Chapter 4
Cole
I turned the water as cold as it would go and stood under it.
Oh my God.
Her voice kept playing in my head.
Oh my God, I'm so sorry. I—
I kept seeing her face when she realized what she'd done. Her hand over her mouth. Her eyes wide. The pull-back like she'd touched a stove.
I'd worked the rest of the call the way I worked any call.
Rolled hose. Stowed the ladder. Walked the structure twice to make sure we hadn't missed anyone.
Stood with Sam at the front of the engine while he gave the homeowner the briefing.
Rode back to the station with the windows down.
None of it had distracted me from how her lips felt on mine.
I stood under the water with my hands on the tile.
I had never kissed anyone in my life.
It hadn't been for lack of offers. I had been turning down a particular kind of offer for a long time. Every woman who'd ever approached me had been after one night. I wasn't built for one night.
I shut off the water and got dressed. The rest of the crew was asleep in their bunks.
I lay on my bunk and stared at the ceiling.
I couldn't shake how she'd looked at me. My body remembered the moment my head was trying to forget. Her lips on mine. Soft. Warm. The way she'd held my face. Her eyes when she pulled back. Her hair loose around her face. Her neck. The dip at her collarbone where the T-shirt collar had pulled away.
I stopped.
I was thirty-four years old. I was not going to lie in a bunk thinking about a woman's collarbone like a teenager with no discipline.
I turned on my side and made myself go to sleep.
The kitchen was quiet at six.
These calls took a toll. Every man at the table had pulled people out of windows in the dark. Every man at the table was walking into the next morning with the kind of tired that wasn't body-tired.
I poured my coffee and sat down. Davis was at the table with the newspaper. Hutch was at the counter with his cereal. The radio was on low. Nobody said anything.
I was grateful for it.
It would come back at me. I knew that. The crew would find their second wind, Martinez would be back from jury duty, and a lieutenant getting kissed on a lawn was not the kind of thing that stayed un-ribbed in this firehouse for long.
Just not this morning.
I got through my coffee. Read whatever Davis was done with in the paper. Sam came out of his office around seven, walked through the kitchen on the way to the bay, and didn't say anything to any of us. The shift change came. We handed the truck over to B-shift, did the briefing, and signed out.
I walked out to my truck in the lot.
The morning was gray. The air was cold, the way Havensworth was cold in November—not the cold that bit, the cold that sat on your shoulders and reminded you the year was almost done.
I sat in the truck with the keys in my hand.
I should have driven home. I'd had two hours of sleep, maybe three. The bed in my own house was the appropriate next stop for a man at the end of a shift like that.
I started the truck and drove to the hospital instead.
I didn't know why I did. I only realized what I'd done when I shut the engine off in the parking lot.
What was I doing here?
Lieutenants checked on the people they pulled out.
That was a thing lieutenants did. It wasn't weird.
I'd done it before—for a man I'd pulled out of a kitchen fire on Reynolds, for a kid who'd come off a bicycle in front of an oncoming truck and lived.
Most lieutenants did. The hospital was on my way home if I was loose about what on my way meant.
I was being loose about it.
I got out of the truck, locked it, and crossed the lot to the ER entrance.
The triage nurse looked up when I came in.
"Lieutenant Weston, Station 33. We had a house fire in Westbrook overnight. Mother and son for smoke inhalation. I wanted to check on them."
She tapped at the keyboard.
"St. George. Natalie and Noah."
I nodded.
"Still here. We're holding them through the morning. They're in observation. Room four."
"Thank you."
I went down the hall.
The door to Room 4 was closed. There was a small glass panel at eye level, the kind built into hospital doors for the staff to check on patients without going in. I stopped a step short of it and looked through.
The boy was asleep in bed. The blanket was pulled up to his chin. He looked smaller than he had on the lawn, but I'd carried him out, and I knew how big he was. Nine years old looked nine years old in a hospital bed.
The mother was in the chair next to him.
She'd pulled it as close to the bed as the room would let her.
One of her hands was on his arm, where it had fallen out of the blanket.
Her head had tipped to the side, and her hair had come loose from where she'd had it tied back. She was asleep. Both of them were.
I stood there for a beat I had no business taking.
She'd stayed up next to him until she couldn't anymore. The chair wasn't built for it. Her neck was going to hurt when she woke up. And she hadn't moved to the empty bed across the room because the empty bed wasn't where the boy was.
I made myself step back from the glass.
I'd come to know they were okay. They were.
I walked back out.
The next shift I caught was a quiet one. Quiet in the operational sense. Martinez had not stopped talking since he'd clocked in.
"Three days of my life," he said. "Three days I'm not getting back."
"You said," Davis said.
"Slipped on grapes, Davis. Grapes. In the produce aisle. The man's lawyer kept calling them the produce. Like that was the dignified word for it. My client encountered the produce."
Davis turned a page of the newspaper.
"Did he win?" Davis asked.
"He won. Three days of my life so a man could get paid for stepping on a grape."
Martinez took a long pull of his coffee and turned his head toward me.
The grin had been building for two days inside a courthouse and was about to be deployed.
"Lieutenant," he started.
"No."
"Just tell me one thing."
"No."
"Is she single?"
"It's none of your business."
"It's a yes or no question."
"It's none of your business."
