Chapter 25
ALEX
DrunkenPoet: Please just tell me you’re alive. I don’t care if you changed your mind about us. I don’t care if you want me to fuck off. Just tell me you’re breathing somewhere.
IndexEcho: [No response]
DrunkenPoet: I love you. I love you and I’m sorry for whatever I did wrong.
IndexEcho: [No response]
_____________________
Kincaid was officially being weird. I was half-tempted to duck out of work early and surprise him at his house, but I’d heard from Javi Sujo’s girlfriend that the fire crew had been out battling a big barn fire all afternoon. The man probably needed hydration and rest after that.
“The fire chief’s a tasty treat,” someone said as I placed another pizza on the large row of tables pushed together for the SERA instructors. “We should’ve invited him.”
“Forget about his ass,” Monroe said with a shake of his head. “You should ask him about his work experience, man. Guy’s hardcore.”
I moved back to the kitchen, even though I was desperate to hear what he was saying about Judd. We still had several pizzas to get out in addition to the extra appetizers Trace had ordered when the original ones had run out.
After bringing more food out, I did a round of drink refills and helped two of my servers bus a few tables. Juni and Karim were beginning to clean up in the kitchen, and I was eager to stay caught up, on the slim chance the SERA group would make it an early-ish night.
Make that a very slim chance, considering they usually celebrated the end of another cohort session with a long night of craft brews and cocktails. I’d already had three orders of the Slingshot Flame tonight, and they seemed to be just getting started.
Judd would have been proud of me for my responsible fire-making.
“Hey, Alex, can I get another Get Lost Pale Ale?” Tommy asked as I moved behind him.
“Absolutely. What about Foster?” I glanced at my cousin with my eyebrow raised toward his boyfriend.
“Bourbon, but this is the last one since I’m not strong enough to carry the bastard.”
Their dog, Chickie, lifted her head up from her spot under Tommy’s chair. I leaned over and gave her long ears a little bit of love. “Good girl,” I murmured. “And a treat for you, hm?”
Just as I was headed back with their drinks and a dog biscuit tucked in my apron pocket, I overheard Monroe say something about Kincaid again.
“And he’s ARFF. So I asked him, what the fuck are you doing working here instead of on an airfield someplace? He used to work with big planes, like index E–level shit.”
I stopped and stared. Then I carefully set down the drinks and asked Monroe to repeat what he’d said. I probably sounded deranged, but I didn’t care. “What’s ARFF, and what’s index E?”
“Oh, aircraft rescue and firefighting. And index E means big planes. That’s the indicator that an airport serves mostly planes longer than two hundred feet.
Like 747s and 777s and MD-11s. It means the airport has to have at least three big-ass trucks with over six thousand gallons of water for foam production. ”
I already knew this, of course. I’d asked IndexEcho the origin of his username at one point and had gotten an explanation very similar to this one.
“How do you know all of that?” I asked, like I was just making casual conversation. “I thought you were mostly a helicopter pilot.”
“I am.” Monroe took a quick sip of his beer. “But my brother’s a United pilot out of Denver. He’s super-nerdy about all this stuff and bragged like a bitch when he got rated to fly MD-11s.”
My stomach felt hollow, and my toes tingled with a strange kind of numbness. “That’s cool,” I said. “How do you know all of that about Chief Kincaid?”
“He told me about it one night last summer. And, honestly, I got the feeling he was probably just taking a break before finding another big ARFF job somewhere. Sounds like he needed a temporary gig until jumping back in the fray.” Monroe grinned and winked. “Why the interest in the chief?”
I felt like my face was made of stone. “No reason. I just didn’t realize that about him.”
Tommy shot me a look, like he heard the strain in my voice, but he cleared his throat and summoned a smile. “Alex is probably fishing for some dirt on the chief. Guy’s been a total pain in Alex’s ass with inspections every week and shit.”
The chief had definitely been a pain in my ass.
But he’d quickly become something else—the man I was falling for.
And now, it seemed, he was something way, way worse.
A fraud.
I didn’t have the brainpower right now to figure out what this all meant, but I could feel in my bones it wasn’t good.
“You guys need anything else?” I asked.
Tommy’s smile dropped, and so did his voice. “Hey, you okay?”
I nodded and tried to smile. “Amazing.”
And then I walked back to the kitchen like I was going to fetch something, found Karim and begged him to take over, raced up to my bedroom to crawl into my bed, and cried for two straight hours over the mess that Monroe’s simple words had made of my love life.
Was it possible Judd Kincaid was IndexEcho?
If he was, then he wasn’t dead, which was a miracle…
Except it also meant my sisters were right and he’d ghosted me four years ago, which would rip my heart out all over again.
And… oh, fuck. Did Judd know I was DrunkenPoet? Had he known all along and hidden it from me?
Months of our exchanged conversations flowed through my memories as I fought the temptation to pick up the phone and call him to clear all this up.
That would be reactionary and foolish. Accusing Judd of being IndexEcho—even asking him if they might be the same person—would damage our relationship if it wasn’t true.
What would that say about my trust in him?
And if I made the accusation and it was true…
I closed my eyes and tried not to cry again because I’d already cried enough for this fucking man.
But it was hard not to feel like fate had it out for me.
I’d had something amazing at my fingertips, and it had been yanked away four years ago.
And now here I was again, on the verge of losing the very next man I’d let myself fall for…
Either that or I’d been screwed twice by the same man.
