Things You Save in a Fire(54)

“Probably a very bad idea.”

“Not on my end. Just saying.”

“I’ll likely get fired now.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. I knew how life worked. I knew how things were. This wouldn’t end well for me.

Then the rookie did something that surprised me. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it, leaning in to meet my eyes in the shadows. “I will never tell anybody about this. Please know that you can trust me, okay?”

I nodded.

“Okay,” he said then. “Let’s get you out of here.”

“How?” I said.

He shrugged, like it was easy. “I’ll carry you out of here over my shoulder, and that mane of hair will hang down over your face, and even if the captain sees us, he’ll never know it’s you.”





Eighteen


THAT NIGHT, WINDOWS open, I lay in bed watching the pom-pom curtains flutter in the breeze, with my heart gusting around inside my body like a kite.

The rookie. I’d kissed the rookie. Very well. In a coat closet.

I might have expected some mixed feelings on kissing, given how long and how hard I’d avoided it.

But I had none.

I felt thrilled. I felt enchanted.

Nobody could have been more surprised than me.

So this was what it was like. This was how I could feel.

I’d thought for so long that I’d lost all capacity to feel all these good things.

Do I have to describe what Heath Thompson did to me on the night I turned sixteen? Do I have to lay out all those details?

Let’s just agree that it was bad—very bad. So bad that “bad” isn’t even a bad enough word. So bad that it left a black vortex at the center of my heart that I’d spent every day since trying not to look at, or think about, or get too close to for fear I’d fall in and disappear. So bad that I closed off my heart entirely—I never went on another date, or kissed anyone, or even had a romantic thought for ten solid years.

Until now.

Until the rookie.

Who had given me something undeniably good.

I would have told you I was fine before. I was fine. I was functioning, I was strong. I paid taxes and changed the oil in my car and bought organic eggs at the farmers’ market. I was a self-defense instructor, for Pete’s sake. Some people get derailed by trauma. Some people are crushed by it and never recover. I get it. I understand. But I was lucky. It took so many years I could barely tell it was happening, but I was able to put my life back together. I was able to finish high school, go to college, and make a living helping people.

I’d wanted to die for so many years.

But I didn’t die. I survived.

More than that, I thrived.

Before the awards ceremony, I would have told you I was completely recovered.

Until Heath Thompson showed up on that stage and dared to touch me—and then we both found out exactly how strong I’d become.

Maybe too strong for my own good.

It had felt like self-sabotage in the aftermath. I had been so worried, as I drove across the country alone, that I was at the beginning of the end. And maybe it was the end of something. But it was a beginning, too. One with the potential to make things better—or possibly so much worse.

But so far so good. I had kissed Owen—in a no-holds-barred, full-body kind of way, and it had been good.

All violence is bad, of course, but what Heath Thompson had done to me was an attack on love itself. It took one of the best parts of being human and ruined it.

I’d gladly given up all hope of love for a guarantee of never having to relive even a part of that memory again.

Here was the astonishing thing: Nothing about what had just happened with the rookie reminded me of that night. It didn’t cause flashbacks, or spark terror, or—worst-case scenario—make me want to die. Quite the opposite, in fact.

It wasn’t terror, it was joy. It wasn’t agony, it was pleasure. There were mouths involved, yes, and hands and arms and bodies touching—but the context was so different, there with a person I’d come to like and admire and absolutely trust, there was just no comparison.

The kiss itself was a big surprise.

But the discovery that kissing wasn’t agony? Even bigger.

It felt almost nostalgic, like remembering what it felt like to believe that the world was full of good things and good people and good luck. It tasted bittersweet, because it insisted there was so much to look forward to—even when I already knew there was far more to dread.

Somehow, what the rookie made me feel was the kind of hopefulness you could only get when you didn’t know any better.

Even though I did know better.

And worse.

I wondered if that was it: Maybe I only liked him so much because I couldn’t have him. I could not have chosen a more forbidden, off-limits, never-gonna-happen guy to obsess over than Owen. We couldn’t be together.

In a way, he was a safe choice.

In another way, it was more dangerous than anything I’d ever done. Because now I knew what I’d been missing. Now I just wanted more.

And now I was crying in my bed. So much my hair was wet on the pillow below. I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that I was a person who never cried—but there they were: tears.

I’m not even sure I could’ve told you what they were for. There were so many different emotions making up their alchemy, I had no idea how to separate them out. There was sadness in the mix, for sure. And anger.As well as relief and joy and longing and anxiety. Tears of everything, I guess. They were tears of intensity. Tears of coming back to life.