by Christa Wick
"You'll call me?" Laurie asked, not quite looking at either of us.
"The second I have good news," Mary assured her.
My heart sank at the double meaning. For Mary, the good news would be that I was out of her son's life, the path cleared for Laurie to swoop in.
Not going to happen.
With the door shut, Mary turned the deadbolt. I hadn't notice that she had brought her own folder to the meeting. It wasn't remotely as thick as Laurie's and she only removed three pages from it, leaving a dozen or more inside.
"We won't be needing any of the parish paperwork," she commented when she caught my gaze on the folder. "I'll grant you a small measure of credit for not making a scene in front of that girl. I have plans for her and she doesn't need to see the uglier side of our business."
I lifted a brow in inquiry. "The future Mrs. Dare O'Donnell?"
A genuine smile pushed Mary's lips into a tight pout. "Exactly. You see the quality in her. If you were half the person Dare thinks you are, you would have already stepped aside."
I glanced at the papers she held in her hand. Whatever they contained, I only saw the empty white backs.
"I'm sure you've discovered that I spent a month in jail," I began. "Dare knows all about that already."
Mary separated one sheet of paper and returned it to the folder. Two remained.
"Your mother said you would deny the allegations, claim that both she and the good doctor filed a false report."
My chin lifting, I drew a slow breath in and tried to hide my surprise. "Well, I'm glad the two of you found something you could bond over."
I delivered the response without the slightest quiver to my voice even though I was dying inside. Helen had fucked Mary's husband while they were married, recorded the act (although Mary likely didn't know that part), yet their delight in torturing me was powerful enough to bring them together -- if only temporarily.
A vicious smirk pulled at the sides of Mary's thin face. "I also found occasion to 'bond' with your grandmother. So I know you're both a thief and a leech."
More lies. My grandmother had used me as a house slave when I was with her and criticized my every move. I only went out to search for jobs or run her errands. I returned home after one such errand to overhear her telling a prospective employer that there was no one named Eden Abbey at that number. I left that same day even though I had no money and nowhere to go.
But the truth didn't matter to a woman like Mary Ivers.
"Dare and I have discussed the problems I've had with my family," I said, trying to match the level of ice in her tone. "You'll find that he doesn't consider them reliable sources."
Mary smiled, seemed to stand taller, her confidence growing as the seconds ticked by.
"The station lost one of their members last winter." She walked past me to the kitchen table and Laurie's three tidy piles.
"Yes, Adam O'Rourke." With almost two weeks of exploring Dare's body, I had finally made it around to his back, surprised to find that he had added a tattoo since the photo shoot. He had selected a skull wearing a fireman's helmet with his stations designation. Below that, two names, Michael Burke and Adam O'Rourke, with the date each died.
"Another explosion," I added, suddenly seventeen and hearing all over again that my daddy -- my hero -- had died.
"Yes, but it wasn't some little old lady with oxygen tanks." Combining them into one stack, Mary placed Laurie's materials inside her folder. She put the two pages she had taken out earlier face down on the table. "A meth lab exploded."
The word "meth" jerked my attention away from Michael's death. It didn't seem possible that she could have found out, but there was no other point to her telling me about last year's tragedy.
"Needless to say, there's a certain sentiment around the station house about people affiliated with the drug. If any one of the firefighters were to somehow become linked to it, the entire station would turn against him."
I remained silent, the muscles of my stomach and chest tightening as she continued her soliloquy. Facing away from me, she reached one arm out, instinctively knowing that I looked at her. An imperial hand gesture ordered me to come closer.
Damning my compliant feet, I approached the table. Her hand coiled around my elbow to hold me in place. She flipped the first sheet over. A very unflattering picture of my one-time lover, Jason Bridge, appeared in the upper left corner. Beneath it his name, date of birth, race, gender and identifying physical marks. On the remaining two thirds of the page, the booking report from the last night I had lived in his house.
