4. Chapter 4
This is not a warehouse. This is a house, a real one, somebody's home, and the dispatch voice is already saying the words that change everything. Working fire. Occupants reported. Persons trapped.
We roll hot. The engine screams through empty streets, and I am buckled in across from Chase, dragging my hood up, snapping my coat closed, and I can see it through the windshield before we even turn the corner.
Orange light pulsing against the underside of the smoke, a glow that does not flicker so much as breathe.
"Stay on me," Chase says. He has to shout it over the siren. "Whatever happens in there, you are on my hip. You do not freelance. You see fire over your head, you tell me. Understand?"
"Understand."
His eyes hold mine one second longer. Then we are there.
The house is half gone already. Flame rolls out of two upstairs windows, clawing up the siding, and the heat hits me the second I drop off the rig, a wall of it, pushing at my face shield.
A woman is screaming on the lawn, barefoot in a nightgown, and she is pointing at the house and saying a name over and over.
My husband. He's still in there.
The captain pulls up in his car and starts barking assignments.
Chase grabs the line, grabs me and we go, up the porch steps, through the front door into a world that has gone black and roaring.
My flashlight beam dies two feet in front of my face, swallowed whole.
The heat presses down from the ceiling like a hand.
I drop to a crouch the way I was trained, low where the air is, and I stay on Chase's hip exactly like he said.
We sweep the ground floor. Kitchen, living room, a hall. Nothing. The fire is above us, chewing through the second floor, and I can hear it, a freight-train sound, the worst sound in the world. Chase finds the stairs and we climb.
At the top there is a hallway full of smoke and one door with a thin line of light bleeding under it.
Chase sounds the floor. Solid. We move. He gets the door and there, slumped on the floor between the bed and the wall, is a man – big, fortyish, overcome by the smoke, not moving, and for one sick second I think we are too late.
Then he coughs.
Chase has him in a heartbeat, hauling an arm across his shoulders, dragging him up and turning for the door.
And that is when I hear it. A groan above us, deep in the bones of the house, the ceiling joists giving up.
I look up. I do not even think. I see the beam coming down right where the man is, right where Chase is turning under his weight, and I do the only thing my body knows how to do.
I throw myself over them.
The beam catches me across the back and shoulders, a freight of burning weight from shoulder to hip, and it drives me down onto one knee.
Pain explodes white behind my eyes. Something rakes hot across my shoulder blade, through the coat, through the layers, a line of fire I feel in my teeth.
I am screaming, I think. I cannot hear it over the roar.
But the man is clear. Chase is clear. The beam is half on me and half on the floor and I shove at it with everything I have, and then Chase's hand is fisting in my coat - again, always - and he hauls, and the weight comes off, and we are moving, all three of us, down the stairs and through the black and out.
Something doesn’t feel right and I’m limping. I’m worried I’m holding them back from safety, but I know Chase is not going to abandon me. The fire gets angier and rages around us, as Chase gets both the man and me out the front door.
The night air hits me like a slap. Cold, clean, impossible.
The mother is screaming a different way now, the good way, the man is breathing, the medics are swarming.
I go down on my hands and knees in the wet grass and rip my mask off and just breathe.
The pain is so loud I can’t figure where it’s coming from.
I feel like I’ve dislocated my hip and broken my back. I try to get up, but stumble and fall.
Chase crouches in front of me. His face is streaked black, his eyes wild and bright in the middle of it, and he is gripping my jaw, turning my head, checking my eyes. His hand on my skin feels electric.
"Talk to me," he says. "Healy. Talk."
"I'm okay," I rasp. "The guy…"
"He's fine. You're not. You took a beam." His hands are shaking. I can feel them shaking against my face. "You stupid, brave…" He stops. He does not finish it. He just grips harder, as if he needs to feel that I am solid.
I feel some need to feel his skin against my face. Once again I’m hard, and I wonder through the pain, why I’m suddenly reliving my teenage years and getting hard all the time.
The rest is a blur of overhaul and rehab and a medic shining a light in my eyes and telling me I am lucky, no burns through to skin that they can see, just a strip of scorched gear and what is going to be a spectacular bruise.
