Second Alarm (Copper Ridge #2)

Prologue

TY

Ten Years Ago

Oregon State Fire Academy

Her shirt is on inside out.

That's the first thing I notice, and it's the kind of thing I'm not going to mention, because mentioning it would mean I was paying attention, and I can't afford to be paying that kind of attention to Hanna Larsen this late, this tired, in a dorm room the size of a utility closet on the last night of our three-month secret.

The seams run up the outside of her ribs.

The tag flares against the nape of her neck when she lifts her hair.

She's wearing my academy shirt, soft gray, the logo on the chest pocket a backwards ghost in the mirror.

She doesn't know. She dressed in the dark.

She's moving with the absent efficiency of a woman who has somewhere else to be in the morning, who's a thousand miles between her and the state line tomorrow. My shirt is the least of her problems.

I'm not going to point out the shirt.

She's been camping out in my room three nights a week since the end of May, and the overflow has quietly taken up residence.

A toothbrush in my bathroom cup. A phone charger braided into mine behind the nightstand.

A paperback she said she'd finish before she left, face down on my desk, spine cracked.

Her running shoes under my chair. She's pulling it all back into her duffel one piece at a time, and every piece is a thing I didn't realize I'd started counting as mine.

I'm going to sit on the edge of my twin bed like a man who hasn't just spent the last few weeks learning every freckle on her shoulders. I'm going to watch her pack. I'm going to say something useful. I'm going to be fine.

"You're going to be cold." The words are out before I can stop them.

Smooth. Devastating. The poet laureate of the Oregon Fire Academy, Class of 2016.

Hanna looks up from her duffel. The dorm lamp is a forty-watt bulb with the ambition of a twenty-watt bulb, and in that light, her face is all shadow and cheekbone and the stubborn line of her mouth. She's wearing my shirt and her own jeans and she's holding a pair of socks.

"It's July."

"It'll still be cold in the back half of the drive."

"You're the most useful man alive, Brennan."

"So I've been told."

She rolls the socks into a ball and pitches them at the duffel. They miss. I don't pick them up for her. I'm not going to be that useful.

The mini-fridge hums. It's been humming like it's dying since the day we moved in, and my roommate has threatened to shoot it twice, but nobody's ever actually filled out the work order, so now it's the sound my whole life makes. A dying refrigerator and Hanna packing.

"Cal texted." I drop my eyes to the floor between us.

Her hands stop on the duffel zipper.

"He said to tell you he's meeting you at the tollbooth outside Portland in the morning." I keep my voice even. "Said he'd buy you pancakes."

"Okay."

"He said he's proud of you."

"Okay, Ty." Her voice has an edge now.

"I'm just delivering the message."

She turns around. She stands there in my shirt — inside out, she still doesn't know — and for a second, the whole room is nothing but her eyes on me, and I'm twenty-three years old, and I've never been so aware of my own hands in my life. I flatten them on my thighs. It doesn't help.

"Don't."

"Don't what."

She waves a hand through the air like she's clearing smoke. "That voice. That — that thing you do. The dry voice. Don't do it right now."

"It's just my voice, Hanna."

She turns to face me fully. "It's absolutely not just your voice. It's the voice of a man who thinks being funny about something will make him look like he isn't bleeding from the throat about it, and I don't have the bandwidth tonight, Ty."

I watch her. Her own words catch up with her a beat later — her shoulders drop a half inch, and she looks at the ceiling.

"That came out mean."

"A little," I agree.

"Sorry."

"It's fine." Because what else am I gonna say.

"It isn't fine." She meets my eyes for the first time since she started packing.

I could say a lot of things here. I could say that I've spent the last few weeks reworking every definition of the word fine I had before we started this, and fine now means her mouth on the hollow of my throat at midnight in a supply closet, and fine now means the way she laughs when something is actually funny instead of when she wants it to stop being sincere, and fine now means this room, with her packing, with my shirt inside out on her body, and therefore fine's become a useless word and I'm going to have to go find a new one after she leaves.

I don't say any of that.

"Stay," I blurt.

The word lands in the room like a dropped wrench.

She doesn't move. She doesn't even breathe for a second. She just stands there with one hand on the zipper and the other one curled into the hem of my shirt, and then, very quietly — "Ty."

"I know."

"Don't do this."

"I know."

"I have a job. I have an apartment. I signed a lease. We agreed." She ticks them off one by one.

"I know."

"You know what you're asking me."

"Yeah."

Her chin comes up. "Do you?"

I look at her. I look at her the way I've been looking at her for weeks in the dark and not at all in the light, because in the light, there's Cal.

There's always, always Cal. The kid who lived one street over from me in Copper Ridge since we were both missing the same front teeth.

