17. Jack
17
JACK
WHERE THERE’S SMOKE
I needed to go to sleep, but I was torturing myself. A sliver of light slashed through my cracked bedroom door, giving me a direct view of Aurora at the kitchen table. Her fingers flew at a furious pace, dancing across the laptop keys like a gazelle. Her gaze was sharp and true, like a sniper. Soft lips formed silent words as she mouthed the thoughts that were unknown to everyone but her and the characters. Every so often, she would get up to refill her mug.
I couldn’t get the sight of her, drenched and shivering at my door, out of my head. I couldn’t get the sight of her in my t-shirt out of my head. I couldn’t get her out of my head.
Especially not after that kiss . . .
Fuck.
I rolled over and squeezed my eyes shut, but it was no use. I could still taste her on my lips.
I peered out of the corner of my eye and studied her. She had pulled her hair down out of the bun it had been in and had one hand tangled in the curls.
Aurora was fascinating to watch.
Day to day, she was as stubborn as a mule. There was a fierceness in her eyes. A force to be reckoned with. That force hadn’t died, no matter how much she claimed it had.
Aurora didn’t know it, but I had been watching her the night she and her friends built the bonfire on the beach. I saw the way her jaw clenched, but she doubled down on burning her notebook.
That stubbornness would either be her end or be the very thing that would bring her out of the ashes. It was the kind of hard-headedness that made her unsinkable. She just needed a quiet harbor to fix her sails. If her drive for writing was anything like her drive for renovating the house, it would take her to the ends of the earth.
* * *
Beep. Beep . Beep . I blindly reached for my phone to silence the alarm.
Why was my door open? I always slept with it closed. If there was ever a fire, closed doors blocked smoke and flames, giving people a chance to escape.
The silhouette hunched over the kitchen table was my answer.
Aurora was still here.
I don’t know why I was surprised. She had been shotgunning coffee like her life depended on it at two in the morning. That was the last I remembered watching her before my tired eyes got the better of me.
She looked so peaceful, sleeping on the kitchen table. Part of me didn’t want to wake her. The other part of me knew her neck would be jacked up for a month if I left her like that.
From the looks of it, she had fallen asleep in the middle of writing.
My second alarm blared, but I quickly silenced it. I didn’t want to startle her.
I eased out of bed, trying my best not to let the old box spring creak. I had thirty minutes before I had to be at the station. Usually , I would have slept in a few more minutes before throwing on my station gear and heading out the door.
But today, I got up right away; energized like I’d just gotten a full night’s sleep instead of a few measly hours.
I got dressed in silence, brushed my teeth, took a shit, and made sure my bag was ready to go. Aurora never stirred. I thought I was a heavy sleeper, but she slept like the dead.
Without stopping to think twice, I crept up to the table and peered at her computer. The screen had locked automatically, which was probably a good thing considering she was using the space bar as a pillow.
As carefully as I could, I tucked an arm under her knees and braced one behind her back, bringing her to my chest.
She mumbled incoherently in her sleep, but didn’t wake. Aurora tucked her head against my bicep and chest and let out a gentle breath as I carried her into my bedroom. She curled into my pillow the moment I laid her on the mattress.
I had never been jealous of a pillow before, but fuck that thing.
I glanced at the time and knew I couldn’t linger. I tucked her in, then grabbed her phone off the table and plugged it into my bedside charger so it would be good to go.
The rain was a bitter insult as I hurried out to my truck. While rain meant a mellow day for everyone else, exploring the museums and aquariums down the coastline, for me it meant we would be running non-stop.
Bad weather was a foreboding omen.
The crew about to get off shift looked dead on their feet. They had been going all night long.
Drew came in behind me, dropping his shit in his locker. “ Morning , sunshine.”
“Morning.”
“You look well rested," he quipped sarcastically. “ And by well rested, I mean you look like shit. You all right?”
“Peachy.” I grinned from ear to ear to spite him.
Drew flinched. “ Never do that again. It’s terrifying.”
I chuckled. “ You asked for it.”
“What’s the deal?”
“Just didn’t sleep. The storm kept me up.”
“Bullshit.”
“What’s it to you?” I asked as we made our way to the kitchen to raid the coffee pot and the spoils of whatever was left from the last shift. From the looks of it, some beloved Cedar Island citizen had brought us doughnuts from Ernie’s .
Hopefully, he had changed out the grease before frying them. The last thing I wanted at seven in the morning was a vanilla cream doughnut that tasted like mackerel and hushpuppies.
I went with a plain glazed doughnut. There was something unsettling about the thought of custard filling laced with seafood.
Luck was on my side. It was still warm. The malty, buttery doughnut coated in sweet vanilla glaze was the pick-me-up I needed after a restless night.
“Spill,” Drew said around a mouthful of vanilla filling.
