66. Chapter 57
Dashiell
Two weeks after the fire
The department clears me for active duty faster than I expected, but not as fast as I would like.
My injuries were less than anyone could’ve anticipated.
The burns healed quickly into thin, pale lines on my palms and forearms. The doctors say that, eventually, they’ll fade to tough scars, but those scars will never go away.
Good, I think.
I need scars from that night.
Once I’m back at Station 27, Nick doesn’t rush me back onto calls. He makes me do desk work, at first, administrative stuff, stuff that I hate. Nobody signs up for these unglamorous parts of firefighting, but they’re just as important as the running into buildings, as the rescuing.
So I do them without complaint.
“You’ll know when you’re really ready,” he tells me once when I push back after he tells me I’ll be spending another shift at a computer. “It won’t be as soon as you want it to be. That’s okay. Don’t rush your healing, Dash.”
Don’t rush your healing.
Not bad advice, I decide.
And maybe the scars on my hands aren’t the only things that need to heal.
Two months after the fire
My first fire back is a holiday dinner gone wrong.
It’s small and contained. I’ve run calls like that a dozen times, it seems, without thinking twice.
But still, after this one, I have to sit in the truck for a full five minutes, my hands shaking until Vinnie angles himself into the truck and asks me if I’m okay.
“I’m fine,” I insist, sitting on my hands.
“You sure?”
“No. I’m not. But I’ll be fine, okay? I just have to keep saying it until I believe it.”
He sits there with me for a moment. Then says, “You don’t have to be fine. Not now, not yet. You can feel everything you need to feel about that fire.” After a moment’s hesitation, he adds, “And about Lorenzo. About what happened with you two.”
I don’t talk about Lorenzo very much. What is there to say? I got my heart broken by someone who loved me so much that he thought the best way out was cruelty? Someone who tried to kill his own brother, and who probably would’ve if I hadn’t gotten there in time?
Yeah, I have nothing to say about that.
Six months after the fire
To celebrate my twenty-third birthday, Grandma Novak takes me to bingo at the Knights of Columbus hall.
“No clubs for us,” she says conspiratorially. Half-jokes and oblique references are as close as we get to talking about the night at Lo Scandalo. Though she never says it, I think the fire left her as scared as it left me.
“Bingo sounds fun,” I tell her, because it does.
And it is.
Halfway through, when she’s won a round and screamed at Zelda Callahan for cheating on another, she sets her chips down and looks at me from beneath her vast, curly wig. “So. How’s my grandson?”
“I’m…fine.” The sudden interrogation has caught me off guard.
“Hm. I don’t buy it. You seem distracted, and you’ve been distracted for months.” She fires up a cigarette—still hasn’t quit—and ignores Zelda Callahan’s dramatic coughing.
“I really am okay, Grandma.”
“Eh. Fine, okay. These aren’t real feelings, Dashiell. You might be twenty-three now, but you’re still a kid! You’re still growing up! You gotta let yourself feel all those messy emotions inside you. You have to let yourself do that.”
I suddenly find my bingo card extra fascinating.
I can’t meet her gaze. I push chips around on the plastic-topped table.
“I don’t know, Grandma. It’s just all so big.
I felt like an idiot after Lorenzo dumped me, and then when he told me that he could’ve loved me the whole time?
It made me feel like an even bigger idiot. ”
“Do you feel better now that he’s in prison?” At my sharp look, she shrugs. “What? I read the newspapers. Do you think he’s where he belongs?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “He turned himself in. And he helped bring his old criminal empire to justice.”
“Now I hear something about a foundation.”
I have, too, but I don’t say that. I don’t want her to know that I, too, have been reading all the news I can find about Lorenzo Diamante.
“Why did you feel like an idiot?”
I sigh. “Because I would’ve loved him, too, Grandma. Before he ended things, I would’ve loved him. After he came back, I think I would’ve loved him, too. Doesn’t that make me an idiot, or a fool?”
“No,” she says sharply. “I think it makes you human. Love, right? That’s one of the most human things there is.”
Nine months after the fire
I’ve started having dinner regularly with Nick and his husband, Tristan. Though Tristan and I never spent much time together before, I’ve started to consider him a good friend.
He knows something about loss, too. About overcoming pain and grief and how those things can get all tangled up in love and make things confusing.
After I tell him how I’m feeling, he offers to connect me to a therapist, someone he really trusts, and I agree. She’s a good one, he says. Queer-friendly, kink-aware, and I find that she’s a great person to talk to.
I tell her everything about that month with Lorenzo and how it’s been impossible to leave it in the past, as much as I want to.
I tell her how much I liked what Lorenzo and I did together, and how I feel guilty about that now.
Am I still allowed to like that, to want that, considering who I learned it from?
“You can keep what was good,” she says frankly. “The relationship might’ve ended, but that doesn’t make the very real desires and pleasures you had fake. Those were never his to take with him. Those belong to you.”
Taking her advice, I start dating again.
At first, I’m slow and careful, exploring the scene mostly out of curiosity rather than any hunger for something new.
I meet up with some guys from the apps. Get drinks with others at bars.
There’s even a single second date with a paramedic from another station.
He’s sweet, fine, but I feel nothing for him beyond that sweetness.
