. It had to be some kind of hero worship. He’d plucked me out of the fire. I still remembered the way he carried me like it was nothing. The way he took care of me during the worst moments of my life.

I still had a lot of feelings all tangled up inside me about the firefighter, and normally I’d talk to Byron about shit like that, but he wasn’t around anymore.

And I didn’t want to talk to my therapist about it.

Which was stupid because that’s literally what therapists were for, but if I couldn’t talk to Byron about it, I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it.

“I’m getting better,” I told Simon. I tried not to tell people I was fine because it always felt like a lie.

“That’s good, because next week we’re stepping up your workload.” Simon turned his attention away from me after that.

Around me, drinks flowed. Realizing that this was the first time I’d been out since the accident was a punch to the gut.

My lemon lime soda threatened to come right back up, but I held it down through sheer willpower.

Byron would come back and kick my ass if I threw up on Simon Preston’s lap.

Simon was the kind of lawyer you learned about in law school.

Chairs shuffled around and suddenly Hal was sitting next to me. He leaned close and spoke to me in a hushed voice. “We don’t always meet up in a huge group like this. Mostly we have our own little cliques, but when Simon lands a big win, he likes to treat the whole office.”

“That’s because nothing happens in a vacuum. My wins are everyone’s wins. I couldn’t do half of what I did without a team of amazing people behind me.”

Hal grinned at me. “And he has the hearing of a bat.”

The conversation turned to other things, mostly law-related.

Stories from the courtroom were passed around, but I had nothing to add to that, not yet anyway.

The firm I worked with dealt with contracts, not criminals, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have trials and hearings.

Simon Preston was one of the top lawyers in his field.

He was halfway through a story about what happens when clients sign things he tells them not to sign when the front doors of the pub opened, and a group of men flooded in.

They all wore the same clothes. Jeans or cargo pants with dark blue shirts.

A logo over the left pectoral that I couldn’t quite make out at a distance.

And then I knew. Firefighters. And among them a familiar face. I couldn’t see the shade of his eyes from across the room, but I knew they looked like the Mediterranean on a sunny day. I knew they held compassion and strength.

A hand on my shoulder snapped me out of my stupor. I’d been openly gawking at Will, watching him grab a table with his friends.

“Are you okay, Oren?” Hal asked.

“I—excuse me for just a moment.” I got to my feet without knowing what I was doing or what I was going to say, but I’d dreamed about Will since the accident.

There were so many details that I’d lost to trauma and alcohol, but I remembered everything about Will.

The color of his eyes. The cadence of his voice.

The feel of his arms around me. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t get him out of my head, but I needed to.

I wove through the crowd and suddenly I was at his table. He was sitting in a booth, sandwiched between a wall and another firefighter.

The table went silent and the one sitting next to Will looked up at me, greeting me with a friendly smile. But all I saw was Will.

“Can we help you?”

“You were there.” I couldn’t look away from Will if I tried. “You pulled me out of the car.”

My chest started to cave in on me. All at once I was aware of what an ass I was going to make of myself.

Then, as if by magic, Will was on his feet and the other firefighter moved to let him out of the booth. Will took my hand and shook it, and only then did I realize that I’d been holding it out to him.

His touch woke me up, and I blinked at him. I took a breath that felt like the first one I’d taken since they loaded me up into the ambulance.

“Do you remember me?” I didn’t know what I’d do if he said no. The idea of him not remembering me when he’d been on my mind every day for seven months was unfathomable to me.

“You look a lot better than the last time I saw you, Oren.” Will’s smile was so dazzling it made the universe shift beneath my feet.