The police had kicked down his front door with a warrant for his arrest. Unknown to me, he had been cooking meth in a trailer on his mother's farm. I already knew he wanted to use my body to make money -- I still had the fresh bruise on my face that night from having refused his demands a few days before. The only reason I was in the house when the police busted in was because Jason wouldn't leave the house without locking me in the closet, my hands and legs bound and a dirty rag in my mouth. I had only been released from the closet half an hour before the warrant was served.
Even though I had spent even less time in Jason's apartment than I had in Dare's home, it seemed like I would never escape the past.
Knowing she no longer had to physically hold me captive, Mary released my arm and ran a finger down the page to a line she had highlighted in bright orange.
Civilians on scene: Eden Alexandra Abbey, 20-year-old white female.
"Do you really want my son in a burning building with a crew that thinks he would be better off dead than fucking a meth dealer's whore?"
I didn't answer, didn't know what I would say if my brain had been capable of speech at that moment. Even if her question was outrageous hyperbole, and I prayed that was the case, Dare's friends would turn their back on him in other ways. The entire time I knew him growing up, not once had he ever considered working as something other than a firefighter. It was clear from our last two weeks together that he was still the same brave little boy ready to run into an inferno and emerge a hero.
Hell, "Dare" wasn't even his legal name. Mary and Frank had named him "Daire," which sounded to my non-Irish ears like "dir-eh." His first grade teacher, every bit as Irish as Dare's parents had dropped the "i" after he jumped from the second story window of her classroom after another boy had dared him to fly like Superman.
Deep down, he would always be Daire "Daredevil" O'Donnell.
Mary flipped the second page. My name wasn't on this sheet, just a list of all the crimes for which Jason had been arrested. "Pimping and Pandering" was highlighted four times.
"Does Dare know you prostituted yourself?"
"I never--"
She broke into my denial with a bitter laugh. "Now you're lying to yourself. Even if you never spread your legs or opened your mouth for one of his customers, he didn't let you stay in his apartment for free. You fucked a pimp, dear girl. There's only one kind of woman who does that."
Opening her folder one last time, she put Jason's pages at the top of the pile. Tucking the file under her arm, she turned to me. Her gaze sparkled. Pure pleasure twisted her mouth. "I'm going to the station now. I understand there's an all hands situation they are dealing with. When he returns from the fire..."
She gave the folder a little jiggle, the gesture all she needed to finish her threat.
Bloody Mary brushed past me. Halfway to the entry closet where her coat hung, she started to hum, continuing the tune as put on her gloves. I faintly recognized it as the Battle Hymn of the Republic.
By the time she finished and was shrugging into her coat, she was halfway through repeating the first verse.
He is trampling out the vintage / where the grapes of wrath are stored...
More than trampled, I listened as she turned the deadbolt to leave, tears already tracking down my cheek. I stood there crying for a few more minutes, my legs unsteady and my body swaying, until, with a resigned sigh, I walked over to the side table
where the day's mail waited. Surprised by Laurie's visit, I hadn't checked to see if the state had delivered my ID yet. Like flipping a coin, I decided if the ID wasn't in the pile, then I would wait and brave the possibility that the first word out of Dare's mouth when he returned from the fire would be "whore" or something equally hateful. If the mailman had delivered the ID, I would take it as the final sign needed that Mary Ivers was right and I had no place in Dare's life.
And it really would be the final sign, not the first. I knew Dare had turned down invitations to other get togethers with his friends. A party, an opening in a better bowling team than the one he currently played with, a billiards and then a dart tournament with his friends at one of the sports bars, and more.
He didn't tell me, I overheard. There were likely others that had come up on the days he had to go into the station. He wouldn't even let Cam, who had grown up in another state and wasn't dating anyone who hated me, into the house when the man stopped over. One-by-one, Dare was losing his friends without Mary revealing the meth connection.
