Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Colton
To comply with local rules, I have to spend the last day of every other week on limited duty, which just means I’m not available for calls that day.
I do all the support work I want but I can’t fight a fire.
None of that is relevant right now except that a big part of how I ended up taking on the bulk of the cooking work is just the consistency of my schedule.
So now I’m sitting at the table, eating dinner, and thinking about Gianna.
Today isn’t the first day I notice something in her eyes that tells me she’s going through something.
It’s the first day I ask her about it. While I’m on the subject, today isn’t the first day I wonder how wonderful it might be to kiss her, but it’s the first day I find out.
That kiss was so sweet.
I think aspartame is four or five hundred times sweeter than sugar.
It might be saccharin. I remember that was an answer on a card back when I played a trivia game when I was a kid.
The science category. Well, I can tell you that when Gianna kissed me, it was a couple hundred times sweeter than a normal kiss. You can bank on that.
I don’t know what that girl goes through for her to look as sad as she does.
She’s too young to be that sad. I think she’s probably in her very early twenties.
Most certainly, she can’t be twenty-five yet.
I suppose that means I shouldn’t be thinking about her the way I do.
In a best-case scenario, I’m eleven years older than her.
“Hey GB, what’s for dinner?” Hank Kelton asks as he steps into the kitchen. He’s working part time now. He got married to a really cute girl a few years back and they have three kids already and one on the way.
“How the hell are you, Morris? Company Picnic.” That’s what we call when I make burgers and bratwurst along with potato salad, chips, and coleslaw. Company Picnic.
He calls me GB. It’s short for Gentle Ben from the television show.
I call him Hobbes. That’s from the comic book.
I’m a bear shifter, and he’s a tiger shifter.
All of the firemen in Company 417 are shifters.
It’s kept secret by the state government.
Only a handful of humans know about it. Pure humans, I mean.
Shifters are human but just more than human.
We came out to the world a couple of decades back, but the politicians don’t think people are ready to know there are shifter firemen or shifter police officers or the like. So, we’re still secret. The truth is most of humanity thinks the whole shifter thing is just a hoax anyway.
Hank walks off and two more of my brothers walk in.
Wayne and Wyatt Macon are actual brothers.
Biological brothers. Twins to be precise.
They are two of our newest recruits. They are both wolf shifters.
They instantly start leaning in to see what’s for dinner.
“Hey, back off, you two. Go ahead and grab your grub.”
“Okay, boss.” They answer in unison and smile like mirror images, which is what they are, of course. I wonder if they drove their mom crazy. I wonder if they shared a girlfriend back in high school without the girl knowing. I wonder all the silly, stupid things people wonder about twins.
I’m watching them pile food on their plates when the call comes in. It’s a house fire.
The Macon twins groan, but we all get moving just the same. I run past them. “Don’t worry, Romulus and Remus, I’m sure you’ll get back before it’s too cold.”
We pull on our gear and get the trucks moving out. It all happens within minutes.
The house isn’t too far from the station. It’s in an older section of an older subdivision. The houses here are nice and would probably have been considered palatial around the 1970s or 80s.
The house is ablaze in one area but it doesn’t seem too bad yet. Vic pulls the engine to the side and I leap out. I see a guy pacing on the lawn out front, yelling to the looky-loo neighbors about something over and over.
The guys get the hoses connected to the fire hydrant and the pump. I approach the guy to see if he’s been injured or knows anything about how things started.
“Hey, man, hey there...”
He turns around. “Why the fuck is everyone standing around? My sister’s in there! I told her to stop, but she just wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Okay, look, I’m heading in. We’ll get her out, okay? The fire isn’t too widespread yet. Just hang on.”
I communicate to the team that there is someone in the house and that I’m going in to search. I ask Wayne to follow me.
We get in and, though the fire is on one side of the place, smoke is already pretty thick throughout. I motion to Wayne to head in one direction and I start checking rooms down another hallway.
The second room I check out, I get lucky. But the girl is not.
She’s turned away from me and pinned against a wall by a bookshelf that has fallen. I’m guessing that the girl may have been grabbing something of value and in her haste somehow jarred the bookcase too much. Whatever happened, she’s in trouble now because the smoke is growing thicker.
I get to her quickly and walk around so I can talk to her, and then I stop cold.
“Gianna?”
She lifts her head, but she doesn’t immediately recognize me. In my gear, I’m guessing I look very different since my face is mostly covered.
I come back to myself. She needs to get out of this smoke. I can’t give her my mask as much as I might want to because I need to be able to stay coherent, but I need to get moving.
I try to shift the bookcase, and she cries out. Okay, so this thing is very heavy and going to need a delicate touch to free her without harming her. Normally, I would be as calm as can be, analyzing and acting with trained efficiency.
But this is Gianna, and I feel an entirely different urgency here.
I want to shift, but the space is just too confined. I would rip my gear to pieces. Oh, that doesn’t matter but it would explode outward like shrapnel. Confined quarters limit me if I care about the surroundings.
I can draw on some of my shifter strength, though, if I begin a shift and change directions mid-shift. It’s hard to explain, but there can be a brief moment where I can be both human and bear at the same time, with enhancements from both.
We don’t bother to do it often because it can be draining, but I do it now.
My body gets a surge of energy and my senses sharpen and in that brief moment before my body truly transforms, I grab the bookcase and manage to lift it and push it back from Gianna.
It falls away and I stagger back but hold on to be able to grab her as she slumps to the floor. I swing her up into my arms and head for the front door. I radio Wayne that I’ve found her.
He trots up from the next room and we run out together.
The fire is coming under control. I hurry Gianna to a waiting ambulance.
I look around for her brother, but I don’t see him.
The house has suffered some pretty severe damage to one side, but the rest of the house is fine. It’s constructed with a floorplan like an L. Only the short wing of the house burned at all.
We clear things up, and a small crew stays behind to do a brief investigation to be able to finish reports on the call. I ride back to the station.
I don’t want dinner, but I eat some because I know I need it.
I can’t stop thinking about Gianna. What was she doing running into that house?
How is she doing now? Is she back home? Not knowing is killing me.
The good thing about being a firefighter is that I have access to things I really shouldn’t have. I mean to the information.
I give a call to the local hospital. I speak to an admitting clerk who knows me, talk for a few seconds about the fire, and find out that Gianna is in a room, admitted with smoke inhalation and injuries sustained from the bookcase falling on her.
Now, I know what I'm going to do.
I head out to the hospital. I picture her from the morning, worried and stressed but still smiling the best she could.
And I think about that kiss.
I get to the hospital and have no real problem checking in on the patient I just rescued, more perks from the fireman status. I find her room and see that no one else has arrived yet, or they’re off getting something in the cafeteria.
So, I slip in and look at her. She’s sleeping. She has some bandages and her right leg is in a temporary brace. She has a bandage on her forehead.
She’s still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. She’s the bravest. I lean down and whisper, “Gianna, this is C. Tanner, Colton, and I want you to know that that kiss at the store was the best thing that has ever happened to me. I haven’t stopped thinking about it or you.”
I seal it with a kiss on her cheek, and then I leave.
The whole drive back to the fire station, I just see her in that bed and I get more and more worked up. That girl deserves more than that.
I feel such a strange need to protect her. I know that I will probably just head right back to the hospital when my shift ends at four.