Chapter Six Evan
The thing about fires is that they always leave a smell on you.
Even after showering and sitting in a weight room that smells like fifty different types of sweat, I can still smell it clinging to me. Something ancient and stubborn that no amount of soap can fully argue with.
Jase is on the bench press across from me, not pressing anything. He's been lying there staring at the ceiling for the past ten minutes, which would concern me if I didn't already know exactly what was going on inside his head.
“She just,” he starts, for approximately the fourth time.
“Jase.”
“No, but she just—the way she looked at me in that ambulance, man. Like I was—”
“The first person who was ever nice to her in her entire life,” I finish. “Yeah. You said that.”
“Because it's true.”
I set down my water bottle and look at him. He's got that expression on, the one that means he has fully committed to a feeling and has no intention of being talked out of it. I've seen it before. Usually, it passes within a week.
“She's a runaway bride, Jase. From one of the richest families in the city. Who you pulled out of a burning building approximately four hours ago.”
“I know what she is.”
“Do you? Because you're lying on a weight bench not lifting anything, thinking about a woman you spoke to for maybe fifteen minutes while she was actively concussed.”
He sits up, planting his elbows on his knees. “She's not like—she's different. I can't explain it. There's something about her that's just...”
“Every girl you've ever met has been different and special and not like the others.”
“That's not true.”
“Jase.”
“That is genuinely not true and you know it.” He points at me. “I don't do this. You know I don't do this. When have you ever seen me lie on a bench and stare at a ceiling over a woman?”
I open my mouth.
He points harder. “Don't say Melissa. Melissa was different.”
“Melissa was also different and special and not like the others.”
“I hate you a little bit right now.”
I laugh, reaching for my water again. Above us, through the low ceiling, I can hear the muffled sounds of Max running post-call protocol with Zack and Rory.
His voice carries even through concrete, not because he shouts but because he speaks with the particular authority of a man who was essentially born already in charge of something.
“He's going to combust one day,” Jase says, also looking up at the ceiling. “Max. He's going to spontaneously combust from sheer tension and we're going to have to write it up as a workplace incident.”
“Born tired,” I say.
“Born braced,” Jase corrects. “There's a difference. Tired implies he ever relaxes.”
We sit with that for a moment.
“She had brown eyes,” Jase says.
I close mine. “Oh my God.”
“I'm just saying. Huge. Like a deer. And she was so—”
A loud clang from upstairs cuts him off. Then a second, smaller one, like something rolling across a concrete floor.
We both look at the ceiling.
“I'll check it out,” I say.
I take the stairs two at a time and stop dead at the top.
There is a woman in a wedding dress in our bay.
Not just any wedding dress. A destroyed one, the hem shredded and dark at the edges with soot, one sleeve hanging half off the shoulder.
She's standing next to the equipment rack with both hands wrapped around a pike pole she's clearly finished knocking back into place, and a helmet is still spinning slowly across the concrete toward the drain.
She sees me at the same moment I see her.
For a second neither of us moves.
She speaks first.
“I'm so sorry,” she says, and her voice is steadier than her eyes, which are doing the thing eyes do when a person is holding themselves together through sheer effort.
“It just fell. I barely touched it. I wasn't trying to—” She stops.
Takes a breath. “I'm looking for Jase Thibodeau. He gave me this.” She holds up a card with her free hand.
Our station card. “I signed myself out of the hospital — they gave me the discharge instructions and I just---" She stops.
Restarts. "I took a cab. The address was on the card.
" A small, slightly pained look, aware of how this all sounds.
"The bay door was up and there was no one in the front, so I came around and I shouldn't have walked in. I'm sorry.”
I know who she is before she finishes the first sentence.
There's no way, is the thought that moves through my head, quiet and certain. Jase has been lying on a bench press downstairs talking about brown eyes and a wedding dress for the past hour and here she is, standing in our bay holding a pike pole and apologizing for a helmet she knocked over.
“It's fine,” I say, and mean it, and take a few steps toward her.
Up close the bruise below her temple is worse than I expected and her feet, bare except for strips of medical tape, are not the feet of someone who should be standing on a concrete floor.