Slowly I thumbed through the stack. Two flyers, a water bill, a credit card solicitation. Not seeing anything else, I closed my eyes and gave the flyers a quick shake just to be certain nothing was sticking within their folds. I heard the rustle of paper and then something hit the floor with a flat thunk.
Looking down, I saw the pre-printed envelope, my name and Dare's address through the clear window. I picked it up, my thumb smoothing across the surface until I felt the plastic rectangle contained inside. I slid a finger beneath the back flap, felt the thin paper slice at my skin and barked a laugh. It wasn't enough that the world wanted me out of Dare's life, it had to make me bleed first.
Sucking at the paper cut, I unfolded the sheet to which my ID card was glued. The girl in the picture smiled. She smiled because Dare had crouched down below the camera despite the clerk's protests and wagged his eyebrows at me. She smiled because her body was deliciously spent from a night in bed with the man making her laugh.
She smiled because she was in love.
With fresh tears wetting my cheeks, I walked into the bedroom I had been sharing with Dare and gathered up the few things I could call my own.
Chapter Eighteen (Part Three)
Eden -- more than three years later
Approaching the ambulance that had become my second home since I received my EMT certification, I handed a tall breve latte and a slice of banana bread wrapped in paper through the ambulance's driver-side window.
Smiling, my partner, Felix Hernandez, threw a wink that would have been sexy if I didn't already know that he had a voracious appetite for cock. "Thank you, chica."
"Thank you," I countered before crossing in front of the vehicle with my own cup and morning treat to claim the other seat. "It was sweet of you to pay for everything."
"It's your two-year anniversary on the job, what was I supposed to do?"
I chuckled and shook my head. "Uhm...go inside and do the ordering instead of handing me a twenty and telling me to get something for myself, too."
"You know the rules."
"Right," I nodded. "Newbie always grabs the coffee for the senior team members, even if said newbie's last job was President of the United States. And under no circumstances will anyone with less than five years on the job be designated as a non-newbie."
This had become the rule for our team six months earlier when Felix had marked his fifth anniversary as an EMT.
"You're finally learning." Extending an open palm, he tapped the pads of his fingers against the fleshy surface several times. "Where's the change, Bae?"
"You do know 'Bae' means 'excrement' in German, right?" I asked, digging into my breast pocket for the ten left over after paying for the coffee and slices of banana bread. If Felix was going to have a nickname for me, I wanted one that didn't make my stomach churn every time I heard it. Even "Ed" was better than "Bae."
He took a sip of his breve latte, a small dot of cream lingering on his mustache as he finished and flashed a smile at me. "Are we in Germany, Bae?"
"Negative," I answered, already surmising that my latest renaming attempt hovered on the brink of failure.
"Are we speaking German?" he continued, his thick brown eyebrows dancing. "Because all I heard on the last sound check was English and a pinch of Espanol."
"Well..." I hesitated, trying to think of at least a few words we had spoken since starting our shift that would bolster my argument. Memory failed me so I lied through my teeth. "Several words can be traced back to Teutonic tribes, which--"
"Tribe Teu-whatsit?" He asked, charging forward as he always did before I had a chance to explain. "What the fuck are you talking about, chica?"
The often crude language was part and parcel of working an ambulance team with Felix. I had grown accustomed to his foul mouth, even took pleasure in his exaggerated delivery -- and it was always exaggerated.
Taking exception with anything he did was impossible. He had been my mentor from day one, was muy guapo despite his addiction to dick, and was a giant of a man who could dance around a multi-car pile up with all the grace of a prima ballerina.
And when it came to saving lives, he knew his shit better than anyone I'd met in the last two years.
Reclining my seat for a more comfortable defensive position, I took a sip of the dark roast coffee before elaborating on my logic. "A lot of German tribes migrated into England back in the Dark Ages. They displaced the Celts, fought the Romans..."
I stopped talking as Felix reached for my slice of banana bread. Laughing, I slapped at his hand. "Hey, what's the deal? No take backs!"
