Rescued By The Filthy Firefighter

1. Chapter 1

The Jonesville firehouse smells like diesel and old coffee, and the second I step through the bay doors, I decide I love it.

I shift my kit bag higher on my shoulder. It is heavier than it needs to be. I packed it three times last night, unpacked it, packed it again, because tonight is the night I either become a firefighter or wash out trying.

The engine sits in the middle of the bay like something alive. Red, chrome, huge. I want to touch it. I don't. Probies don't touch things on day one.

"You Healy?"

A guy with a clipboard barely glances up at me. Older, gray at the temples, the kind of tired that settles into a person after years of nights like this.

"Yes, sir. Jason Healy. Reporting for my first…"

"Cap's office is there. Don't go in, he's busy." He points with the clipboard, then jerks his thumb toward the far end of the bay. "Your problem's over there."

My problem.

I follow the thumb.

There is a man crouched beside the engine, checking the tread on a tire with the focus of someone defusing a bomb.

He’s late twenties or early thirties, but he holds himself like someone older.

He is big and masculine. Broad through the shoulders, solid through the back, forearms like he wrestles the equipment instead of carrying it.

Dark stubble. Scarred knuckles. He does not look up when I walk over, even though I know he hears my boots on the concrete.

"Hi," I say. "I'm Jason. I think I'm with you tonight?"

He stands. Slowly. He is taller than me, which I did not think was possible, because I am not exactly small. He looks at me the way you look at a stain on your favorite shirt.

"Chase," he says. That is the whole sentence.

"Awesome. Great. Cool." Three words, none of them necessary. "So I just did the academy, obviously, that's why I'm here, but I've kind of wanted this my whole life, like since I was a little kid, so I'm really…"

"Bag."

I stop. "What?"

"Put your bag down. You're not moving in, you're working a shift."

My face goes hot. I set the bag down against the wall as if it personally offended me. "Right. Yeah. Obviously."

Chase is already walking. I scramble after him.

The station is smaller than I expected. The bay swallows most of it, the engine and the gear and the racks of turnout coats hanging like a row of shed skins.

Off the back there is a kitchen, all scuffed counters and one good coffee pot that someone clearly loves more than people.

A narrow hall leads to the bunk room, six beds, thin mattresses, a smell of bleach over something older.

There are the showers past that, tile gone gray, a row of hooks.

That is my whole world for the next twenty-four hours.

After that, it's going to be the same as everyone else.

Forty-Eight on, seventy-two off. I read about the schedule a hundred times. Living it is going to be different.

"This is the rig," Chase says, stopping at the engine. "You'll learn every inch of it. Every compartment, every tool, where it lives, why it lives there. You don't guess. You don't 'think.' You know. Because the night you don't know is the night somebody dies."

"Got it," I say. I mean it. I want him to see that I mean it.

He opens a side compartment and rattles off names faster than I can catch them. Irons. Halligan. Pike pole. Hydraulic spreaders that he calls the jaws. I nod at all of it. I repeat a couple of the words under my breath like a kid in church.

"You writing this down in your head?" he asks.

"Yes. Definitely. The, uh…" I point. "The Halligan one."

He points at the same tool. "That's the pike pole."

"That's what I meant."

Chase exhales through his nose. It is not a laugh. It is the opposite of a laugh.

We check the air packs next. He shows me how to seat the mask, how to read the gauge, how to listen for the hiss that means the seal is bad.

My hands are shaking a little, and I hate that, so I talk to cover it.

I tell him about the academy, about the instructor who said I had good instincts, about how my mom cried at graduation, about how I drove past this exact station as a kid and told myself I would work here one day.

"Healy."

"Yeah?"

"Do you ever stop?"

I close my mouth. "Sometimes," I say. "Not often."

For just a second, something flickers at the corner of his mouth. It is gone before I can be sure I saw it. He turns back to the air pack.

Here is the thing about Chase that I figure out in the first hour.

He does not waste anything. Not words, not motion, not time.

Everything he does is exact. I watch him coil a length of hose, and it comes out perfect, tight, clean, like the rope knows better than to argue with him.