I curled on my side, mashing my face into my pillow, and despite—or maybe because of—all this uncertainty, I found myself missing the citrus scent of Judd’s sheets. The comfort I’d felt falling asleep in his arms, in his bed—
I lifted my head as a memory came freewheeling into my thoughts.
The ball cap I’d seen in Judd’s closet before falling asleep weeks ago.
Summer Song.
At the time, I’d been half-asleep and hadn’t processed why it seemed familiar. Why it had given me an extra level of comfort. Now I realized it wasn’t just the words on the cap that were familiar but the logo.
Summer Song was a pale ale. IndexEcho’s favorite. From a brewery near his hometown, he’d said. And we’d joked about how I liked the name because it reminded me of a poem.
Like a lovesick idiot, I’d looked it up online after he’d mentioned it, desperate to get my hands on some just so I could drink his favorite beer and have an additional connection with him.
I’d memorized the logo so I could look for it at the store.
And when I hadn’t been able to find it locally, I’d gone back online to see where it was brewed and where I could find it.
It was a craft brew made and bottled in West Virginia.
And it wasn’t distributed anywhere outside of the mid-Atlantic.
Which, last I checked, was where Philadelphia was.
IndexEcho was Judd Kincaid. It was becoming obvious, and I could no longer deny it.
Did I even want to deny it? For so long, it had been my greatest wish that IndexEcho was alive and well in the world, even if he didn’t want to be with me. Now, not only was he alive, but he was in my life. He’d made love to me. He’d held me for hours. He wanted to date me.
But another thing Monroe said also echoed in my head. I got the feeling he was probably just taking a break before finding another big ARFF job somewhere.
Judd and I had never talked about the possibility of him leaving Legacy, but IndexEcho had talked about what he wanted his future to look like. His job had been important to him. Part of his identity. Surely, he’d want to go back to aviation firefighting at some point.
And, hell, even if that had changed in the past few years, Judd was an active firefighter.
He didn’t just hassle small businesses about code violations.
I’d seen him injured once already from a wildfire.
I’d seen the burn scars on his body. I knew how often he was in the shit with his crew—situations that often led to serious injuries…
Or worse.
I’d lost IndexEcho once when he’d only been a dream, a fantasy. Could I handle losing him again now that I knew he was Judd Kincaid, the man I’d surrendered my body and my trust to?
No. Absolutely not. Not a chance.
And I was angry that he’d even consider putting me in that situation.
Again.
We were barely into… whatever this was. Hell, we hadn’t even had a real date yet. And already I felt betrayed and heartbroken.
My tears came again, cooling the worst of my anger, hardening it like volcanic rock.
The next day, I woke up feeling hungover. I was dehydrated and sleep-deprived. My head pounded to the rhythm of my heartbeat until it felt like contractors were hammering around me all day.
Work was excruciating. We had a moms’ group for lunch who’d brought a motley collection of babies and toddlers and stayed for two hours. Usually, I loved having this group on a weekday, especially now that tourist season was behind us. But today, it was torture.
By the time I went upstairs to shower and change before heading to Kincaid’s house, I was low-key nauseous.
Tavo looked up from his spot playing video games in the living room. “You look like shit.”
“Mm, you’re the best kind of friend. Don’t ever change.”
“For real, man. You want me to call Ella? She gives you hell, but you know she’ll come baby you if you’re sick.”
I shook my head carefully. “No. I’m going to hop in the shower, then I’m headed out.”
As I turned, Tavo started to say something and stopped.
“What?” I asked, turning back to him.
“Remember that guy at the farmer’s market who said he remembered me and the judge from back in San Francisco?”
I tried to think of what he was referring to, but I had no idea. “The guy in the ball cap?” I asked in surprise. “Wait, he said he knew Judge Miller?”
He hesitated. “Not really. He knew who he was, but it wasn’t like he knew him-knew him. He was a server at Pinch, a club Kirk and I used to go to. I told him it wasn’t me, and then Chief Kincaid made a joke about doppelg?ngers. That’s when you walked up.”
“Oh, right. And the chief told the story of mistaking me for my cousin because we look alike.” That part I remembered.
He nodded. “Yeah, exactly. And the ball cap guy was super nice after that, moved on quickly and ended up buying a steel and flint from me. I just… I keep wondering if I should have been more worried about it than I was.”
I considered this for a moment. “I wonder how he knew who the judge was? I own a restaurant in a tiny town, and I still don’t know all my customers.”
“Yeah. I think that’s why it’s bothering me.
” Tavo scooted sideways on the sofa so he could see me better.
“The judge is a regular at Pinch. And this guy said the judge had been flashing money around to keep an eye on me. That’s why it stood out for him.
But you don’t think…? I mean, it’s not like this guy is going to go back to the judge and tell him he saw someone who looked like me, right? ”
The chances of the judge asking some random server at a club if he’d seen a guy he was supposed to remember from a year earlier were unheard of.
“I think you’re okay,” I said. “Besides, the judge has to drop this eventually. Maybe we should have asked the server if Judge Miller had been back with any other guys.”
Tavo’s eyebrows winged up. “Oh shit. Good call. That would have been sweet. Except then he would know I was the guy instead of someone who just looked like the guy.”
He was right. Better to claim not to know anything about anything. “I’ll tell Joel to have one of his investigators stop by and question people at the club. What club was it?”
“Pinch on Valencia.”
I nodded and reassured him before heading back to my room to get ready. After showering, dressing, and shooting off an email to my uncle about Tavo’s case, I headed to Kincaid’s.
And tried not to vomit from nerves.