The kid whose mom fed me dinner every summer his dad was on shift.

The kid whose little sister used to follow us around the backyard with a doll in each fist. The kid who talked me into applying to the academy with him, who packed into this dorm room with me the day we moved in, who still thinks Hanna showing up in town this spring was nothing more than his sister chasing a paramedic program.

Cal, who doesn't know that when he flew home for the long weekend to see their mom, I took her to dinner at a diner with bad coffee.

Who doesn't know anything about anything.

Who I love. Who loves me. Who thinks I'm a good guy.

"Yeah." I hold her gaze. "I do."

"It would kill him."

"It wouldn't kill him."

"He'd never forgive either of us."

"He might."

"Ty."

I drop my eyes. "Hanna."

"You’re twenty-three, Ty, and I’m only nineteen."

"Yeah."

She crosses her arms. "This is — this is a thing that happened at the fire academy. You're going to go back to Copper Ridge and meet somebody else. I'm going to go to Portland and meet somebody else, and we're going to look back at this in ten years and laugh, and it's going to be a funny story."

I file that one away. Ten years. Laugh. Funny story. I file it because it's the kind of thing you remember later, when you want to look back at it and confirm exactly how wrong you were about yourself.

"Okay."

She drops her arms. "Don't just say okay."

"What do you want me to say, Hanna?"

"I don't know."

"Yeah."

She drops her hand from the zipper. She crosses the room.

She's still in my shirt, and she still doesn't know the shirt is inside out, and I still don't tell her, because if I tell her she'll change it and she'll never again be in my clothes in the wrong way, and I can't stop the hoarding of small things tonight.

She puts her hands on my shoulders. Her palms are warm. She's been biting her thumbnail.

"I'm not the person who stays."

"I know."

"I don't know how to do it. I watched my mom do it.

I watched her — " She stops. She does the thing with her jaw.

"I watched her wait up every time my dad was on shift.

I watched her pretend it didn't cost her anything.

And then one day it cost her everything, and the whole house just — Ty.

I know what you're going to say. I'm about to strap a radio on, too.

I'm going to be the one climbing into the back of a rig in the middle of the night.

I get it. That's why I know. I'm going to be the one making somebody wait up, and I'm going to be the one who has to wait up, too, because the job doesn't stop for either of us.

It just doubles. And I can't be my mother.

I can't be my father. I can't be both of them in the same house.

I'm not going to sit at a kitchen table for the rest of my life waiting to see if the man I love walks back through the door, and I'm not going to be the one making him do it either. "

"Hanna—" I reach toward her.

"Don't." She shakes her head.

"I was going to say okay."

"Say it like you mean it."

"Okay." I mean it. I don't know how else to mean it.

She kisses me. It's not a goodbye kiss. It's the kind of kiss a person gives you when they're still trying to talk themselves out of leaving and know they're going to fail.

It lasts longer than it should. When she pulls back, her eyes are wet, and she isn't going to let them be wet for long, because Hanna Larsen isn't that kind of woman.

She pulls back first. "Cal can't ever know."

"Okay."

"I mean it, Ty. Ever. Not in a year, not in ten, not ever." Her hands tighten on my shoulders for just a second before she lets go.

"Okay."

"Promise me."

There's a specific silence in the world that comes right before you make a promise you shouldn't make. It has a pitch. I've heard it twice in my life, and both times involved a woman I was in love with.

"I promise."

She picks up the duffel. She slings it over her shoulder. The backwards logo is over her heart, and the tag is at the back of her neck, and she's beautiful in a way that's going to take me a long time to recover from, and she doesn't look back when she opens the door.

She pauses.

"For the record." Her voice is quiet, aimed at the door frame rather than me. "I'd have said yes. If you'd asked me at sixteen. If you'd asked me in my mom's kitchen the summer I finally got taller than her. If you'd been brave then."

I stare at the back of her head. "I didn't know you were interested."

"I know."

"I know you are now."

"Yeah." A beat. "That's the problem."

And then she walks out of my dorm room wearing my shirt.

I sit on the edge of the bed in the forty-watt light and listen to the fire door at the end of the hall bang shut, and bang shut again, because there's an echo in that stairwell I've never noticed before.

I'm going to notice it every time for the rest of the day.

The shirt is still inside out when she leaves.

I tell myself this is the part where I get up, kill the overhead lamp, go to sleep, and wake up tomorrow a firefighter.

I sit there until the blinds go gray instead.

At some point I move. I put a kettle on the hot plate we're not supposed to have in the dorms, make a cup of bad instant coffee, and drink it black, the way she takes it, and I tell myself that tomorrow I'll begin the project of forgetting Hanna Larsen.

As project timelines go, it's wildly optimistic.