I'd known this was coming since the morning after the call. Here it was.
The crew had filled him in during his jury duty.
I'd seen him texting back and forth with Davis through the days he'd been gone, the way Martinez always texted, in cryptic punctuation that said, I'm in court, I can't talk about the case, but tell me what I'm missing.
He had two days of stored material now. He was going to use it.
"I'm just saying," he said. "For the record. The kind of moment you had on that lawn happens in a book. In a movie. With music."
"Martinez."
"Hallmark Channel, Lieutenant. With the soft lighting."
"He's right," Davis said. "It was very Hallmark."
Martinez had, at twenty-nine, the worst romantic record of any man I'd ever met. He didn't have any trouble getting women to go out with him. He had every kind of trouble getting them to stay. He couldn't, despite the sample size, account for it.
"How's Taylor doing, Martinez?" I asked.
The grin froze.
"That's mean, Lieutenant."
"Just asking."
"You don't have to bring it up."
"I'm just expressing concern."
Davis was openly laughing into the newspaper now. Hutch made a sound that was almost not a laugh.
I picked up my coffee, took a long pull, and set the cup back down.
Martinez was looking past me. His face had done the thing it did when a pretty woman walked in. I'd seen it a hundred times.
"Cole."
Davis had stopped laughing.
I turned.
A woman was crossing the lot with a white box in both hands. She looked like she'd walked out of a church window with her white dress and the morning sun catching in her hair.
"Is that—"
"That's her."
"Lieutenant, she's gorgeous."
Sam came out of his office at the end of the kitchen and walked past us without looking at any of us.
The rest of the crew was making no effort to pretend they weren't watching.
She held out the box. People usually brought something to thank the crew after a good call. The bay had taken in a lot of casseroles over the years. Sam knew how to receive them. He nodded once at whatever she said and said something brief before he turned his head and looked at me.
The look was the kind of look you gave a person when you were telling someone else, with your eyes, You can tell him yourself.
"Cole. Come here a second."
Behind me, the crew made the noise—the low, drawn-out oh that meant they were enjoying this. Davis made it first. Hutch joined him. Even Martinez, whose grin was somewhere between betrayed and delighted, made it.
Here we go.
I stood up.
Sam walked past me, winking as he passed. He knew exactly what he was doing. I wasn't sure I was grateful for it.
I crossed the kitchen and the strip of bay floor between us. The crew was twenty feet behind me, still making no effort to pretend they weren't watching.
She was looking at me.
"Hi," I said.
"I wanted to say thank you," she said. "Properly. Not the way I said it the other night."
"You don't have to thank me."
"I do." A small pause. "And I wanted to apologize. For—for what I did. On the lawn. After you got us out."
"It—" I caught myself. "Don't worry about it."
The words were out before I'd thought about them. They were the wrong words.
"Does it?"
She'd said it lightly. The corner of her mouth did something that was almost a smile. Her eyes stayed on mine.
I'd walked into that.
"No." I cleared my throat. "But you don't need to apologize."
She held the look one beat longer. Then she let it go.
"Thank you for that."
She glanced past me toward the box, now on the kitchen counter behind the crew, then looked back at me.
"Mrs. Thompson made most of them. I made the cinnamon rolls."
Oh.
The morning at the bakery came back to me in the time it took me to register the word cinnamon. The Reeves cake. The smudge of flour on her apron. The smile she'd been holding the door shut with. Same woman.
I'd been carrying her around in my head without knowing it was her.
I made my face stay where it was.
"Tell her thank you. From all of us."
"I will."
Another small pause. Neither of us moved.
"I should introduce myself properly." She held out her hand. "Tessa Marin."
I took it.
Her hand was small in mine. Warm. Her skin was soft. Her grip was real—the grip a person gave you when she was meeting you on purpose.
"Cole Weston."
Her hand went slack in mine.
Tessa Marin. That wasn't the name on her chart.
For half a second, something moved across her face. Gone before I could name it. Then the smile came back—not the one from the bakery. Different. I watched her put it on.
She took her hand back a beat early.
"Nice to meet you, Cole."
I didn't know what had just happened, but I filed it away.
"How are you and your son doing?"
"Noah. He's okay. He's—yeah. He's okay." She caught the second okay and slowed herself. "He slept through the night, which I didn't expect. I thought he'd wake up. I kept checking on him."
"Good."
She nodded.
"Have you found a place to stay?"
"Yes. Mrs. Thompson has a spare room. She insisted. We're there for now, until we figure out what's next."
I nodded once.
Up close, she was beautiful in a way I'd been working on not noticing since she'd crossed the lot.
Dark eyes. Dark hair pulled back. The kind of skin that didn't need anything done to it.
There was a tiredness in her face I hadn't seen from across the bay—the kind that sat under the smile she'd built when I told her my name.
I made myself keep my eyes above her shoulders.
She didn't seem to want to be looked at the way I was looking at her.
I made myself stop.
"I should let you get back," she said.
"Okay."
She didn't move. Then she remembered she was the one leaving and took a step toward the bay door. Stopped. Looked back at me.
"Thank you, Cole. I don't know how to say it better than that."
"You don't have to."
She nodded and walked out of the bay, crossing the lot with her arms held close, her shoulders down.
I stood at the threshold of the bay for a beat longer than I needed to.