I inhaled the rest of the doughnut and pocketed a protein bar for later. Chances were, we wouldn’t be around the station for meals today.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, dude. I just didn’t sleep.” I turned on the kitchen sink and washed the sugar off my fingers.
“What was the neighbor up to last night?”
I didn’t answer.
Drew grinned. “ Ahh . There it is. So you were getting right with the other Whitlock .”
“Her name is Aurora . Not ‘the other Whitlock ,’” I clipped.
Drew lifted his hands in surrender. “ I get it. You’re protective over your summertimer. No worries, man. She’s all yours.”
I hated thinking of Aurora like that. She was way fucking more than that, whether I wanted to admit it or not.
“She’s not my summertimer.”
When I had asked her for “more” in the middle of our heated makeout session on the couch, my mouth nearly went numb. I had never wanted more. In fact, I always wanted what Drew did—no strings and a good time.
Everything I told Aurora was the truth. I couldn’t handle attachment. I couldn’t deal with the weight and responsibility of loving someone, knowing I might not be able to save them if the worst happened.
But she had marked me like the brand on the floorboard of her house. It was the scarlet letter scarred on my skin. It was the signet she had used to claim me while I was none the wiser. I bore it willingly, like a lovesick court jester, vying for a fleeting moment of the queen’s attention.
“Sure, dude,” Drew said as he patted my back and headed out of the kitchen. “ Keep telling yourself that.”
Tones dropped before he had made it through the door. Bodies thundered down the stairs as we jumped into our turnouts and loaded into the rig. Dispatch relayed the location of a downed tree turned motor vehicle versus motor vehicle. The ringer was that power lines were down and electricity was arcing in the torrent.
The engine came to a screeching halt at a precarious intersection. Cars were starting to line up from both sides of the scene. Impatient drivers poked their noses out to see if they could get around the mess.
“Drew. Work with the deputies to set the perimeter,” our captain barked. “ Wharton . You’re leading the extract.”
We geared up as the rest of the orders were given for debris removal. The utility company was already on the way out to cut the lines, but that didn’t make the situation any less dire. A motorist was trapped. EMS was en route, but they were coming from the hospital in Morehead City and were at least a half-hour away. For the time being, we were on our own.
Guys grabbed fiberglass poles off the rig to move the live wires without getting electrocuted by using the hook on the end.
“Whoa—” I grabbed the back of Drew’s turnout coat right before he stepped into a puddle. A live wire was on the opposite side, sparking and jolting. A metal shard was just outside the water. I grabbed one of the pike poles and pushed the piece into the puddle.
In the haze of steam, fog, and smoke, electricity arced from the puddle to the metal.
“Shit,” Drew muttered as he watched the sparks appear out of nowhere.
“Watch your step, gentlemen,” I clipped into my radio. “ The standing water will fry your asses.”
The soles of our boots were made from heat-resistant rubber, but it was better safe than sorry.
It was a delicate dance to get to the trapped driver. The front of the car was crushed like a soda can. It had rear-ended the first vehicle, who stopped on a dime when a power line fell.
The driver, a teenage girl, had lacerations on her face and chest from the airbag. She was sobbing hysterically and clawing at the door.
“Ma’am, my name is Jack . I’m with the Cedar Island Fire Department . I’m gonna help get you out, all right? We’ve got an ambulance on the way. Can you tell me where you’re hurt?” I asked through the open window.
“Everything hurts,” she gasped. “ I can’t get out. I — I —c-can’t?—”
I keyed in my radio. “ Someone call for a medevac. Clear for a helo to land.”
“Copy,” Drew clipped as he expanded the perimeter and created a landing zone.
“Wharton, you need hydraulics?” Captain asked.
I reached in through the shattered window and unlocked the door from the inside. The hinges were jammed, but there was a little give. I braced and yanked. The door cracked free, letting out a piercing shriek as it opened.
“Negative. No hydraulics needed.”
Shit.
I was glad I had made the call to bring in a helicopter, even though EMS was on the way. Her legs were bent at a grotesque angle from the impact.
“Can you tell me your name?” I asked as I sliced through her seatbelt.
“J- Jen .”
“How old are you, Jen ?”
“Seventeen,” she croaked as tears streamed down her face.
A new driver caught in a situation that more practiced motorists still wouldn’t navigate well. It would haunt her, that was for sure.
The buzz and whirr of chainsaws filled the air as the crew went to work on the downed trees. Flashing yellow lights joined the group.
Thank fuck. It was about damn time. A woman and a man from the utility company jumped out and went to work cutting the electricity. That would make things slightly less dire.
“Helo is ten minutes out,” someone said over the radio.
“Copy.”
“Power’s cut,” someone else relayed.
I let out a sharp exhale. Moving the girl wasn’t optimal. If I had to guess, she had two broken legs. But ten minutes was too long to leave her in the car. “ Get me a stretcher,” I requested over the line.