He managed to steal a thick pinch and pop it into his mouth. He swallowed, took another sip of his coffee and answered. "Anniversary Girl doesn't need any cake. She needs to get laid and stop spending so much time cuddling up with her college textbooks."
Finding his logic far and away superior to mine, I handed over the rest of my banana bread. I hadn't had sex in three and a half years, not since the night before I left Hagersburg -- the last night I had spent in Dare's bed and in his arms. Things were starting to get cobwebby between my legs. And I focused every spare dollar and minute I had in finishing up my two-year degree.
"I don't have time for men," I lied, pulling the seatbelt across my lap as the dispatcher called our unit number. "And books are a hell of a lot less complicated than men."
"ALS 536 ready for instructions," Felix responded to home base. Taking his finger off the call button, he shot a smile in my direction. "Have it your way, Anniversary Girl. That just means more cake and cock for me."
The location coming over the line erased his grin. A vehicle had collided with a pedestrian at the base of the Sky Island Scenic Byway.
About fifteen minutes away from our location on the northeast side of Tucson, the area was a favorite spot for tourists to hike and run. Locals avoided it like the plague, especially during sunrise and sunset when the scenery proved distracting to even the most conscientious drivers.
In the two years since I'd been hired on as an EMT, our unit had been dispatched to the site half a dozen times. Twice the responding cops should have called for a coroner's van and saved us the trip.
I hit the sirens as Felix threw the vehicle in reverse and backed from the parking spot. Reaching for my clipboard, I silently prayed that this time we would arrive and only need to swab a few scratches or ice a jogger's ankle.
As with every other prayer I had made since I turned seventeen, God wasn't listening.
Chapter Nineteen
Dare -- a few hours earlier
I opened my eyes to a tight ass hugged by yoga pants as Laurie Quade bent to tie her running shoes. Reaching out, I slid my hand between the gap in her thighs. She tensed in a way that made me think she had expected my touch, was in fact posed there with the hope that I would wake before she left on her morning run.
We were on our fourth day in Tucson, with three days remaining before we returned to Hagersb
urg. In between her running and our fucking, we had visited one gallery, a mall, several boutiques and eaten twice our fill of the local southwestern cuisine.
A couple's spa was scheduled for the afternoon. I hoped a blowjob would follow, or maybe I would get really lucky and blowjobs would bookend the spa trip.
She smiled at me over her shoulder. "Morning, sleepy head."
Lifting my brows, I forced a matching smile onto my face. When she had her back to me or her mouth around my cock, I could pretend she was someone else -- a specific someone else. The curve at the small of her back, the arch of her shoulders, and the strong thighs could have made her a twin to Eden.
But, as beautiful as she was, Laurie's face would never fool me for one second into thinking it was Eden by my side.
"Morning, Angel," I answered after realizing I had remained silent. My response came too late. The blue eyes darkened, the sudden shine in their depths undoubtedly the threat of tears.
I rubbed at her leg in apology. "You want me to come with?"
As in shape as she was, her runs were more like my power walks and I only offered to go with her when I wanted to make up for being an asshole. In my defense, she had gladly put up with me being an asshole for the last three years, ever since the day I gave up on Eden coming back into my life and asked Laurie out on our first date.
She shook her head.
"Are you sure?" I didn't really want to convince her to change her mind, but the gesture was expected. Same as I expected her to sweep aside my offer with a reason that it was perfectly acceptable for me to stay in bed and let her run alone.
"The shuttle is leaving in a few minutes." She reached for the room's keycard and tucked it into what passed for a pocket in women's yoga pants. "A bunch of us are going up to what they call Sky Island Highway...or maybe it's Sky Island Byway."
She laughed, her generous nature making it impossible for her to remain upset for very long. "Anyway, it's supposed to be all blue sky dotted by the occasional tree or rocky pinnacle that look like they are floating on the ocean. Sky Island -- get it?"