Love Him Breathless

by E M Lindsey

  “I got a job offer in New York and I’m going to take it,” he said, standing three-feet from Fitz, but it felt like three thousand miles already.

  Fitz swallowed thickly. “Just like that?”

  Chance didn’t bother to hide his sigh. “Just like that.” And then he left Fitz in the cabin for the rest of the night. He didn’t end up alone. He sent an SOS text to his best friend, and Parker showed up half an hour later with a couple of forties from the gas station, four bags of hot Cheetos, and a joint that sat on the table all night, unlit.

  By morning, Chance no longer existed in Cherry Creek, and Fitz dove head-first into his new normal. He slept a lot less, and he swam across the lake until his entire body burned—but it was what it was. He just…moved on.

  Chapter Two

  Knitting had started out as therapy when Fitz was attempting to regain dexterity in fingers he couldn’t feel. His therapist said the motion of the needles, and wrapping yarn might seem pointless, but it would help. Months of nothing more than knotted blobs of acrylic yarn was discouraging—but then one day the blob got longer, and the stitches got tighter, and then…it was a scarf. Or something.

  He knitted in the winter and sold his stock in the summer at the Farmer’s Market just to make a little cash for supplies. Most of the time it was to keep his hand limber, but sometimes it was just a good way to keep his mind away from the dark places he went to more often than not since Chance skipped out on him. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong about that Wednesday evening, either. Fitz had been working a twenty-four-hour shift, and sometimes that was lonely when he was the only one on duty. The soft clacking of wooden needles was all he needed to keep his mind occupied for those last quiet hours until he could go home.

  “You know those are terrible, right, Chief? You can’t even call that a hat. That’s an abomination.”

  Fitz didn’t bother to look up from his work at the sound of Birdie, his second in command, as he leaned in the doorway. This many years, and one heartbreak later, and he still wasn’t any good at knitting. But then again, he wasn’t considering a career change. “It’s not meant to be a hat, asshole.”

  “Then I don’t want to know. You look fucking tired though, have you slept? Marcy said there weren’t any calls.”

  “I slept some. Are you on tonight?” Fitz asked as he stretched his leg out over the coffee table. He’d worked hard over the years to make the station’s lounge comfortable. Considering most of the men did several twenty-four-hour shifts, he wanted them to at least feel like it was partly home.

  He heard Birdie’s heavy steps as he moved into the room, and then the couch shifted under their combined weight as his captain sat. “Is it like a thing with you? Like some sort of religious thing that you can’t check the fucking schedule.”

  Fitz snorted as he dropped a stitch, then grabbed his crochet hook to push it back onto the needle. There would be a hole, but no one ever really cared. He sold the hats and scarves to people he knew would never wear them. Well, mostly. Last winter, he’d seen Levi Kadish leaning out of his food truck with the scarf his boyfriend had bought him wrapped around his neck, and Fitz felt a sort of jolt—of pride mostly, and a little bit of envy because Levi must really love James Motel to sport that monstrosity in public.

  “You asked to make the schedule,” he answered absently, “and I basically live here, so the only time I give a shit is when my employees are interrupting my knitting time.” It was the slow season in Cherry Creek, the handful of weeks leading up to the summer with the Farmer’s Market and tourist season—not that tourists flooded in.

  At best, they had people coming in for dinner at Mangia E Zitto, thanks to the owner’s shitty celebrity chef personality and his husband’s viral YouTube channel. But their single fine dining restaurant wasn’t enough to sustain the town, and Fitz knew there was pressure on the mayor to do something about it. He’d heard rumors that Rene was looking to bring in some consultant to help spruce up the town’s advertisement and tourism draw, which Fitz knew would be great for the economy, but also would stress out the locals who weren’t used to it.

  He’d already seen the faint stress lines on Charlie Motel’s face at the thought of the Lodge filling up to capacity for the entire summer. He was good on rooms, but short on staff, and Cherry Creek didn’t have a high unemployment rate. The students were all out for summer, but Fitz couldn’t imagine that being sustainable work.

