Chapter Eleven Noelle
The alarm goes off at six forty-seven in the morning.
I’m already awake. I’ve been awake since five, lying in the dark listening to the blizzard work its way through the old building’s joints, and when the alarm sounds, I’m sitting at my desk with cold coffee and the Delaney files open on my laptop.
The station moves beneath me. Boots on the stairs. The bay doors grinding open. Engines turning over.
Then the rigs are gone, and the building goes quiet.
I look out the window.
The street is white. Not the soft, managed white of a regular snowfall but something total and indifferent, snow driven sideways by a wind that makes the station’s old windows shudder in their frames.
The streetlights are still on, but their light barely reaches the ground, swallowed up somewhere between the fixture and the street. I can barely see the outline of the brownstones across the way. Everything past the middle of the block has been erased.
They drove into that.
***
I stay at the kitchen table with my laptop and tell myself the crew doesn’t need me at the scene.
I only last twenty minutes before I make up my mind to do the opposite.
The thing is, I have no role at an active fire scene. Grant hasn’t authorized it, my kit isn’t designed for this kind of response, and the conditions outside are bad enough that adding an unqualified civilian to the equation would be actively counterproductive.
I know all of that.
I know it while I’m pulling on my jacket. I know it while I’m wrapping my scarf twice around my neck and pulling my hat down over my ears. I know it while I’m pushing through the side door into the cold that nearly knocks the shit out of me.
The scene is two blocks north.
I can see the light before I can see anything else. The red and white flash of emergency vehicles cutting through the white, a strange underwater quality to it with all that snow in the air. I walk toward it with my head down against the wind.
The perimeter is established at the corner. A NYPD unit on crowd control, though there’s no crowd, just two men in heavy coats standing a careful distance back. I badge my way through and find a position near the barrier where I have a clear enough line of sight.
The vehicle is a delivery truck, jackknifed across the intersection, its cab angled hard into a parked car.
The driver’s door won’t open. I can see that, from here, the impact has buckled the frame.
Someone is inside. The crew is working the door with hydraulics, two of them braced against the wind, and I track the scene automatically the way I always do, reading positions and angles and where the risk is concentrated.
The fuel tank is on the driver’s side.
It’s close to the point of impact.
Grant is directing from the far side of the vehicle. Wes is on the hydraulics. Mateo is at the cab, talking through the window to the driver, one hand flat against the door frame, close enough to the heat coming off the engine that I can see the shimmer of it even from here.
The fuel tank is right there.
Mateo is right there.
I know the physics of this situation. I’ve worked enough vehicle fires to understand exactly what a compromised fuel tank in proximity to sustained heat can do, how quickly it can do it, and how little warning there usually is before it does.
Mateo says something to the driver, and the driver’s hand appears at the window, and Mateo takes it and holds on.
The hydraulics bite into the door frame.
The wind picks up, driving snow horizontal across the scene, and for three seconds I can’t see anything clearly. Just shapes and flashing lights and the sound of the hydraulics working.
Then the wind drops.
The door gives.
Mateo reaches in, and the driver comes out, one arm over Mateo’s shoulders, and they move away from the vehicle together, and Grant is already there on the other side, and they get the driver to the ambulance, and it’s over.
My hands are shaking.
I look down at them like they belong to someone else.
The fuel tank didn’t go. The door came off before it had to. The driver is in the ambulance, and Mateo is walking back toward the engine already unzipping his jacket and saying something to Wes that makes Wes’s mouth twitch.
My hands are still shaking.
I put them in my pockets and walk back to the station.
***
The crew comes back forty minutes later.
I’m at the kitchen table when the bay doors open, back in my chair with my laptop in front of me and no memory of what I’ve been looking at for the last forty minutes.
The noise of the station refilling moves through the building the way it always does, boots and voices and gear being handled, and I keep my eyes on the screen.
The bay empties gradually.
Showers. Reports. Kowalski heading for the kitchen. Rico’s voice carrying down the hallway.
I close my laptop.
The equipment room is at the far end of the bay, past the second engine. The door is open, and the light is on, and Mateo is in there going through his gear with the systematic attention of someone who has found a task and intends to stay with it.
