25. Skylar
Chapter Twenty-Five
SKYLAR
I heard a soft swishing sound, or maybe a slipping sound, followed by a heavy tumble. I had just finished work for the day and spun in my chair to see Ludie on the floor across the hallway.
“Oh, my god!” I exclaimed, leaping up and dashing into her office.
“I’m fine,” she murmured, her voice thready.
“Ludie, I think you just fainted.” I knelt beside her.
“No, I didn’t, sweetie,” she said, her voice a little stronger.
“I’m calling 911,” I said as I fumbled for my phone in my pocket.
She shook her head. “Call Dan. He’s outside helping Flynn and his brother with something,” she managed between shaky breaths.
I dialed Dan’s number quickly. He answered immediately. “Skylar, Dan here.”
“Hey, Dan. Ludie fainted. I wanted to call 911, but she told me to call you.” I was already questioning why I’d done as she asked.
“I’m completely conscious, for God’s sake,” she said, her voice even stronger this time.
“Be right there. Call 911,” Dan ordered me.
I knew Ludie could hear him because her eyes narrowed. I sat beside her on the floor, holding the phone to my ear after I dialed 911.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“Hi, I’m out at the small airport, and my boss fainted.”
“I didn’t faint,” she protested beside me.
The 911 operator ran through a few questions before asking how Ludie was now.
“She is conscious and has been since I got into the room, but her skin is pale and—” I held my fingers to the pulse on her wrist. “Her pulse feels thin if that’s a thing. I don’t know.”
“Ma’am, we’ll have an emergency vehicle there within five minutes. Will you be able to wait with her?”
“Of course! I’m not going anywhere.” As if on cue, I heard the door burst open from out front. “Her husband just got here too. Should I stay on the line?”
“You can if you’d like, or you can call again if you need to. The EMTs are already on the way.”
Ludie glared at me. “I’ll call back if I need to,” I said hurriedly.
As soon as I hung up, Dan entered the room. He knelt in front of Ludie. “What happened?” he asked gruffly.
He stared at Ludie with so much love in his eyes that my heart felt pierced by it.
It took my breath away for a few seconds.
Not that I’d ever doubted Dan’s love for her or hers for him, but they’d been together a long time.
They had a shorthand, casual manner with each other that tended toward practical. This moment felt intimate.
“I’m fine,” she insisted. “If Skylar wasn’t still working, she wouldn’t even be over here. She heard me slip. That’s all.”
“Ludie,” Dan said, a hint of warning in his tone.
“All right. I fell. I’m glad she checked on me, but I swear, I’m okay. I was never unconscious.”
“You have that thing going on with your heart,” Dan interjected.
“What’s going on with your heart?” I burst in.
“Her heart skips a beat sometimes,” he explained. “Sometimes, she gets weak because she doesn’t get enough oxygen in her blood.”
“Should we be doing something about this?” I practically yelped.
“I take medicine,” Ludie said defensively.
I might have only known Ludie and Dan for less than a year, but they were more family than I’d ever had. They treated me like their own, and I cared about them. More than I wanted to admit.
“She takes medicine, but sometimes, she forgets. I’m getting you one of them pillboxes,” Dan announced.
Ludie rolled her eyes, pressing her lips together. I knew she was feeling stronger for that alone. “Pillboxes are for old people.”
“Well, Ludie, we are officially old. Nothing wrong with a pillbox,” Dan said.
“It’s like a calendar. It’ll just help you keep organized for the day-to-day. That’s all,” I offered, trying to ignore the lump in my throat and the way my chest ached.
“Fine, I’ll get a pillbox,” Ludie muttered, her eyes bouncing between Dan and me. She looked as if we’d betrayed her.
At that moment, we heard voices out front, and I leaped up, hurrying down the hallway to greet the EMT crew.
A police officer was with them, and I instantly got nervous.
I didn’t know why, but if a cop was in the vicinity, I assumed I had done something wrong.
I used to joke with Emily that if I came across someone who’d been murdered, even if the murderer was standing there with a knife over the body, I would feel like I had done it just for being present.