“Copy.”
Drew appeared with the stretcher in tow. “ Tell me where you need me.”
An acrid smell filled the air as black smoke began to billow from the front of the crushed car.
Yep. We had to move her now.
“Jen, I’m not gonna lie. This is gonna hurt like hell. But we have to get you out and away from the car.”
We were sitting on a ticking time bomb, but I didn’t want her to panic and fight me. There wasn’t space for me to get behind her and for Drew to get her knees.
“Jen, I want you to reach out and grab onto my shoulders. Can you do that?”
She gave me a pensive nod.
“I’m gonna have one arm behind your back, and one arm underneath you.” I cocked my head toward Drew . “ This is Drew . He’s going to guide your legs out from where they’re pinned.”
The car let out a menacing hiss, then a bang. Smoke roared as flames licked out the front. Jen screamed and threw her arms around my neck.
I slid my arms behind and under her, then counted down. “ Three , two?—”
Drew squeezed into my left and knelt as another flash of flames whipped toward us. “ One .”
Jen was light as a feather, but she was pinned in tightly.
“It hurts!” she cried as I eased her out of the car.
“Drew—” Flames were working their way up the hood, but he was laser-focused on getting her out as safely as possible.
Boots thundered, splashing in the rain as the crew rushed to work the problem as the billowing heat grew.
“I feel it,” he snapped. “ She’s priority.”
“Faster,” I barked.
Jen wailed in my ear. Drew had leaned the stretcher against the car. I kicked it away from the flames.
“Almost . . .” Drew jerked his head away and hissed under the heat.
“ Now ,” I ordered.
“Clear!” Drew shouted.
I lunged back, keeping a safe hold on Jen as the deep, rhythmic thumping of helicopter rotors filled the air.
“My phone!” she whimpered. “ My mom’s gonna kill me. ”
“I promise she won’t. She’ll be happy you’re still here.”
But all Drew heard was a scared girl in distress. “ Where is it?” he asked as he leapt away from the car as it was slowly engulfed in flames.
“The backseat,” she sniffed. “ I’m not allowed to have it in the front with me.”
“Hey!” I barked.
But Drew didn’t waste a second. He ripped open the back passenger door and rooted around.
Shouts rose up when the crew realized what the fuck he was doing.
A macabre explosion rattled what was left of the car.
“Drew!”
That motherfucker eased out of the backseat like he had all the time in the fucking world. The purse was on fire as he yanked it free. He dropped it on the ground and gently stomped out the flames.
I shoved down the burning anger and focused on the task at hand. “ Looks like your ride is here, Jen .’”
The helicopter pilot made a slow, picturesque landing in the middle of the chaos. The side doors rolled back and two flight nurses climbed out. I carried Jen over as smoothly as I could while they popped open the door beneath the tail and hauled out the gurney.
One of the flight nurses jogged over to help stabilize her legs. “ This is Jen ,” I said as I eased her down onto the gurney. “ She’s seventeen.”
The nurse at her feet flipped up the visor on her flight helmet. “ You’re in good hands, Jen .”
“I need to call my mom,” she said through sniffles.
“Right here,” Drew said as he set Jen’s purse in her lap. He gave the flight nurse a flirtatious wink.
“Go ahead and call Mom ," she said. “ We’re gonna do some quick vitals and then we’ll get in the air. Have you ever flown in a helicopter before?”
Jen shook her head.
The nurse gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “ It’s badass. You’ll love it.”
That made Jen crack a smile.
We finished the handoff, then went back to clear the scene as the helicopter took off. Traffic began to move at a snail’s pace as we freed up the opposite side of the road.
Tow trucks came in a caravan, hauling away the wreckage.
What a way to start the fucking day . . .
As we cleared debris from the road, my mind went home. Was Aurora still in bed? Did she find the breakfast I had left for her? Would she still be there when I got off work in twenty-something hours?
Heaviness settled over me when we unloaded back at the station. Drew was too fucking chatty as we went through gear checks and reset for the next call; acting like nothing fucking happened.
“Dude, what crawled up your ass and died?” Drew asked as he shouldered his bag and headed to the showers.
A caustic laugh slipped. “ What crawled up my ass? How about you going into a burning car to get a fucking purse?”
“It made her feel better. She was scared, dude.”
“She would have been scared regardless,” I snapped. “ That doesn’t mean you get to make stupid, reckless decisions that risk your life. It was a fucking phone. It can be replaced.”
Drew flipped me off.
“You’re just going to ignore me? You could have gotten really fucking hurt.”
“Smoke always leads to the fire.”
“No shit.”
He pointed at me. “ This reaction you’re having? That’s smoke, dude. Think about where it’s coming from and deal with that before you come at me again for doing my job.”