Singe Read online

  Alone.

  “Don’t just stand there!” He gestures wildly at Sharpie and Parker, grabbing a hose off the side of the engine without breaking his stride. “Christ, go cover him!”

  Addie swears herself, offering up a quick prayer—St. Florian, patron saint of firefighters—as she yanks Mama’s valve closed. Now that Eli is inside, the mother-effing idiot, she can’t risk bringing a wall down on top of his dumbass head. Her hands are shaking inside her gloves. She thinks, very clearly: If you die while we’re fighting, I will kill you again myself, sweetheart. It’s one hundred percent against the rules to date somebody in your own firehouse, and this is exactly why.

  What Addie wants to do is throw herself off the engine, grab a hose and run. Instead she makes herself climb calmly down into the cabin and look up what frequency Fifteen operates on. Their sirens are whining closer, pulling onto the end of the street. Addie takes a deep breath, switching her radio to their wavelength. “We’ve got a guy in there,” she tells Jim O’Neill, careful to keep her voice calm and steady. He’s known her since she was a kid, Jim has, he fought fires for her father, but Addie’s not about to let him hear how terrified she is of what might be going on inside that house. “There’s a kid upstairs.”

  It takes a long time to bring the flames down. Addie keeps on chanting prayers inside her head. She registers snatches of the conversation over the radio, Brooks and Parker and Sharpie coordinating their movements at the back of the house, checking in with Jim’s guys up at the front. Nothing from Eli. By the time they’ve got the monster under control every muscle in Addie’s body is screaming for mercy, and her heart’s about to beat out of her chest with fear.

  “What about the kid?” she asks over the radio, unable to stand it for one more minute. She thinks of Eli’s easy smile, the scars on his arms and his chest. She’s going to murder him, if he gets out of this alive. God, he’s too stupid to breathe air. “Should somebody go in and—”

  “Here he is,” Parker interrupts, audibly relieved. “Fucking asshole. He’s got her.” Then a shout in the direction of the paramedics, “Can we get some help here, please?”

  Eff it. Addie scrambles down out of the engine then, crossing the lawn just as Eli passes the little girl—a baby, no older than Paulina—off to the medics. Brooks is screaming his head off. Eli turns his head and sees her, and for a second neither one of them move.

  “Hi,” he says finally. His radio is still off, so Addie sees his lips move more than she hears it. Brooks keeps yelling about safety procedures, both in her earpiece and in real life, a split-second echo with the mic delay. Addie yanks off her helmet and walks over.

  “You,” she tells Eli, pointing at his chest. “Fuck you. Don’t you ever do that to me again.”

  Brooks adjusts his tirade to include the sin of acting independently from the firefighting unit, you are a member of this company and this company functions as a whole, Grant, it does not exist to back up your cowboy antics. Addie knows he thinks she’s pissed that Eli forced her to shut off Mama before the blaze was properly under control. And she is, of course she is. But.

  Eli takes off his helmet too. His face is soot-blackened, all the places his visor and neck protector don’t cover. A fire that serious, he should have been wearing a respirator. He’ll have to go to the hospital and get checked out for smoke inhalation. “I’m sorry, Addie,” he says, tone somewhere in the neighborhood of beseeching. “There was a kid.”

  “There will be other kids,” Brooks growls. “You always need to follow orders.”

  Behind them, Fifteen is switching over to handlines and heading inside to clear the house, take the fire from ‘under control’ to ‘out’. The mist from the big crosslay hoses wets Addie’s hair and face. She puts her helmet back on.

  Brooks nods at her. “Everyone back to work. Not you, Grant. You’re going with the medics.” Obviously he’s had the same thought as Addie.

  Eli shakes his head. “Cap, I’m f—”

  “I said get, Grant.”

  So. Eli gets.

  It’s after lunch by the time the sooty, sweaty lot of them make it back to the firehouse. Addie collapses face-first onto the first bunk she sees and sleeps until mid-afternoon without the benefit of a shower, a streak of dirt across the clean white pillow when she finally blinks awake. Her head’s pounding something awful. She should have gulped some water before she passed out.