I try the next one, and it ends up a tangled mess on the floor that looks like roadkill.

He stares at it. Then at me.

"Again," he says.

I do it again. It is worse.

"Again."

The third one is almost okay. He does not say good. He just takes it from my hands, fixes the one loop I got wrong, and moves on. I tell myself that not-yelling is basically a compliment.

The other guy on shift, the one with the clipboard, drifts through every now and then with a coffee mug and a face that says he has seen a hundred probies come and go.

He calls me "new guy" and does not learn my name.

I decide not to take it personally. Cap stays behind his door.

The station is quiet in a heavy way, like a held breath, and I start to understand that the quiet is the job too.

You wait. You clean. You check the rig again, even though you checked it an hour ago. You wait some more.

Around midday I make myself useful by making a fresh pot of coffee, and I am pretty proud of myself until Chase walks in, takes one sip, and pours the entire mug down the sink without a word.

"It was too weak," the clipboard guy tells me, not unkindly, when Chase is gone. "He likes it strong enough to stand a spoon in."

"Noted," I say. I file it away with everything else. Pike pole, not Halligan. Coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in. Don't go in Cap's office. Don't touch things. Don't talk so much.

I am thinking about that last one, telling myself I can be a quieter, calmer, more impressive version of me when the alarm drops.

It is not like the movies. It is louder. The tones hit something low in my chest, the lights flip and a flat voice comes over the speaker with an address and a single word that changes the whole room.

Structure.

Everything moves at once. Chase is already at the rack, already stepping into his boots, pulling his bunker pants up in one motion that he has done ten thousand times. I fumble mine. My foot catches. I nearly go down in front of God and the entire crew.

"Breathe," Chase says, right next to me, low, sharp. "Coat. Pack. On the rig. Go."

I go.

The ride is the longest ninety seconds of my life.

I am buckled in across from Chase and my heart is going like a drum and I am running through everything I have ever learned and finding most of it gone, just wiped clean by adrenaline.

Chase watches me from across the cab. His face is calm. Completely, impossibly calm.

"Stay on me," he says over the engine roar. "You don't leave my side. You don't freelance. You see something, you tell me, you don't go after it. Understand?"

"Understand," I say. My voice cracks on it. I hate that too.

Then we are there.

The house has smoke pushing from the eaves, gray and angry, curling up into a sky that has gone the color of a bruise.

I have seen burns at the academy. Controlled ones.

Tidy little fires lit on purpose so that we could practice on them.

This is nothing like that. This is heat I can feel from the street, a low animal growl underneath everything, glass somewhere going off like a gunshot.

For one frozen second, I just stare at it.

This is real. This was always going to be real. People live here.

"Healy." Chase's gloved hand closes on my shoulder and turns me to face him. Through the mask, his eyes are steady. "With me."

And somehow that is enough. The fear does not go away. It just gets a leash on it. I move when he moves.

Most of the job, that first call, is not heroic.

It is dragging line, it is fetching tools, it is being a second pair of hands that mostly gets in the way.

I am soaked through with sweat inside two minutes.

The air pack is loud in my ears, my own breathing huge and ragged, and I keep having to remind myself to slow it down, to not suck the bottle dry in ten minutes like a rookie, which is exactly what I am.

But then there is one moment.

Chase needs the line bled and repositioned, and he barks a command, and for once, for one beautiful once, I understand it before he has to repeat it.

I get my hands on the hose, I plant my feet the way I was taught, I take the weight, and I hold.

The water surges and the line bucks like it wants to throw me, and I do not let it. I hold.

"Good," Chase says.

One word. He probably does not even know he says it. But I hear it through the roar and the heat and the noise, and it lands somewhere in my chest and lights up brighter than the fire ever could.

Later, after, when the worst of it is knocked down and we are standing in the wet street with steam rising off the ruined porch and our gear streaked black, I catch him looking at me.

Just for a second. There is something in his face that is almost, nearly, not-quite approval before he sees me see it and turns away to coil the line.

I stand there, breathing hard, filthy, exhausted, and grinning like an idiot inside my helmet.

I did one thing right.

For him, somehow, that matters most of all.