20. Derek
DEREK
Gray light was already leaking through the windows by the time I woke up on the floor of Leah's living room, one arm dead asleep underneath her, the quilt tangled around both of us and the fire nothing but cold ash in the grate.
For about four full seconds I had no idea where I was or how much trouble I was already in.
Then I remembered, and something old and familiar clawed straight up the back of my throat.
Leave quietly, before this becomes something you can actually lose.
I lay there a long moment, Leah's breathing slow and even against my chest, one of her hands still loosely curled into the front of my shirt like she'd fallen asleep mid-grip and never bothered to let go, and I ran the same argument I'd been running with myself for two years, the one that had kept every door in my life locked from the inside.
Wanting something this much was how you ended up losing it.
I knew that better than most men my age had any business knowing it.
I eased my arm free without waking her, careful the way I was careful with anything that mattered, and got dressed in the gray half light with my boots in one hand so the laces wouldn't wake her, moving through the wreckage of her half-unpacked living room like a man evacuating a building on fire alone.
The cabin was silent except for the settling embers and Leah's steady breathing behind me. Every step toward the door felt like leaving a job half finished.
I made it as far as the porch.
Ember was already there waiting, curled up against the door like he'd known exactly which direction I'd be running before I did, and the second I stepped outside he rolled onto his back in the middle of the frozen welcome mat and looked up at me with the specific, unbearable patience of a dog who had absolutely no intention of moving until his belly got what it wanted.
"Not now."
He didn't move.
"I have somewhere to be."
He thumped his tail once against the boards, which I chose to interpret as agreement, and continued lying there, ninety pounds of dead weight blocking the only path off the porch, staring up at me with an expression that managed to be both hopeful and deeply unimpressed.
I tried stepping around him. He rolled with me, staying directly underfoot with the singular focus of an animal who had made exactly one demand all morning and intended to see it through.
"You're supposed to be on my side."
He was not, apparently, on my side. He was on nobody's side except whichever one currently had a hand free to scratch his stomach.
I crouched down and rubbed his belly, because apparently that was the negotiation I could lose at six in the morning. Looking back through the window at Leah asleep on the floor in front of the dead fire, hair loose across her face, I felt the whole argument I'd built overnight start to fall apart.
Every instinct trained into me by loss said leave before this costs you something. Every other instinct I apparently still had left said the opposite, and it was a lot harder to argue with than I wanted it to be.
I left anyway. Just not fast, and not entirely sure I believed my own reasons for it.
The station at that hour still smelled like last night's coffee and somebody's leftover chili, fluorescent light doing nothing kind for anyone's face, and I'd barely made it past the bay doors before Sarge fell into step beside me with a mug in each hand, one of which he held out without a word.
"You look like a man who spent the night reevaluating his entire personality."
"I'm fine."
"You're the opposite of fine. You've got the exact face you had after that ice rescue last winter, the one where you didn't talk to anybody for six hours.
" He took a long drink from his own mug, watching me over the rim of it with the particular patience of a man who had all morning and intended to use it. "Something happen?"
"No."
"Derek."
"Nothing happened that's any of your business."
"So something happened." He grinned, and I hated how satisfied he looked about it.
"I've known you two years. I know exactly what your face does when you've made a decision and exactly what it does when you're currently in the process of talking yourself out of one you already made. This is the second one."
I didn't answer that, mostly because he was right, and I set my own mug down on the workbench a little harder than I needed to.
"You left this morning, didn't you? Before she woke up."
"I had to get to work."
"You had to run." He said it plainly, no heat behind it, which somehow landed harder than if he'd been needling me about it.
"You've been running from good things since Boston, man.
I watched you do it with Rachel. I've watched you do it with half the invitations this town's tried handing you for two years straight.
I'm not watching you do it with this one. "
"It's complicated."
"It's really not." He set his own mug down too, and for once there wasn't a single trace of a joke on his face.
"You like her. She likes you. You spent last night finding that out the hard way, from the state of you this morning, and now you're standing in this bay before sunrise trying to talk yourself into believing that's a problem instead of the first good thing that's happened to you since I've known you. "
"You don't know what happened last night."
"I don't need to know the details. I need you to stop treating every good thing in your life like it's a structural hazard you have to evacuate before it collapses on you.
" He crossed his arms, and something in his voice went quiet in a way that cut through everything else in the bay.
