Between Hello and Goodbye(16)

“Shit happens,” I muttered, remembering how I’d given her grief back at the Falls. I took two containers out of the food bag. “You need to eat.”

“Now that you mention it, what is that heavenly smell?”

“Food truck fries.”

“That sounds…interesting,” she said dubiously.

“Don’t knock it till you try it. Hurricane Fries are the best…unless you don’t like spicy.”

“Me? I love spicy.”

Of course, she does.

I set up the food on her coffee table. Faith took a forkful of fries dripping with soy sauce and drizzled with wasabi and then moaned in a way that should be illegal.

I coughed. “Good, right?”

“That’s amazing.” She took another bite. “Island specialty? And to think I would have missed it.”

She didn’t mean anything by it, but knowing Kauai like I did, everything else she was going to miss came at me in a neat, orderly list. I busied myself with my food and when we were finished, I served up the pie.

“That did not come from the food truck,” Faith said.

“My sister-in-law makes the best key lime,” I said, cutting two slices. “This is from her for you.”

“You told her about me?”

Shit.

“I have dinner with my brother’s family a few nights a week. Sometimes I tell them about my calls.” I shot Faith my own arch look. “It’s not every day we chopper a tourist out of Ho’opi’i.”

She smirked. “I find that hard to believe.” I returned to the couch with the pie and Faith forked a mouthful. “This is homemade? Tell your sister-in-law I love her.”

“Her name is Nalani, and she had some thoughts about your vacation,” I admitted. “So did Paula.”

“Oh?”

“Your ankle sprain is Grade One,” I said slowly. “That means in a few days, you’re going to have more mobility, but right now you need to rest it, ice it, and try to stay off it. Which isn’t easy to do alone.”

“Tell me about it.”

I tossed down my napkin, like throwing in the towel. A flag of surrender. But who was I kidding? I’d known how my four days off were going to be spent the second I got back in my Jeep with Nalani’s pie.

“It’s not in my personal protocol to involve myself with tourists but… I’d like to help keep you from losing your entire time on Kauai.”

She glanced up quickly in surprise. “You would?”

“I have some time off. I’ll pop in now and then, help you through these first, hard days. After that, I go back to work, but you should be able to get around on your own.”

“Why would you do that for me?”

“Because…” I stammered, thinking quickly. All the reasons I wanted to keep spending time with this woman flooded my brain and I rejected all of them. She leaned forward, waiting for the rest. I snagged on something Morgan said earlier that night. “Because I’m an EMT. We have a duty to act.”

Faith wrinkled her nose. “Even on your days off?”

“Always,” I said. “Firefighters, police, and emergency responders never clock off the job completely. It’s not in our DNA.”

It wasn’t quite the truth but not exactly a lie either.

She nodded, thinking. “That’s very generous, Asher, but I barely know you. That’s never stopped me before, mind you…”

Of course, she had zero reason to trust me. I hadn’t given her one shred of something personal to even out the scales. I could throw her a scrap. Seemed only fair.

“You asked about what I did in New York. I was a hedge fund manager on Wall Street.”

Faith’s eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed thoughtfully. “I can see that about you. Fireman calendar pin-up looks and smarts. Why did you trade Wall Street for this little island?”

“The abridged version? That lifestyle was chaos. Lots of booze, drugs, sex—”

“Where do I sign up?”

I couldn’t hold in my laugh. Faith’s brassy, nothing-fazes-me demeanor was wearing me down, drawing me in.

“It was constant high-pressure,” I continued. “Stress was our actual commodity. I never built anything. Nothing tangible, anyway. Just moved money around to make more money. It wasn’t enough.”

Faith settled back on the couch cushion. “Not enough how?”

“Mentally,” I said. “Spiritually, I guess.”

“So you came here for personal growth too. A reset?”

I came here so I wouldn’t give myself a cocaine heart attack…

I shrugged. “Hawaii’s a good place for that.”

Faith smiled. “I knew there was something deeper going on with you behind your perfect manly physique and less-than-perfect bedside manner. Maybe we have something in common after all.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. I didn’t quit after one day.”

Faith’s arch look returned. “You didn’t bust an ankle and require a private helicopter tour of the local hospital, either.”

“No, but calling it quits doesn’t seem like you.”

“And you know this because…?”

“I don’t,” I said. “Something about you. I think you’d have crawled out of that trail if you had to.”