“He's downstairs. I'll get him in a second.” I nod toward her feet.
“Can I carry you up? Those shouldn't be on concrete.”
She looks down at her feet, then back at me, like she'd forgotten about them entirely.
“You don't have to do that,” she says.
“I know,” I say. “Can I?”
A pause. Something in her face loosens slightly.
“Okay,” she says. “Yes. Thank you.”
I close the distance between us and scoop her up, one arm under her knees, and she catches my shoulder with her good hand. Then I turn toward the basement stairs and holler down.
“Jase. Someone here for you.”
There's a beat of silence from below and then footsteps, fast ones, and by the time I've carried her to the top of the interior stairs Jase is already there.
He takes one look at her in my arms and his entire face does something embarrassing.
“Hey,” he says, voice dropping into something softer than his usual register. “Hey, you made it.”
“Hi,” she says to him, and the wariness in her expression shifts into something different. Something that looks like relief finding its proper target.
I set her down at the top of the stairs, making sure she's got her balance before I let go.
“Room at the end,” I tell them both.
It's the spare room. Sparse and a little grim, but it has a bed and a window, which puts it ahead of several options I've personally slept in over the years.
Inside, she stops in the center of the small space. The bruising below her left temple is more visible in this light, and the cut on her palm is bandaged, and there are shallow lacerations on her shins that someone has dressed. I clock all of it and make myself not react.
She's looking at the bed like she's not sure she deserves it.
“Please have a sit,” Jase says, and she does, immediately.
He crouches in front of her, checking her eyes with the quiet efficiency of someone who does this for a living, asking her a few low questions that she answers in a voice still a little rougher than it should be from the smoke.
I pull open the narrow closet. There's a small supply of extra station gear on the upper shelf and, below it, a collection of hoodies and sweatpants that have accumulated here through various channels of abandonment and collective amnesia.
I pull out a pair of FDNY sweats, a t-shirt, and the least offensive hoodie available, which still has something inexplicable stained on the left cuff, but beggars and all that.
I bring them to her, and she takes them with both hands, looking down at them like they're something valuable.
“Thank you,” she says.
“Don't thank me yet. There might be a mystery stain situation on the hoodie.”
Something almost a smile crossed her face. Jase catches it and I watch something settle in his expression, like a knot coming loose.
His radio crackles. Max's voice comes through, clipped and specific, asking for Thibodeau in the tone that means now rather than when convenient.
Jase looks at me. I look at him.
“Go,” I say.
He goes, but not without one last look at her from the doorway that she doesn't see because she's looking down at the clothes in her lap.
When the door clicks shut behind him, I check the bandaging on her foot on reflex, confirming the tape edges are holding. Then I straighten up.
“Do you need help with the dress?” I ask.
Because it's an honest question, not a loaded one.
The dress has approximately four hundred buttons running up the back of it, and with one hand bandaged and her arms clearly not at full strength, this is either a two-person job or an exercise in frustration.
She twists to glance at the buttons over her shoulder, and something tired and almost funny crosses her face. Like the buttons are the final insult in a very long list of insults.
“Please,” she says.
I move around behind her and start working.
There are, and I want to be clear about this, a lot of buttons.
Small, cloth-covered, infuriatingly fiddly buttons, about half of which have been slightly warped by heat or stiffened with dried smoke residue.
I take my time with them, which is the only sensible approach, and I make sure my fingers don't linger.
She has good posture, even now. It's unconscious, the kind that gets drilled into you young.
“Jase saved my life,” she says, after a minute of quiet.
“He did.”
“He rode in the ambulance with me.” A pause. “He didn't have to do that.”
“No,” I agree. “He didn't.”
“Is he always like that?”
I consider the question, working loose another two buttons. “Like what, specifically?”
“Like he actually means it. The caring about people. Like it's not a performance.”
“Jase?” I almost laugh. “Yes. He's exactly what he looks like. It's actually a little unnerving until you get used to it.”
She's quiet for a beat. I've made it roughly two-thirds of the way down, enough that I can see the line of her spine and the clasp of whatever she has on underneath. I keep my eyes on the buttons.