All of the dating really serves another purpose: an audit of sorts. Figuring out what I like, what I don’t like. What I want, and, more importantly, who I want to be.
Eventually, I go to another club. Not Lo Scandalo, of course, because even nine months later it’s nothing more than a construction site and some caution tape.
Instead, I find a smaller, quieter place across the city with an excellent playroom and a strict, affirming consent-driven culture that makes me trust it within moments of arriving.
I’m not there to look for a partner, though. I’m just there to look for myself.
A Dom who introduces himself as Daniel buys me a drink. He’s older, soft-spoken, and completely unlike Lorenzo in every way that matters to me. He’s not my type in the least, and over drinks he tells me that he works in IT, and that no one in his life knows that he’s actually a Dom.
When I tell him why I’m here, how I’m trying to understand what I like, he offers up his services.
“I’d like that,” I say, because that’s exactly what I need.
He takes me to the playroom and talks me carefully through a scene. He’s a gentle, strict Dom, precise in his instructions, rigid in his interrogation of my consent.
We negotiate my limits, and it’s nice for me to consider them without the thoughts of Lorenzo clouding my judgment—but even as I decide what I, alone, am comfortable with, I can’t help but picture Lorenzo in Daniel’s place.
Daniel uses rope on me, tying me up and using a paddle on me, then edging me between each set. There’s no degradation, no praise, nothing about the scene that will leave anything aside from marks on my ass, and a deepening understanding of myself.
After him, there are others, spread out over weeks, when I feel that it’s right to go to the club. Slowly, I piece together what I like. What I want. What I need.
Those scenes affirm for me what I knew about myself: I like being submissive.
It brings me to a sort of quiet, floating headspace that’s strangely tranquil, even if it’s mixed with intense physical pain.
There’s a powerful relief for me in choosing to completely hand control of myself and my pleasure over to someone else.
Some things, I realize, I don’t like as much. Degradation, for instance, doesn’t sound the same when it comes from a stranger’s mouth.
Only Lorenzo’s.
One year after the fire
Mila buys me a coffee to celebrate Giovanni’s trial date finally being set. We meet at the same coffee shop where she first told me about Saturn Industrial Holdings.
“We did that shit,” she says as we settle into mismatched chairs and sip our lattes. “You did that shit, Dash. The department owes you more than just a commendation plaque, even though that’s all you’re getting.”
“Honestly, I don’t even need the plaque. What am I going to do with it?”
She shrugs. “Use it as a paperweight or something.”
“So. How’s life?” she asks.
I hide a grin in my latte. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh. I just heard from Nick that he’s seen you at the Anvil a few times recently.” She winks.
The Anvil is the club I’ve been frequenting. And yes, I’ve seen Nick—and Tristan—there. Three times, now. Once, I watched while Nick fucked Tristan in a swing. Another time, they watched me get tied up and covered in hot wax. You know, just normal coworker things.
“I hope he didn’t go into specifics,” I say, blushing.
“Nothing too graphic,” she says with a grin. “But I’m happy for you, that you’re finding yourself. It’s about time.”
One year, six months after the fire
The article is small, with a clickbait-y headline, the kind that I would normally ignore, and honestly wouldn’t have seen, if Vinnie hadn’t texted a screenshot of it to our Station group chat with four exclamation points and zero context.
Diamante Family Foundation to Open Doors Next Month, A Year and a Half since Nightclub Fire.
I’m in my bunk room at the Station when I get the message. I read it twice.
It’s short and to the point. Lorenzo, it says, has been released from prison. He cooperated with the investigation against Giovanni and against their broader criminal empire, and thanks to that, he’s now a free man. A convicted felon, yes, but a free man.
And, he really did it. I’d heard rumors early on, but over the last six months or so I’ve stopped revisiting the memories of Lorenzo.
Our time together was, in the grand scheme of things, pretty short.
A month can be worth a lifetime, and that month certainly changed my life, but it’s stopped defining me.
I’ve no longer been scouring the news for anything about Lorenzo.
I’ve let him go.
But this Lorenzo that’s been released, the Lorenzo that put out a statement saying how humbled he was by his time in prison, how he’s ready to spend the rest of his life giving back to a world his family only ever took from, seems genuine.
It’s a scary thought, that he might be someone I could even look up to and respect.
The last part of the article is what surprises me the most: his foundation has made a massive donation to the SFFD. Aside from the article, it hasn’t been publicized at all. He asked for the department not to put out a press release. But it’s there.
The article mentions the date of the grand opening—a month from now. It’ll be a public event, with opening remarks from the president of the foundation: Lorenzo Diamante himself.
For a long time, I sit with my phone in my hand.
I think about Lorenzo’s words, a year and a half ago, when he told me that, given the time, he could’ve grown to love me.
I think about my own quiet knowledge that, given the time, I would’ve only fallen more in love with him.
I think about Daniel and how he showed me what I wanted, and how I could claim it.
About my therapist, who told me it was okay to take the good and move on.
And Grandma, who told me that love is, after all, one of the most human things.
Growth, I think, is another fundamentally human thing.
In the last year and a half, I’ve grown. I’ve changed. I’m not the man I once was.
Who am I to say the same isn’t true for Lorenzo?
I check my schedule for the next month, and before I’ve even texted Nick asking for a specific date off, I already know that I’m going to go to that opening gala.