Chapter 6
SIX
JESS
As a child, I almost drowned in the river behind my grandparents’ place.
It started as a slippery rock, one bad step, a sudden plunge. What I remember most isn’t the water—it’s the silence. The way the world went muffled and far away while my body panicked and clawed for the surface.
This felt like that.
Sound came back first, in fragments. A high, shrill keening that might’ve been a siren. Someone shouting something about pressure. The hiss of water. Boots on pavement. All of it warped and distant, like I listening from the bottom of a pool.
Then came sensation.
Cold concrete under my hip and shoulder. A hard edge against my spine. My lungs burned, raw and tight. Something plastic covered my mouth and nose, pressing into my skin, hissing with every inhale.
My brain scrabbled toward a thought: mask. Oxygen. That’s what they put on people on TV when things had gone really, really wrong.
I tried to move. My limbs answered like they were made of wet sand.
A warm, solid weight settled against my shoulder, keeping me from lurching upright. “Hey. Easy.”
His voice cut through everything else.
Even before the rest of the world came into focus, I recognized that voice. Low. Steady. A little rough around the edges, like it had been scraped over gravel.
Powell.
My eyes dragged open, the lids heavy and reluctant. The night above me was smeared and bright—Christmas lights, street lamps, and something flashing red-blue-red again. My vision tunneled and then snapped back, narrowing on the dark silhouette leaning over me.
He was close. Too close. His features resolved slowly: soot streaked across his cheek, mask askew on top of his head, brows drawn tight with a worry I’d never seen on his face before. His hand curled firm around my shoulder, fingers splayed as if he could anchor me to the concrete.
“Jess.” My name in his mouth came out like a promise and a plea at the same time. “You with me?”
The plastic mask over my nose and mouth made it hard to talk. I managed the tiniest nod. The motion sent a spike of pain behind my eyes.
Everything smelled of burned plastic and old coffee and wet asphalt. The back of my throat tasted like an ashtray. I coughed, and that hurt too, a raw scraping up my windpipe that made my eyes water.
“Slow breaths,” he said. “In through the mask. Let the O2 do the work.”
Bossy, I thought fuzzily. But my lungs were in no shape to argue, so I tried it his way. Cool, faintly metallic air flowed in as I inhaled. It wasn’t pleasant, exactly, but it was better than choking.
Bits and pieces came back in disjointed flashes: the flicker of the breaker panel in the back of the truck, that weird electrical odor, a sudden plume of smoke where there absolutely should not have been any, and the bone-deep, oh-shit certainty that things were about to go sideways.
And then nothing.
I forced my gaze to shift past him, toward where my truck should be.
Pour Decisions looked… wrong.
Soot coated the Airstream’s shiny skin, black fans of smoke staining the metal above the service window.
The roof vent was warped, edges crumpled inward.
Water pooled dark underneath, reflecting the sagging tangle of ruined twinkle lights that had once cheerfully framed my workspace.
The wreath I’d wired up that afternoon—fake holly, real pinecones, red ribbon—hung crooked and blackened, edges curled from heat.
Steam belched from the open side door, the one I’d cursed a hundred times for sticking, the one that had clearly lost that fight tonight. Firefighters moved around the truck, hoses sweeping, voices clipped as they called to each other.
The sight punched the air out of my lungs harder than the smoke had.
I’d lived in this town long enough to know what fire could do to a structure. I’d watch it strip a building down to studs in less than half an hour. A food truck was smaller. In no universe was the damage anything but expensive and catastrophic.
A broken, ugly little laugh tried to push out of my chest and came out as another cough instead.
Powell’s hand tightened on my shoulder. “Hey. Easy.”
“My… truck…” The words rasped against the mask. I tried to lift a hand to point, but it trembled halfway up and fell uselessly back to the concrete.
He followed my gaze. His jaw flexed, a muscle ticking once near his ear. “You’re okay,” he said quietly. “That’s what matters.”
“That’s—” I coughed again, throat protesting. “That’s my everything.”
The oxygen mask mangled the consonants, but he understood anyway. His expression shifted, some mix of sympathy and something darker moving behind his eyes. “I know.”
He couldn’t. Not really. Pour Decisions wasn’t just a truck and an espresso machine and a hand-painted logo.
It was every inch of independence I had left.
