28. Distance and Decisions
Chapter twenty-eight
Distance and Decisions
Sterling
Jake’s couch is a lie. It’s a designer piece of charcoal-colored fabric that looks sleek in his living room, but it’s exactly four inches too short for a man of my height.
I spent the night folded into a cramped, miserable knot, staring at the blue light of the digital clock on his stove until the numbers blurred.
Every time I closed my eyes, the smell of woodsmoke from that minor trash fire call yesterday morning seemed to seep back out of my pores, mixing with the stale scent of Jake’s bachelor apartment.
It’s a smell I used to find comforting, the familiar scent of a brother-in-arms, but now it just smells like a retreat.
This is the second night I have spent on it in three days, and I have been keeping the ledger the way I keep every ledger, which is precisely and without ever looking straight at the total.
Night one: here, folded onto four feet of designer charcoal, after the blowout at the loft and the silence that followed my confession.
Day one into day two: a full twenty-four on at Ninety-Nine, eight in the morning through eight the next. A shift I was legitimately scheduled for, and which I have never in all my life been so grateful to find on a roster.
Day two: I walked out of that shift at 8 o’clock, walked into the captain’s office at 8:01, and asked him what he had. He had a hole from eight to midnight. I took it. Sixteen more hours of other people’s emergencies, and at a quarter past midnight I drove straight here.
Three days. I have not set foot in my own home in three days. I have a key in my pocket and a lease with my name on it, and I have been sleeping on a couch four inches too short for me, and if you had asked me at any point in those seventy-two hours why, I would have told you it was the schedule.
There was no logic to any of it beyond the sheer coward’s instinct to flee.
I couldn’t stand to be in the same zip code as my own vulnerability, so I put a shift between me and it, and then I put another one.
Both nights I crashed on Jake’s couch, listening to the muffled sounds of the city through windows that have the same industrial thickness of my own.
I’d woken up three times thinking I heard a cat meowing for breakfast, only to realize it was just the screech of the ’L’ train a few blocks over.
I pull my boots on at six a.m., my joints groaning in protest. My back feels like it’s been put through a hydraulic press.
Jake’s door is closed so he is probably still dead to the world, about to drown in a puddle of his own drool.
I don’t leave a note. I don’t have the words for one anyway. I just grab my keys and head out.
The elevator ride up to the fifth floor feels longer than usual.
Usually, I’m bracing myself for Bowie to dart between my legs or for Mandy to be standing at the counter with a mug of tea, her auburn hair a chaotic mess of waves.
I tell myself I’m ready for the silence.
I tell myself that this is what I wanted, to stop the performance before the lines blurred so much I couldn’t find my way back to the truth.
I’m a firefighter. I know how to handle an exit strategy.
You find the door, you check for heat, and you get out before the roof comes down.
But as the bell dings, my stomach does a slow, sickening roll.
The heavy steel door of the loft swings open with a groan that echoes through the entire space.
The first thing I notice isn’t what’s there, but what isn’t.
The air is still. The industrial hum of the refrigerator is the only sound, stripped of the background noise of her humming or the scratching of charcoal on paper.
The concrete floors look wider, flatter, and completely indifferent to my return.
My footsteps sound like gunshots against the floor as I walk toward the kitchen.
She’s gone. It’s not a surprise, but it hits like a physical blow to the solar plexus.
The countertop is wiped clean, not a single stray crumb or a ring from a tea mug left behind.
The blue notebook, the one where we wrote our lies, the one with the ’Roommate Rules’, is sitting by the sink, perfectly aligned with the edge of the granite.
I pick it up, my thumb tracing the spiral binding.
I flip it open to the first page and there it is, her red-pen addition in that neat, artistic script: No being weird about this.
I let out a breath that tastes like ash.
We failed the most important rule. We got weird.
We got so weird that we turned six years of friendship into a high-stakes heist, and now I’m standing in a vault that’s been picked clean.
The ink of that red pen looks like a warning light I ignored for far too long.
I’d told her I loved her, and she had responded with a silence that emptied the building faster than any fire alarm ever could.
