Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

  He looked down at his shoes. “But then—that kiss. It kind of broke everything. It made me wonder if maybe I wasn’t totally alone in all that stuff.”

  Um, no. He was not totally alone. But I held still.

  He went on. “So that’s why I’m telling you. Because I’m never sure, when you push me away, if you really want me to go.”

  I took a step closer, and then another, until my body was right up against his, like it had just been—except this time, rather than curling down against his chest, I reached up, stretched against him, and brought my face close to his.

  A very different vibe.

  Then I looked straight into his eyes.

  “I don’t want you to go,” I said.

  And then I wrapped my arms behind his neck, pulled him closer, stood up on my tiptoes, and kissed him.

  I never even made a choice—or maybe I’d made the choice long before.

  I kissed him there in the street, up against his truck, as long as either of us could stand it. I leaned in. I owned it. I pressed against him and tried to absorb that solidness of his chest. I caressed him and tasted him and just let myself fully melt into the moment. Then I pulled back, a little breathless, and said, “If I took you upstairs, could we keep doing what we’re doing?”

  He gave me a wry smile. “I am very grateful to be doing what we’re doing.”

  “But,” I added, wanting to be clear, “not go any further.”

  “Just kiss, you mean?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re asking if I’m willing to go up to your room and kiss you?”

  I nodded again. “For a good long while.”

  He kissed me again. “I am definitely willing to do that.”

  “I’m going to have to take things very slow, is what I mean.”

  He nodded. “Of course.”

  “Could we go upstairs and sleep together—actually sleep?”

  He smiled bigger, all teasing. “Firefighter Hanwell, are you proposing that we snuggle?”

  I gave a barely-there smile of my own. “I guess that’s one way to describe it.”

  “I’ll take anything. I’d sleep on a bed of nails to be next to you.”

  I turned and started pulling him toward the house. “That’s actually perfect, because my bed is made of nails.”

  “Sold,” he said. “I’m in.”

  I led him through the garden, over the threshold, up the slanted stairs, and through my attic door. We kissed and stumbled the whole way.

  It’s amazing how brave you can be when you feel safe. I walked him backwards to the foot of my bed, and I tugged on him to sit down. When he sat, I climbed on top of him, perching on his thighs, my arms around his neck, my face right there with his.

  We just kept kissing. And the more we kissed, the more I relaxed into the moment, and the more I gave in to all the goodness of being close to him. It was like a tiny, wordless negotiation: Each time I took a step closer and he met me with tenderness, I took another step closer. The closer I got, the closer I wanted to be.

  I pulled his shirt off and threw it on the floor, and then there he was, half-naked, all smooth skin and contours. Then I pulled my own shirt off, and there I was in my sports bra—exactly as I’d been with him so many times at the station, as he put EKG pads on me or checked my spine.

  Of course, this was nothing like those other times.

  When he ran his palms up, then back down, the skin of my back, he wasn’t checking my vertebrae. He wasn’t working to maintain professional distance. He was doing the opposite. He was trying to get as close as possible.

  And so was I.

  I ran my hands over him, just absorbing the warmth and the softness, and the landscape of his muscles and the miracle of getting to touch him at all.

  Then I pushed him back until he was lying down.

  I scooted forward and traced his six-pack with my fingers.

  His breath came out like a shudder.

  It’s amazing how much context matters. I knew Owen. I’d seen him in action. I’d worked with him all these months, and I’d seen him make the right, kindhearted, compassionate choice time and again. The man spent his free time baking cookies, for God’s sake. He brought puppies home in baskets. I trusted him. I cared about him. And the more I kissed him, the more I wanted to kiss him.

  “Thank you for coming upstairs,” I said.

  He met my eyes. “Thank you for inviting me upstairs.”

  “This is a big deal for me.”

  “For me, too.”

  “But you’ve been in a girl’s bedroom before.”

  He shook his head. “Not in the bedroom of a superhero.”

  “I’m not a superhero.”

  “You’re pretty damn close.”

  “I’m the opposite, in a lot of ways.”

  “It’s possible that you don’t fully know how awesome you are.”

  “That’s distinctly possible.”

  He met my eyes. “But I do.”

  The intensity of his gaze made me feel shy.

  “I think about you all the time,” he confessed then. “In between shifts, all I’m doing is waiting to see you again. Then, during shifts, I can’t concentrate. I’m supposed to be filling out time logs, but all I can see is that one wisp of hair you can’t seem to keep in your ponytail holder.”

  I started to lean in for another kiss, but he stopped me.

  “I think you are so beautiful,” he went on slowly, deliberately, “that it’s blinding. But it’s not just that. When I look at you, I just see all the things I admire. It’s all the badass stuff about you, sure, like the way you’re so calm when all hell’s breaking loose, and the way you can toss a three-point shot backwards without even looking and make it with nothing but net, and don’t get me started on the one-arm pull-ups. It’s how you never panic and nothing scares you. But it’s also that your first career goal was to be the Tooth Fairy. And that you hum to yourself when you’re washing the dishes. And that when you laugh really, really hard, you run out of breath and start squeaking like a mouse.”