We both speculated that perhaps that was an unintended side effect of being in foster care.
You had so many authority figures coming in and out of your life and making decisions for you that you tended to feel like you were always out of place and being judged.
I thought this man might be Risa’s husband, which should have relaxed me, but I was still nervous.
“Ludie okay?” the police officer asked.
“I’m not sure. She fainted,” I said over my shoulder as I led the group down the hallway.
All the while, my heart thudded in my chest. I wanted to cry, but I needed to keep my shit together. Dan had shifted from kneeling in front of Ludie to sitting on his hips beside her. They were both resting against the desk. The EMTs went into action.
Ludie swatted them away. “What are you doing here?” she asked, her eyes swinging up to the police officer.
“I happened to be nearby when I heard the call. I wanted to make sure you’re okay,” the man said easily. He glanced at Dan. “How’s it going, Dan?”
“Hey, Darren. Ludie’s being stubborn again. She doesn’t want a pillbox so she’ll remember her heart meds.”
Ludie looked horrified. Dan was spilling her personal tea right here. One of the EMTs asked Dan a question, and the cop glanced at me. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Darren Thomas, chief of police for Diamond Creek.”
“I’m Skylar, Skylar Bridges.” My voice felt as small as I felt. “I work here,” I added.
“I know,” Darren said with a nod.
“Oh, you probably know everything, huh?”
“No, I definitely don’t. But you rent from Risa. She mentioned you’re a friend. Any friend of hers is a friend of mine,” he said easily.
I didn’t know what to do with this, so I just nodded.
Risa’s husband and Diamond Creek’s chief of police was one handsome man.
With chocolate brown hair and eyes to match, he was relaxed and masculine.
After our brief conversation, he was swept into chatting with Ludie and Dan.
The EMTs didn’t end up taking her to the hospital, but they gave her oxygen on-site and procured a pillbox from their vehicle, donating it to her.
She wanted to argue the point until they pointed out she donated funds to the town’s emergency services every year.
“We’ll just pretend you gave it to yourself,” one of them said.
Ludie laughed softly. Her color had come back.
“You might want to think about getting an emergency button,” Darren commented.
“What?!” Ludie barked.
“In here, in the bathroom, and at your house,” Darren added.
“Why?” she demanded. “I’m fine.”
“If Skylar hadn’t been here and heard you, you might’ve needed more help,” Dan said pointedly.
Eventually, the emergency crew filtered out. Darren left with a wave, and I made sure Ludie and Dan were buckled up in Dan’s car, insisting I would close up everything. I returned to the office, looking around and thinking about how I’d never been in here without Ludie and Dan.
It was getting dark outside. The office layout was simple.
The front entrance faced the parking area with the runway just beyond that.
The rows of plane hangars lined it on the other side.
In the distance beyond that, Diamond Creek’s larger airport, the one where the big planes landed, was visible.
There were a few chairs and a desk with some magazines strewn across the top in the front area.
No one ever sat at that desk. I walked down the short hallway that led to Ludie’s office on one side with the break room across from it.
That room had a round table, a microwave, and a small refrigerator.
Just past that, at the end of the hallway, was the room where we manned the airwaves to coordinate transports and online scheduling.
It held an L-shaped desk with computer monitors and phones.
Ludie and Dan had started this business well before the era of cell phones. They still had the old dial-up phones lined up even though we never used them. I needed to ask Susie about a small business loan. If something happened to Ludie and Dan, I really did want this to be mine.
Oh, I’d be scared as hell, but I loved this job, and I thought I was actually pretty good at it.
Having something to focus on kept my mind from spinning off down myriad tracks of anxiety, worry, and regret, and recrimination.
They were all there waiting in my thoughts.
I took a deep breath, almost jumping out of my skin when I heard the door open out front.
I hurried down there to see Tucker coming in. “Hey, I was coming into land, and I heard from Flynn that Ludie had an emergency. He said Dan called and said she was okay, but I thought I’d see how she was doing.”
“She did. She fainted,” I said.
“She okay?” he pressed.