  Sharpie’s in the kitchen when she stumbles in there, clean and changed and car keys in hand. “Hey,” Addie says sleepily, getting somebody’s plastic souvenir Big Gulp cup down from the cabinet and filling it with water from the tap. Her mouth feels fuzzy, and she downs half in one long sip. “Where you going?”

  “Grant’s cleared to come back, lungs are good,” Sharpie tells her, crossing for the doorway. “Told him I’d come pick him up so Cap could rip him a new asshole.”

  Addie swallows the rest of her water. “I’ll go,” she hears herself say.

  Sharpie looks surprised. “Yeah?” he asks, eyeing her up and down. “You sure you don’t want to like, hose off?”

  Addie just stares at him.

  “Sorry,” Sharpie says, cringing in the face of a glare that’s borrowed from both her parents. “You look fine, you look—yeah. You go.”

  “Thanks so much,” Addie says insincerely and clomps past him out the door.

  “You’re an idiot,” is the first thing Eli’s paramedic tells him. “All of you fire boys. Bound and determined to make the most of that health plan.” Then she says her name is Lyn and thanks him for his service.

  Lyn asks him how long he was in the smoke and has him take a few deep breaths, peering inside his mouth and throat and clucking her tongue like someone’s disappointed mother.

  “Okay,” she says finally, buckling herself into a jumpseat that is not unlike the ones they have in the pumper. Eli has been inside an ambulance exactly once before, and he doesn’t remember it. “If your airway closes and I have to cut a hole in your throat, it will be your own damn fault.” She has him on an O2 mask the whole way to the hospital, deep slow breaths.

  They bring him straight to triage, where a doctor and two nurses take what feels like an age to clear him for duty. During an especially slow moment, Eli ducks out to the front desk, attracting a lot of stares in his turnout gear. The EMTs are still there filling out paperwork, four of them in blue with their backs to him.

  “Did she make it?” Eli asks. “The little girl?” She weighed less than Hester in his arms. Most of her hair had burned off. Eli could see the shape of her tiny scalp.

  His EMT, Lyn, turns around and sighs. “We don’t know,” she says. “Are you sure you want to?”

  Eli thinks about that for a minute, how you shouldn’t ask questions you aren’t ready to have answered. Finally he shakes his head. “No,” he says, feeling like the idiot Lyn thinks he is for the first time all afternoon. “I guess not.”

  Back in his curtained off room he falls asleep while he’s waiting to get discharged, sacked out on the cot under the bright fluorescent lights like he hasn’t closed his eyes in ages. Addie Manzella’s the one who wakes him up.

  “All right, Sleeping Beauty,” she says, kicking the hospital bed with the toe of one boot, and not gently. He smells smoke and sweat as he startles awake. “Let’s go.”

  Eli blinks. “Hey,” he says, unable to keep from grinning at the sight of her. She’s filthy, and she’s royally pissed. It’s not a bad look on her. “I thought Sharpie was coming.”

  “Yeah, well, you got me instead. Come on, get up. We’re going.”

  Eli keeps smiling as he sits up, rubbing his head tiredly. “Did you wanna be alone with me again?”

  “Screw you,” Addie hisses, jabbing one finger right at his chest. She—yeah. She doesn’t think he’s funny. Her dark eyes narrow angrily, a set in her graceful jaw. Those boy-straight eyebrows form almost a solid line. “Screw you, Eli, you know that? You were an asshole today, you put the entire company
in danger and Fifteen besides, and you scared the shit out of me. Drew Beecher, that wasn’t enough for you, huh? I hope you’re thanking God that little girl’s going to live, because otherwise—”

  “Wait wait wait.” Eli holds his hands up. “How do you know that?” he asks quietly. “About the girl?”

  Addie glares at him. “I asked the doctor.”

  “Oh.” Eli curls his fingers around the metal frame of the bed. On the ceiling, the curtain tracks form a neat semi-circle. Will’s curtains were blue with yellow dots. “That’s good then.”

  His tone makes Addie stare harder, fierce eyebrows bunching up. “You’re fucking right it’s good,” she mutters. “Christ. You know what, never mind, do whatever you want. Let’s just go.”