  “I don’t squeak like a mouse.”

  “There’s all this toughness about you—but the most impressive thing about that toughness, I think, is that you built it to protect the tenderness.”

  I blinked at him. Who was this guy? “It’s not true that nothing scares me,” I said then. “You scare me.”

  He let out a laugh. “I am far too lovesick to scare anybody.”

  I had to clarify something. “Are you lovesick?” I asked.

  He met my eyes. “Horribly.”

  “About me?” I asked, just making sure.

  He gave me a look like I was adorable and ridiculous and lovable, all at once. Then he nodded and got serious again. “Every single minute of every single day.”

  “It’s not you that scares me,” I said. “It’s the things I feel about you.”

  “The things I feel about you scare me, too,” he said, looking very serious. “We’ll just have to be very careful with each other.”

  “Okay,” I said. Agreed. Next, I kissed him breathless.

  “We can stop whenever you want,” he kept saying.

  “Okay,” I’d say, and keep going.

  The official plan was to snuggle. But I just kept kissing him instead.

  I don’t know how long this had been going on—an hour, maybe?—when I started tugging at his pants, like I wanted him to take them off. I’m not even sure what my plan was, exactly. I just wanted there to be fewer barriers between us. I just wanted to get rid of everything that was in the way.

  He shook his head. He didn’t break the kiss, but he pulled my hand away. “Nope. Not a good idea.”

  I went back to tug some more. “Why not?” I said, not breaking the kiss, either.

  “Because we had an agreement. And I’m trying to stick to it.”

  “But the agreement was more about me than you.”

  He squinted at me, like, Kind of. “True. Ish.”
r />   “So if anyone should be allowed to amend the agreement, it should be me.”

  “We’re not amending the agreement.”

  “Because we don’t have protection?”

  At that, Owen squeezed his eyes closed.

  “What?”

  “We do, actually, have protection.”

  “We do?”

  He put his hand over his eyes. “My cousin Alex put a condom in my pocket at the party.”

  I thought about that for a second. Problem solved. I went back after the pants.

  “Nope,” the rookie said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want you to regret anything.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Maybe he was right, but I was willing to find out. “Don’t you want to?” I asked.

  He honked out a hoarse laugh. “There are not enough words in the universe to describe how much I want to. But we can’t.”

  “I think we can.”

  “Cassie,” he said, lifting up on his elbows, “I don’t want to mess this up with you.”

  His saying no had the opposite of the effect he intended. It didn’t discourage me. It freed me up to go forward.

  His saying no just made me say yes harder.

  I pushed him back down on the bed and started working on him to change his mind. I kissed him with new purpose. I ran my hands through his hair. I draped myself over him.

  He kept talking. “We don’t have to rush things.”

  But I could tell he’d closed his eyes. And the way he was breathing—so deep and fast—I could tell that I was melting his resistance.

  “We can do this anytime,” he went on, still protesting. “Life is long.”

  “Life is not long,” I said, running my hand over his torso. “It’s short.”

  “I think we should wait,” he said, kissing me back just as hard.

  I was winning. Or maybe we both were. But I could feel him giving in.

  Then I pulled back and looked him in the eyes. I had a serious question. “Do you think, if we got started, but then it wasn’t good for me, you could stop? After starting, I mean?”

  He gave me a serious answer. “If we got started and it wasn’t good for you, I wouldn’t want to do anything but stop.”

  “I might need to stop,” I said. “I don’t know. But what I do know—right now—is that I’d really, really, really like to get started.”

  * * *

  WE DIDN’T STOP.

  I never even thought about stopping again after that.

  All that closeness, and trust, and time we’d spent together—plus the fact that he was a Nobel Prize–level kisser—made it easy. There were fumblings and mistakes, and moments of self-conscious laughter. The point is, we laughed a lot, and we stumbled along, and we took things slow, and fast, all at the same time. At one point, he accidentally pulled my hair. A little while later, I accidentally elbowed him in the cheekbone. Somewhere in there, for a few scary minutes, he thought he’d lost Cousin Alex’s condom—which, laughing with relief after he found it, we decided would be a great name for a garage band.

  But as goofy and silly and fun as everything that happened between us in that room, that night, on my virginal white bed, was—it was serious, too. And had nothing to do with the past or the future. We were just alive, and together, and happy—right then and right there.

  Would it always be just exactly like this? Of course not.

  The rookie was leaving, my mother was dying, and the world was full of monsters. Good things didn’t last, people hurt each other every day, and nobody got a happy ending. But that night with him made me see it all in a new way. All the hardships and insults and disappointments in life didn’t make this one blissful moment less important. They made it more. They made it matter. The very fact that it couldn’t last was the reason to hold on to it—however we could.

  Yes, the world is full of unspeakable cruelty. But the answer wasn’t to never feel hope, or bliss, or love—but to savor every fleeting, precious second of those feelings when they came.