I nodded, my eyes stinging with the tears threatening to spill over. “I think so. Apparently, she has some kind of heart condition where her heart skips a beat sometimes. She’s supposed to take medicine, and she forgets. I guess she doesn’t always get enough oxygen. That’s what Dan told me.”
I was standing by that desk out front, my fingertips resting on the edge. Tucker’s eyes held mine from across the room. “You okay, Skylar?” he asked, his tone gentle.
It actually hurt to swallow, but I tried to put on a brave face. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I croaked.
In a second, Tucker was right in front of me, pulling me into his arms. I buried my face in his chest and burst into tears.
He smelled like the wind and the trees with a hint of salty ocean air clinging to him.
I wasn’t the kind of girl who burst into tears.
I wasn’t the kind of girl who let any man comfort her, even though it was always what I’d been desperate for.
I tried to pull myself together, but I couldn’t.
Every time I lifted my head and tried to look at Tucker, I cried even harder.
Everything I attempted to say came out in a garble of hitched breath and sobs.
He simply held me, one palm moving in slow passes up and down my back.
His touch was so soothing, and it felt beyond good to be in his arms.
He was warm and strong and seemed entirely unruffled by my explosion of tears. I finally reached a point when my crying slowed. By then, I was afraid to even look at him. I was mortified.
My head was tucked against his chest. I heard the rumble of his voice against my cheek when he spoke. “Everybody needs a good cry sometimes.”
“I know,” I mumbled to his chest. “But I don’t cry.”
“I do sometimes,” he said, his voice low and gravelly.
That punctured my embarrassment. I cautiously lifted my head, peering up at him. I had one arm banded tightly around his waist and the other tucked between us. I knuckled my tears with my fist as a watery, sheepish smile stretched across my face. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s okay. You worried about Ludie?”
I swallowed and nodded. “Maybe this sounds weird, but Ludie and Dan are like family for me even though I haven’t been here that long.”
“I get it. There are different kinds of family.”
“She scared me today.”
He nodded, his palm still soothing me with those slow passes. “What do you want to do?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.
“Well, I’m not leaving you alone tonight,” he said bluntly. “After a cry like that, I’d be a shitty friend to walk away.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” I shrugged, feeling foolish. “It’s just me and my drama.”
“Do you want to come out to the lodge for dinner?”
I shook my head swiftly at that. I wasn’t ready for a crowd even though I liked everyone there.
Blessedly, Tucker didn’t ask me to explain. He simply dipped his chin in acknowledgment. “Do you want a distraction?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we could get takeout and go back to your place, or I could take you out somewhere.”
I wasn’t ready to see people who knew me that well, but a distraction might help me pull myself together. It was enough for Tucker to have seen me fall apart. I could handle strangers. “Okay,” I said quietly.
“Ski lodge, or go somewhere else?”
“Let’s go to the ski lodge. I heard it’s really good.”
“Oh, it’s good. Trust me. Come on.”
He loosened his hold, his hands sliding down my arms as he stepped back. He curled his palm around one of mine, and I savored the feel of it. I needed the contact to ground me, to keep me from feeling like I was spinning loose. Feeling lost and unmoored was common when you spent so much time alone.
When we walked outside, I came to a stumbling stop as I looked at the sky. It was painted in streaks of red, pink, and orange, with the last rays of the sun shooting through the colors. I pressed my palm against my chest as I took a breath.
“Kind of like living in a postcard here,” Tucker commented.
Smiling up at him, I felt a little lighter inside. “It does.”
I heard the screech of an eagle and a few seagulls calling nearby. I breathed in the crisp salty air. Our footsteps crunched on the gravel as we walked through the parking area. I discovered Tucker was parked beside my car.
“I’ll follow you back to your place, so you can drop your car off,” he said. I opened my mouth to argue, and he added, “For the environment. It’s about a twenty-minute drive up the hill. It seems silly for both of us to drive up and back.”
“Well, when you say it like that, all logical and stuff, it makes sense,” I said dryly.
He squeezed my hand before he let it go.