  Her car seems to have acquired more offal since Eli was last in it, a bag of kitty litter on the passenger’s seat and a stack of baby books up on the dash, one of her uniform shirts hanging up in a dry-cleaning bag. Addie jams her sunglasses onto her face while Eli moves the litter to make room. They cover so much of her face Eli finds himself staring at her mouth, a clean, pale pink against her smoke-grayed skin. She must have had a drink of something, wiped her lips. Eli wants to touch her.

  He picks up a board book instead, flipping through it. “My dog was hit by a car this weekend,” he finds himself saying. “She broke her leg.”

  “Okay,” Addie says, like fuck you, why do I care. The car smells sour, even with the windows rolled down. Eli can see a few clean lines on her neck where she sweat through the dirt.

  “Okay,” Eli agrees. The book is one he owned as a kid, about bunnies who love each other all the way up to the moon, and all the way back. Will used to practice his reading on Eli with books like this, gradually moving onto novels. When he died, they were struggling through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn together. Eli never finished it.

  He’s just reaching up at a stoplight to set the bunny book down when Addie’s hand darts out and grabs his wrist. Her grip is like iron.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” she demands, running a ragged nail over his scars. “Do you want more of these, is that it? How did you even get these in the first place, Eli, huh? Where in God’s name is your head?”

  For a second Eli almost tells her. Then he thinks better of it and shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, answering the second question and not the first one. “It was stupid, I don’t know.” Then, because he’s tired and his lungs ache and he wants to, he turns his wrist and laces his fingers through hers.

  Addie snorts. “Oh my God,” she says, sounding like she can’t believe him, like everything about him is the setup of some long, tired joke. “You’re the worst, Eli, you know that?” She shakes her head, tongue at the corner of her clean pink mouth. The stoplight changes to green. “Where do you live?”

  That is—that is not what Eli is expecting. “Where do I—”

  “You heard me,” she interrupts. “We don’t need to do some ridiculous Who’s on First routine, just tell me where your house is.” The car behind them honks impatiently. Eli gives her his address.

  Addie sighs. “Okay,” she says and flicks on her turn signal.

  Up in his apartment fifteen minutes later, she surveys his living room furniture with a mixture of pity and disdain. “This is pathetic,” she pronounces, shaking her head sadly. He’s got one piece of art on the wall above the couch, a black and white poster he got at Target of a bunch of construction workers eating lunch on the beams of a half-finished skyscraper. “This is the home of a serial killer.”

  “I’m divorced,” he reminds her, like that’s an excuse for something. He’s still not entirely sure what they’re doing here.

  “Yeah,” Addie says, rolling her eyes. “I know about you.” Then, “Where’s your shower?”

  Eli points. The bathroom in this place isn’t too bad, at least, the walls and fixtures done up in plain, renters’ white. It’s clean. “There are towels,” he offers. “Although, I guess—you’ll want a new one, huh?”

  He’s pleased with that stab at domesticity, but Addie’s face stays impassive. “Little late to worry about your germs,” is all she says, sitting down on his floor to yank off her boots. She strips her socks too, balling them up inside for safekeeping. Her toes are as pink and clean as her mouth. “Okay.” She pushes herself to her feet, looking at him expectantly. “Let’s go.”

  Oh. Oh.

  She turns on her heel and starts walking before Eli can do anything dumb, like let his mouth drop open or, God forbid, ask, “What do you mean?” Instead he follows her up the hallway and into the bathroom, giving it a critical once-over. The tile slopes a little, cracking near the walls, but other than that. Even the weird anti-suicide windows look okay in here, high up the wall and tiny for privacy.

  Addie glances around the room and sighs.

  “You’re divorced all right,” she pronounces, fingering his towels. Without her boots, she’s small enough to tuck under Eli’s chin.

  “It’s not that bad,” he protests. Months of one-night stands, and he’s never brought a woman home with him. He guesses he knew it would hurt his chances.

  “It really is,” Addie says, stripping her station T-shirt over her head. She’s got a plain cotton sports bra on underneath, black and thick-banded; she smells sweatier with her top off, and it makes Eli want to lick her all over. “Come on,” she says, when she catches him staring dumbly. “We can tell them there was a paperwork glitch or something, but it’s not like we’ve got all day.”