The gear doesn’t need checking. He just came off a call. Everything was working twenty minutes ago. We both know that.
I lean in the doorway.
“Hey,” I say.
He spins around. Whatever he expected to find in the doorway, it isn’t me, and for a second his face does something unguarded before he gets it back under control.
“What are you doing down here?” he asks.
I look around the room like the answer might be written on the walls somewhere. “I don’t know,” I say. “I was at the perimeter,” I say, changing the topic. “During the call.”
He stares at me. “It was minus four out there with the wind chill.”
“I know.”
“Noelle.”
“I had to see it for myself. I needed to know everyone got out okay.”
Something moves across his face. Not quite surprise. More like he wasn’t expecting that specific honesty.
“You could have asked when we got back,” he says.
“I know.”
He exhales. “Something could have happened to you out there. Last thing we need is a double emergency.”
“I left after the driver was out,” I tell him. “I watched them get him to the ambulance, and then I walked back.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “He was scared,” he says finally. “The driver. He kept saying he couldn’t feel his legs. Turned out it was just the cold, but he didn’t know that.” He looks at his hands. “I just talked to him. Kept telling him we had him. That’s all you can do sometimes.”
“You were holding his hand,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“You weren’t going to let go.”
“No,” he says. “I wasn’t.”
The equipment room is small and warm, and the overhead light is steady, and the rest of the station feels very far away.
He crosses the room.
He doesn’t ask. He just opens his arms, and I walk into them, and his arms come around me, and I press my face against his shoulder and breathe.
He’s warm, which shouldn’t surprise me but does, solid and warm and smelling of cold air and the faint chemical ghost of smoke.
We stand there for a moment like that. Not performing anything. Not building to anything.
Then his head dips and mine tilts up, and it isn’t planned; it’s just the next true thing.
This is different from the kitchen. The kitchen was playful and then suddenly wasn’t. This starts honest and stays there. There’s no performance in it, no question being asked. Just the particular intimacy of shared relief finding the only shape it knows how to take.
He backs me up against the nearest wall between two rows of hanging gear, his hands sliding under my jacket to grip my waist. The kiss turns deep and urgent.
All the fear and relief from the call pours into it.
I can still see him standing next to that fuel tank in my head, and it makes me kiss him harder.
He pulls back just enough to rest his forehead against mine. His breathing is rough.
“You’re so fuckin cute when you do things like this,” he says quietly.
Mateo drops to his knees in front of me. He looks up as he opens my jeans and slowly drags them down my legs along with my underwear.
His hands are warm against my skin as he helps me step out of them. Then he leans in and starts kissing me. Soft, open-mouthed kisses along the inside of my thighs, across my hips, and over my lower stomach.
I watch him and feel a rush of heat that has nothing to do with the adrenaline anymore. He looks incredibly hot like this.
On his knees, focused completely on me, dark hair messy from the call and snow. His eyes are heavy with want but still so warm. It makes something tight and aching bloom low in my belly.
“You are so beautiful,” he murmurs against my skin between kisses. “I swear I can’t stop thinking about how lucky I am right now.”
He spreads my thighs gently and leans forward. The first slow lick of his tongue through my folds makes my breath catch.
He groans softly, like tasting me is the best thing he has ever experienced. He takes his time, licking long and thorough, exploring every part of me with his mouth.
I feel exposed and wanted at the same time.
My heart is still racing from the earlier fear, but now it mixes with a deep, pulsing arousal.
Every stroke of his tongue sends sparks up my spine.
I slide one hand into his hair, fingers tightening as he finds my clit and circles it with the perfect amount of pressure.
“Mateo,” I breathe.
He hums against me, and the vibration makes my thighs tremble. He slides two fingers inside me slowly, curling them deep while his mouth stays focused on my clit, sucking gently.
The feeling is overwhelming. I can feel how wet I am, how eagerly my body responds to him. He is so focused, so completely into this, and it makes me feel desired in a way I have not let myself feel in a long time.
He pulls back for a moment, pressing soft kisses to my inner thighs and mound. His voice is low and rough when he speaks.
“You taste so fucking good,” he says. “I could do this for hours. I love how you feel on my tongue.”