  The answer wasn’t to never love anyone.

  It was to love like crazy whenever you could.

  So I kissed him back. And I made a choice to believe in that kiss. I stripped us down until there were no barriers left, and I made a choice to get started and see what happened.

  What happened was good. What happened was just exactly what I needed.

  There was something powerful between us, and I had this unshakable feeling that it could rebuild something essential that had crumbled inside me—the same way that laughter soothes sorrow, or company soothes loneliness, or a good meal soothes hunger.

  It was a profound thing to realize. Love could heal me. Not the rookie, not some guy, but love itself—and my impossibly brave choice to practice it.

  It really did turn out to be power, not weakness. The power to refuse to let the world’s monsters ruin everything. The power to claim my right to be happy.

  I made a choice to trust the rookie, but it was the choice that mattered the most.

  I won’t lie. Sleeping with the rookie that night was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

  But it was also, without question, the easiest.

  Twenty-four

  THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up with a naked rookie in my bed.

  I guess there’s a first time for everything.

  Woke up late, I should add, because, understandably, I’d totally forgotten to set my alarm.

  Nothing about this situation alarmed Owen—but everything about it alarmed me.

  “Get up, get up!” I said, pulling the blanket to wrap up in. “My mom’s downstairs! It’s morning! We’re late! We’re on shift today! Come on, come on!”

  He opened his eyes and took in the sight of me with a look I could really only describe as blissed out.

  “Come on, man! You’re going to get me fired!” I stepped to the bathroom to run the shower, and when I came back in, he was just standing there, again, still, totally naked, fumbling for his pants. “Oh my God,” I said, slapping my hand over my eyes. “You’re so naked.”

  “That tends to happen when you take off your clothes.”

  I peeked through my fingers. “Do you want to know how many naked men I’ve had in this room?”

  “Not really.”

  “Zero!”

  “Until today.”

  “Until today.”

  “You’re naked, too,” he pointed out as he buckled his pants. “Under that blanket.”

  “We’re going to be late,” I said, back to business, “both of us, at the same time. They’ll totally know what happened.”

  “They will not. I have a legendary poker face.”

  “I don’t!” I was panting just a little. “Neither of us is ever late! Both of us late—together? We’re screwed.”

  “Don’t panic,” he insisted, all chill. “I’ll text the captain. I’ll tell him your car broke down and I’m giving you a ride.”

  Actually, that was a good idea.

  Plausible, at any rate.

  “Go take your shower,” he said then. “I’ll make coffee.” I started to turn, but then he said, “Wait! One quick thing!”

  And then he was beside me, no shirt, no shoes, and he was wrapping his arms around me and the blanket. He pressed his face into my hair at the crook of my neck. “Thank you,” he said then. “For everything.”

  * * *

  THE GUYS DID not suspect us.

  If they had, they would have teased us mercilessly. I waited for it all day, but it never happened.

  So I just did what I do best: ignored the rookie and did my job.

  It was a week before Owen would have a chance to talk to his dad, so we’d have at least two full shifts of doing this before anything changed. Whatever “this” was. It wasn’t dating, that was for sure. I’d forbidden him to come near me again until this whole situation was resolved. I guess we were just keeping a shared sec
ret. Or maybe nurturing a mutual crush. Or having flashbacks—luxurious, shocking, delicious flashbacks—of that glorious night in my attic room and the way the breeze had ruffled the pom-pom curtains.

  Or maybe quietly, without even doing anything at all, we were just making each other happy.

  It was weird to feel happy—especially when there was so much trouble and sorrow around us. But I just couldn’t seem to help it.

  So I let it be what it was. I let it alter my experience of being on shift in ways that didn’t matter and ways that did. I was supposed to be a robot, but I’d become the opposite of that. Instead of metal and machinery inside my rib cage, it was music and motion and color. It was grief about my mother, and euphoria about Owen, and hope for the future and regret for the past—all swirling together in some relentless symphony.

  Distracting.

  I wasn’t sure it made me bad at my job, though.

  If anything, it seemed to make me better—more committed, more alert. More alive.

  It wasn’t easier. It was harder.

  But it was better.

  I made it through a whole week like that, trying to let everything that had happened soak in and start making sense in my head. It did and it didn’t, and my mom insisted that was okay. That’s just how the heart worked, she said—more in circles than straight lines.

  Owen kindly respected my wishes and did not come to see me on our days off.

  But he called every night at bedtime.

  And I’d lie in my attic bedroom on the phone like the hopeful teenager I’d never really had a chance to be, my bare feet against the window, watching the moon through the curtains for hours, as we talked ourselves to sleep.

  * * *

  THEN, DURING THE last shift before Owen would explain everything to his dad and officially resign, we got a call for a structure fire.

  This was not a little garage fire on the edge of town. This was a grocery store, right in the middle, and a fire that had started in the early hours of the morning and built momentum until sunrise, when the manager witnessed a black column of smoke rising from the roof as he pulled in to work.