I look toward the guest room door, the wood grain looking stark in the morning light.
I shouldn’t go in there. It’s a tactical error.
But my feet move anyway, drawn by the ghost of a scent I can already identify before I even cross the threshold.
The room is perfectly staged, like a furniture catalog.
The bed is made, the sheets pulled so tight the whole thing looks unslept in.
Sitting right in the center of the duvet is a single, folded shirt.
It’s the one she claimed on her first night here, the one that used to hang halfway down her thighs while she padded around my kitchen.
I pick it up, and the scent of her lavender shampoo hits me so hard I have to sit down on the edge of the mattress.
It’s faint, a lingering echo of her presence, but in the sterile silence of the loft, it’s deafening.
I bury my face in the fabric for a single, weak second, breathing in the last of the woman who had made this warehouse feel like a home instead of just a space to sleep when I’m not working.
She hadn’t even taken the shirt. She’d left it behind like a return to sender, a quiet statement that she didn’t want any part of my life to cling to her anymore.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, a violent vibration that makes me jump. It’s a text from Jake.
*Wake up sleeping beauty.*
*I’m at the Teacup. You want anything?*
I stare at the text and wonder if Mandy is there too.
*And no your girlfriend isn’t here, but Kayla said she’s in a new apartment already.*
*Also Kayla wants me to tell you you’re a dumbass and her old building is boarded up so the landlord put her in one of his other places. She’s been there two days.*
I stare at the screen until the light dims. She’d been tracking the repair timeline.
She’d been planning the move while I was busy pretending that sharing a bed didn’t change the molecular structure of my life.
I hadn’t asked when she was leaving. I hadn’t wanted to know.
I add that to the list of things I’ve been avoiding, right under ’confessing I’m in love with my best friend.
’ Two days. She had been gone for two of the three days I spent not coming home, and I had been so busy volunteering for other people’s fires that I never noticed the air change in my own place.
I can’t stay here. The loft has reorganized itself around her absence.
Every shadow in the corner looks like her silhouette; every creak of the floorboards sounds like her coming around the corner to tell me I’m being ridiculous.
I shove the sweatshirt into the back of my closet, burying it under a pile of uniforms where I don’t have to look at it, and grab my gear bag.
If I can’t be in my own head, I’ll go where the noise is.
I’ll go where someone else’s emergency is louder than mine.
Firehouse 99 is a beehive of activity when I pull in.
The smell of diesel and floor wax is a relief, a sensory anchor that tells me who I am supposed to be.
I walk into the captain’s office and ask for an extra shift.
The Captain doesn’t even look up from his paperwork; he just nods and marks it down.
He knows my history. He knows that when a Hayes starts picking up doubles, it means something at home is on fire and we don’t have enough water to put it out.
It’s the family curse, we work until we’re numb, then we work some more.
Jake is in the kitchen drinking a fresh cup of coffee when I emerge, still in his street clothes, having clearly come straight in from the Teacup.
He looks at me, then at the clock, then back at me.
He doesn’t say ’I told you so.’ He doesn’t even tease me about ’Saint Sterling’ or my new status as a temporary homeless person.
He just slides another cup of coffee from the cafe across the industrial stainless-steel counter.
I hate that he knows me well enough to see through my bullshit. He knew this is where I’d be after that text even if I left it on read.
“You’re a masochist, Hayes. You know that, right? ”
“I’m a public servant, Lawson,” I say, the lie feeling familiar and heavy in my mouth. “There’s a difference. ”
“Is there?” Jake leans back, his eyes narrowing as he takes a sip of his own coffee.
“Because from where I’m standing, you’re just running back into a burning building because you don’t like how quiet the street is.
You offered her an exit because you were too terrified to see if she’d take an entrance.
You made it easy for her to leave, Sterling.
You practically opened the car door and handed her a map. ”
“I gave her what she needed,” I snap, the sharpness of my own voice surprising me.
I feel the heat rising in my neck. “She needed to get her life back. She didn’t ask for a fake boyfriend and a ring she doesn’t want.
I was an emergency shelter, Jake. The emergency is over. The tenant vacated. End of story. ”