“Get him back to the station and give him a full check over,” the captain tells Chase. “We’ll dampen down without you.”
Chase takes the chief's car back to the empty station. It is just us, the amber lights, the tick of the cooling building.
And the adrenaline. God, the adrenaline. It is still ringing through me, a high electric hum that has nowhere to go. It’s making me so hard, as if I have some arsonist’s boner.
"Locker room," Chase says. "Now. I'm checking you myself."
I do not argue either.
The locker room is bright after the dark, harsh white light, the smell of smoke clinging to both of us under a sharp note of antiseptic. He sits me down on the bench and stands over me, and his hands are still not quite steady as he starts to work.
He peels my suspenders down. Unbuckles the coat, eases it off my shoulders, slow, careful, watching my face for where it hurts.
The coat is wrecked, a black scorch raked across the back of it.
He sets it aside as if it personally tried to kill me.
I angle myself so he can’t see the bulge in my pants.
But then he starts on the layers under. He lifts the hem of my smoke-stained shirt and works it up my back, and where the fabric peels away from the heat-tender skin I hiss, and he gentles instantly, his palm flattening warm against my spine.
"Easy," he murmurs. "I've got you."
He gets the shirt off over my head. The cool air hits my bare skin and I shiver.
And then his hands are on me, mapping, cataloguing.
My head is filled with taboo thoughts. I tell myself it’s the adrenaline, the shock, the skin against skin contact, but whatever the excuse it’s becoming harder to conceal how hard I am.
The pads of his fingers trace the edges of the bruise already blooming across my shoulder blade, feather-light, testing.
He works down my spine, vertebra by vertebra, pressing gently, asking with each one - “here?” - and I shake my head, no, no, just there, and his touch circles back to just there, careful as anything.
It is supposed to be a medical check. That is all it is supposed to be.
But his hands are so warm, and they are moving so slow, and I have just had my whole body flooded with the certainty that I almost died and the wild relief that I did not.
Somewhere in the careful drag of his rough palms across my bare back, the adrenaline keeps going to the place I don’t want it to go.
I feel it happening, the press of my cock against the fabric.
I feel my breath go short and ragged. I feel the heat pool low in me, sudden and undeniable, and there is not a single thing I can do to stop it.
His hands keep moving, down my sides now, his thumbs pressing into the muscle along my ribs, and a sound comes out of me that is not about pain at all.
His hand rest on my injured hip.
“Pants off,” he says.
I do as he commands, making sure to keep my back to him. As I slide them down, he’s already pulling down the waistband of my briefs, exposing my bruised hip.
He must feel them snag, as he looks round to the front and sees my cock tenting my briefs, the front stained with pre-cum.
He goes still.
I know the exact second he understands. His hands stop.
The whole room holds its breath. I am sitting there shirtless on a locker room bench, flushed to my ears, utterly unable to hide the state the adrenaline and his hands have left me in, and I want to die.
I want the floor to give out again and swallow me whole.
"Jason." Just my name. Low. Rough. The first time he has ever used it.
"I… I can't… I'm sorry, it's the adrenaline, I don't…"
"Look at me."
I look at him. His face is inches from mine. His eyes are dark and steady and not one bit disgusted, and his own breath, I realize, is coming as hard as mine.
He doesn't pull away. Instead, he leans in, the scent of his sweat and expensive deodorant thick enough to taste. He looks down, his gaze dropping from my eyes to the heavy, damp bulge straining against my briefs.
The silence is deafening, broken only by the distant drip of a shower head somewhere in the back of the locker room.
"You're not sorry," Chase says. His voice has lost that grumpy edge, replaced by something much more dangerous. He reaches out, his thumb grazing my underwear where the wet patch is darkening the cotton. "But if you want to stop... and pretend nothing happened..."
He pauses, his eyes locking onto mine again, challenging me.
"You tell me to stop right now, Jason. Before we get any deeper."
My heart is thudding against my ribs like a trapped bird. 'I’m straight', the voice in my head whispers, but it sounds weak. Even weaker than usual. My cock twitches, a heavy, pulsing ache that demands more than just looking.
It’s all the answer he needs.
A slow smirk pulls at the corner of his mouth. "Let's get these clothes out of the way."