My rent. My savings. My hours and my recipes and my stupid, stubborn dream of not having to answer to anybody after a lifetime of answering to everybody.
The holiday season was when I made enough to float the slow months. December paid for March. December kept the doors open. December meant appointments on my calendar and preorders and special orders and custom holiday drinks with kitschy names that regulars loved.
And now my December leaked steam into the night while strangers watched.
The backs of my eyes burned. I told myself it was from the smoke.
My chest hitched anyway.
Powell shifted closer, his knees brushing my thigh. The contact shouldn’t have felt like anything through layers of denim and turnout pants, but my body registered it like a line drawn in the sand. He was solid and warm, and somehow I knew he wasn’t going anywhere.
For once, I didn’t flinch away.
It hadn’t really registered until that moment that he was filthy. His gear was damp, darker in patches. Soot streaked his forehead where he’d shoved his mask up. A smear of something that looked suspiciously like the shape of someone’s hand ran along his jaw.
My hand?
Nope. Not going down that road just now.
“You went in,” I said, voice small even to my own ears. “The door…”
“Stuck,” he agreed. The grim tone wasn’t aimed at me. “We forced it.”
“I told you,” I whispered, the guilt curling cold and sharp in my stomach. “I told you it was—”
“Yeah,” he cut in quietly. “You did. And you’re still here.”
That shouldn’t have been enough to derail my spiral, but it was. For a second, all I could focus on was the way he said it—like alive was a thing I’d accomplished on purpose, not something he’d dragged me back to with brute strength and stubbornness.
A gust of cold air slipped under the edge of my sweatshirt. My whole body shivered.
He noticed me shivering, because of course he did. “Hang on,” he said, voice low.
His hand left my shoulder, and for one stupid second, I felt the absence—like someone had unplugged the space heater.
A moment later, he dug around in one of the endless compartments in one of the rigs and came back with a folded mylar emergency blanket.
He snapped it open with a practiced flick, the metallic gold-and-silver crinkling loudly in the chilly night air.
“Let me,” he murmured.
He draped it around my shoulders carefully, adjusting the edges so they didn’t interfere with the oxygen mask straps. The foil rustled as it settled over me, trapping heat against my body. It wasn’t soft, but it was warm, and it felt like a barrier between me and the night.
“There,” he said. “Better?”
I managed a small nod. The blanket reflected the flashing lights in sharp glints; every time I breathed, the air from the mask fogged a little patch of silver near my cheek.
The world shrank down to the circle of warmth inside the mylar blanket and the way his knee stayed pressed against my leg, steady and uncompromising.
I should have pushed it away. I should have shoved the blanket back at him with some sharp remark about not needing his charity. That was the script. That was how this went.
I didn’t do either of those things.
I curled my fingers into the blanket and held on.
“I can’t…” My throat closed up for a second. When I forced the words out, they sounded small and wrecked. “I can’t afford this.”
I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. The admission slipped past whatever defenses I had left, a truth too big to be contained.
He didn’t rush in with platitudes, didn’t try to tell me it would be fine when it absolutely might not be. He just absorbed it, eyes dark, nodding once like he’d already considered that and filed it under Reasons to Take This Seriously.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said eventually.
The word snagged in my ears. “We?”
His lips twitched, more grim than amused. “You think I’m walking away from this and pretending it’s not my business?”
“Pretty sure it’s literally your business,” I croaked. “You’re the fire department.”
The corner of his mouth tipped up a little more. “That too.”
Another wave of shivering slashed through me. This time I didn’t fight it when he shifted even closer. An arm brushed my back cautiously, giving me plenty of time to swat him away.
I didn’t.
I leaned in.
It was automatic—a gravity thing more than a decision. My body tipped infinitesimally toward the nearest stable point, and apparently that was him. My shoulder bumped his chest. His arm came up reflexively to steady me, palm broad and firm between my shoulder blades.
For a second, we both froze.
Then he exhaled slowly, the movement of his chest a subtle rise against my arm, and adjusted his grip to something more obviously supportive and less like he was afraid of spooking me.
I rested there. Not fully against him—we weren’t cuddling on the sidewalk like idiots—but close enough that his warmth seemed to reach me, even through the turnout coat and my sweatshirt.
If I thought too hard about it, I’d pass out just to avoid the emotional implications.
So I didn’t think. I just let myself not hold my own weight for a minute.