"You've fought actual fires with less fear on your face, man. Go."
"Go where?"
"Back. Today. Not tomorrow, not after you've built four new reasons why it's a bad idea.
Today." He picked his mug back up like the conversation was over as far as he was concerned.
"I'm not saying this because I want to see you happy, though I do.
I'm saying it because watching you white knuckle your way through another decade of being careful is exhausting for the rest of us. "
I didn't say anything for a long moment, running his words the way I ran everything, methodically, looking for the flaw in the logic, and not finding one anywhere I looked.
"What if I mess it up?"
"You will. Everybody does, eventually. That's not the part that decides anything.
" He shrugged like the answer was obvious, which apparently it was to him and hadn't been to me for two solid years.
"The part that decides anything is whether you show up again after you mess it up.
That's the whole job, man. Same as this one. "
"Since when did you get good at this?"
"Since always. You just never asked." He clapped me once on the shoulder, hard enough to mean it, and walked off toward the trucks like the whole conversation had cost him nothing, though for a man who'd apparently been sitting on that speech for two years, the ease of it felt like a lie I didn't have the energy to call him on.
I spent the rest of that long, slow shift running calls I could have run in my sleep, half my attention somewhere back on that porch with a dog who wouldn't move and a woman who hadn't woken up before I left, and by the time three o'clock rolled around I'd rehearsed and discarded roughly a dozen different versions of what I was going to say, none of which survived contact with how simple the actual truth was underneath all of them.
I stopped for coffee on the way, mostly because showing up empty-handed felt wrong and mostly because I needed something to do with my hands that wasn't shaking, and by the time I pulled up outside her cabin I felt exactly as steady as a nineteen-year-old standing outside a door for the first time, which was not a feeling I'd expected to still be capable of at forty-four.
She opened the door before I finished knocking, hair still damp, wearing one of my old department shirts she must have found somewhere in the wreckage of last night, and the sight of her in it did something to my chest that had nothing to do with the cold.
Behind her the living room looked exactly the way we'd left it, quilt still tangled by the dead fireplace, one of my socks abandoned on top of a moving box, and something about the ordinary wreckage of it steadied me more than I expected.
"You look like you're about to arrest somebody."
"I have coffee."
"That's not an answer."
"I don't want this to be a one-time thing." The words came out plainer than I'd planned them, no speech behind them, nothing rehearsed surviving the actual sight of her standing in that doorway. "I want to do this on purpose. With you. If you want that too."
She didn't make me wait for it, didn't make me stand there working up to the rest of a question I hadn't finished asking.
"Yes." She was already reaching for my jacket, already pulling me through the doorway before the coffee in my hand had a chance to spill. "Obviously yes."
"You didn't let me finish."
"I didn't need to. I've had the answer ready for weeks.
" She looked up at me, something bright and unguarded and entirely sure in her face, the same look she'd been wearing since the tree lit up two nights ago.
"I've known what I wanted since roughly the moment you got out of that truck and yelled at me about my bumper. "
"I didn't yell."
"You absolutely yelled. I still have the incident report to prove it."
Driving back to the station an hour later, coffee gone cold in the cup holder and my whole chest lighter than it had been in longer than I wanted to count, I found myself replaying the whole conversation, searching it for the flaw I usually expected to find in anything that felt this easy.
It hadn't gone wrong anywhere, not one part of it, start to finish. That was the part I hadn't planned for.
It was the hardest conversation I'd had all year, one I'd built four excuses to avoid, one that had cost me a night of pacing and a lecture from Sarge I probably deserved. And it turned out to be six words long once I stopped running from it. Do you want to do this?
We'd both nearly laughed about it later, standing in her kitchen with cold coffee and a dented tailgate story between us that already felt like it belonged to a different life, at how simple the whole thing turned out to be in the end.
She'd brought up the bumper first, grinning the whole time, and I'd tried to argue the damage had been worse than she remembered, and neither of us had made it more than a few seconds before we were both laughing too hard to keep the argument going.
Two years of keeping everyone at arm's length, one disastrous fender bender that hadn't let me, and it had all come down to six words and a woman who didn't need to hear me finish the sentence to already know the answer.
I pulled into the station lot still smiling about it, and Sarge caught sight of my face through the bay window before I'd even parked, and didn't say a single word, just grinned at me like a man who'd already known exactly how this was going to go.