Things You Save in a Fire(56)

“You do it, sir,” I said.

“And what if a ranking member of the crew doesn’t tell you to do something?”

I sighed. “You don’t do it, sir.”

“We’re clear on that?”

“We’re clear.”

He turned back to his computer. We were done here. “Good,” he said then. “Now scram.”

I walked to my locker feeling stunned—but also very lucky that I hadn’t been in trouble for what I thought I’d been in trouble for. Maybe the rookie was right. Maybe our going on a date would not lead inevitably to the end of my career.

Maybe we were going to get away with it.

Or maybe not: because when I opened up my locker, I discovered that somebody had scrawled graffiti all across the inside. Very specific graffiti that made it clear somebody somewhere knew something.

In terrible handwriting, in five-inch-tall letters, in Sharpie—there was one word: Slut.



* * *



I SLAMMED THE door shut the second I saw it.

I felt a sting of panic through my body. Not cool. Not fair. Not even, you know—accurate. Not even close.

Six-Pack looked over. “Everything okay?”

“Yep,” I said. But I was breathing fast.

The timing was uncanny.

Six-Pack was still eyeing me.

“The lock sticks sometimes,” I said, leaning hard against the door, breathing.

Had the captain recognized me? Was that why he was so weirdly mad that I had just earned the station four thousand dollars’ worth of safety equipment? Or had there been someone else there we didn’t see? Or maybe word of mouth? Of course, by the end of the party, every single person there knew that Owen had screwed a very drunk girl in the coat closet.

All anybody had to do was recognize me.

I’d been warned, of course. Captain Harris had warned me—as had a lifetime of being female. If we broke the rules, I would be the one punished. I had known the risk I was taking when I went to that party with him, though I had not truly been able to imagine what the consequence would feel like. But I’d persisted. Like a fool.

Now, pressed up against my locker, frozen against it, really, my heart racing, my adrenaline on high alert, I was starting to get it.

This was not good.

Six-Pack frowned at me.

The thing was, though, this actually was not the first time in my life that I had opened a locker and seen the word “slut” inside. The last time, it had been high school, and it had been scratched into the orange paint on the inside of the metal door. This time, it was dark black Sharpie ink. It seemed like such an impossible coincidence. What were the chances of getting harassed like that—even once, much less twice?

Although, maybe the playbook for harassment just isn’t all that varied. Maybe the type of people who do this kind of thing don’t dig deep into creativity.

Seeing that word, scrawled there so angrily, left an afterimage in my eyes that I couldn’t blink away. It shocked the hell out of me, honestly—both in the real moment of my current life, and in a way that felt like a reverberation from high school.

Somehow, it made me angry at Owen. If he hadn’t been so irresistible, and so likable, and if he hadn’t frigging asked, I would never have gone with him to that party in the first place. Today could have been just another plain old regular firefighting day.

It also made me angry at myself. What had I been thinking? How cocky was I—how flat-out stupid—to think that I could just do what I wanted? I knew what world I was living in. I had willfully, stupidly broken the rules, and now I’d have to suffer the consequences.

And last, though not at all least, it made me angry at whoever had done it. Someone had gone to some trouble to figure out my combination and find a time when the locker room was empty. Someone had done something to hurt me. Intentionally. With malice.

That was a horrifying feeling. Somebody out there had come after me.

And I didn’t even know who it was.

I spent that entire day rigid with rage at every living human being on earth, including myself. I glared at patients. I evaluated every guy on our crew suspiciously. My thinking and my emotions were totally jumbled all day, but one thing was clear: I needed to stay as far away from the rookie as possible.

So …

If he came into a room, I went out.

If he asked me a question, I turned away.

It was a way for me to reclaim a sense of strength. I could survive this. I was tougher than this. One piece of graffiti wasn’t going to shut me down.

Then, once the guys had gone to bed, and I could hear the reliable rhythm of their snores, I snuck back down to my locker.

I couldn’t sleep anyway.

I opened it up and peered in. Part of me hoped that maybe if I just checked again, it might be gone.

Nope.

There it was. Slut.

The handwriting was rounded and pointy at the same time. The T almost looked like an X. It looked more like Slux, really. Terrible penmanship. Come on. If you’re going to do it, do it right.

Though it was a clue. Maybe there’d be some way to get a peek at some of our paperwork from the captain’s office—or maybe four graffiti letters wouldn’t be enough to settle it.

I drew in a long, scratchy breath, then let it back out. I just let my head lean forward until it was resting in my hands. I closed my eyes. I felt so tired.