  A paperwork—fuck, she premeditated. Eli feels his dick jump inside his pants. “Right.” He yanks his own shirt off and starts the shower, just tepid. It’s warm in here. When he looks back she’s tugging at the elastic on the sports bra, breasts tumbling out like something out of a high school fantasy, if his high school fantasy was short and Roman Catholic and possibly hated him a little. Jesus, her body is his favorite body. As soon as Eli thinks it he realizes it’s true.

  “Addie—” he starts, wanting to tell her things: that he’s sorry about the blonde girl at the bar, that he used to have a brother and it makes him stupid at fires sometimes. Instead he gets his palm on the back of her skull and kisses her, free hand on the sweaty curve of her rib cage. Addie makes a quiet sound at the back of her throat.

  “In the shower,” she mumbles. “Come on.”

  Eli doesn’t argue, reaching for the button on her work pants. He’s only ever had her naked the one time. She’s just as surprising as he remembers, the sudden dip of her waist, ass flexing as she steps into the tub. Eli doesn’t think there’s a straight line to be found on her entire body.

  “You just gonna stand there?” Addie demands, tilting her head back into the spray. Her curly hair triples in length like a magician’s scarf, flattening against her scalp. Her nipples are very, very pink.

  Eli exhales slowly and forces himself to stop thinking about arson and tiny dead bodies, the smell of gasoline. “Nope,” he says, more to himself than anyone else. “Move over.”

  Chapter Nine

  Even with Eli standing behind her in the shower, getting handsy with her boobs while he rubs himself against her ass, Addie is still half-certain he’s about to drop dead. She knows about smoke inhalation, has been drilled on its dangers since she was a little kid. She wants to slice his chest open, crack apart his ribs and peer at his lungs herself, verify that they’re pink and sound. She’d work her way up to his esophagus next, slice it lengthwise and check for burns. Then, maybe, she would be satisfied.

  “Sorry,” Eli says as she reaches mechanically for the soap. “I only have guy’s stuff.”

  Addie brings the bar to her nose and sniffs, getting a deep breath of chemical garbage that’s supposed to smell like mountain springs. She’s lathering it up anyhow when Eli reaches up from behind her and takes it out of her hand.

  “Let me,” he murmurs, the words vibrating against the base of her neck, this low delicious hum. “Come on, Addie, let me.” He rubs the b
ar between her shoulder blades and down her spine, over one hipbone and down between her legs. He’s so, so hard. When she turns around to face him, he’s burning hot against her stomach.

  “Are you good?” Addie can’t keep herself from asking. Water runs down her cheeks and into the corners of her mouth. “Are you sure you can breathe? Are you good?”

  Eli looks surprised, like it’s occurring to him for the first time how badly he rattled her. “I’m fine, princess,” he promises, then palms down her slippery breasts, her nipples puckered up under his hands. “I’m better than fine. I’m perfect.” He grins, impish. “If I knew this is what I needed to do to get you to like me again, I would have cowboyed up a long time ago.”

  “Don’t joke,” Addie orders, shaking her head and tipping her face up so he’ll kiss her. “I don’t like you.” She’s frowning, too hard. She can’t seem to make herself stop long enough to fit her lips against his.

  “Hey, hey.” Eli pulls back, cupping her face. “I’m okay. Everyone’s okay.” His gaze is warm and understanding, rubbing away the streaming water with both thumbs. Addie wants to claw his compassionate eyes out.

  She twists away, frowning harder. “Only because you got lucky. You weren’t smart or brave. Everyone’s okay because you have a generous effing guardian angel, not because you’re a good firefighter.” She makes herself breathe, snorting water up her nose and sputtering inelegantly. “I was stuck on top of the engine, Eli. I couldn’t even do anything.”

  Eli’s brow furrows. “You were managing the hoses,” he says, petting her cheek. Addie wonders what he was like in school. She bets he was one of those kids who would take a reading comprehension passage and be able to tell you that the dog was brown, but not that it was sad the bear stole its ice cream.

  “Yeah.” She scrubs at her face with both hands. Her hair is going to be murder after this, his cheap anti-dandruff shampoo and no conditioner. “I was. Come here.”