  His sister, Gwen, had a teenage son who was the epitome of why Fitz wouldn’t entertain the idea of interns at the station who were under eighteen. Not even for filing paperwork and answering phones. Owen was also the reason Fitz was glad he’d come out at seventeen and never looked back. He might want kids—someday—but it wasn’t likely.

  Fitz liked his life, as lonely as it was. He’d worked his ass off in rehab, worked his ass off in therapy. He had to stop playing sports because the doctor didn’t sugar coat it when he said if he got range of motion back in his arm and hand, it would take years. And that hadn’t been a lie. But it also wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

  At eighteen, three months before graduation, a little bookshop on the corner of Center Ave, right near the Chametz, had caught fire. He and Parker had been walking home from their shift at the Cherry Creek cinema, and Fitz smelled the smoke before they saw it.

  At first, he thought it was a hallucination from his accident. They were bad when he was first released from the hospital, but they’d tapered off after a few years. Every now and again, though—especially in winter—for just a second, he would swear he was choking on the thick, black smoke. But this time, Parker made a small noise and grabbed his arm, and the pair had gone running.

  Fitz didn’t even think twice—didn’t even give himself time to be scared. Parker ran to the pay phone and dialed for the fire department, and Fitz kicked down the front door and stuck his head in. He was smarter after his brush with death at the hands of uncontrolled flames, but he had also taken classes at the rec center on how to stay safe during a housefire and how to administer first aid.

  He put his shirt up to his nose and got low to the ground, but it didn’t seem like anyone was inside. By the time the truck arrived—far too late in Fitz’s opinion—the building was going up in flames, but no one was hurt. At least, no one was hurt—that time— and it was in that moment Fitz knew what he wanted to do with his life.

  Fitz signed up for EMT classes in Colorado Springs, and then spoke to the chief in Cherry Creek and secured a job when he was done. He was proud of himself, and in spite of the fire taking so much from him, he felt like he was on the right path. Even when Ronan saw him training and lost his damn mind that Fitz would put himself in danger like that again, Fitz knew he’d made the right choice. He had no hesitation about going over to the station and signing his name on the dotted line. He ignored the looks of wonder, and some of pity, from these men who had known him his entire life.

  The burn victim, the Scout kid, the one who almost didn’t make it. The one whose arm didn’t work right.

  He knew it was going to take effort, but he didn’t regret a second of it, even through the pain, and the quiet tears, and the self-doubt. By the time he made Chief, no one was surprised. By the time he sat in the old chief’s office and laid out his own family photos and replaced Hughes’ plaque with his own that read Edmund “Fitzy” Fitzgerald in perfectly scripted stamp, his life made sense.

  He had a good team, and he loved Cherry Creek. It was hard sometimes, watching the world pass him by—watching people fall in love—but he was happy. Mostly. Eventually, he and Ronan started speaking again, and Parker came home married to the grumpy bastard, and the world started making sense again.

  “You got plans tonight?” Birdie asked him.

  Fitz finally looked up at the man and shrugged. Isaac Shephard, who had been a transplant from West Virginia, had joined the department a year after Fitz made Captain. He earned the nickname Birdie three weeks into the job when someone too
k notice that every time Isaac was behind the wheel, they’d end up with a bird-shaped imprint on the window. Fitz saw the way it killed the guy a little bit each time—even if they were just pigeons—but he rolled with the punches, just like the rest of them.

  And Birdie was a good guy. He worked as hard as Fitz, and he was a good second in command. Fitz had never worried—not for a second—with Birdie at his back. It was nice to be cared for, even if it was lacking in some ways.

  “Just gotta get my stock going,” Fitz said, patting the yarn and he ignored Birdie’s eyeroll. “I think it’ll be a good summer.”

  “Winter hats and scarves in the summer. You’re so fucking weird, Chief.” Whatever Birdie was going to say next was interrupted by the sound of a call which Birdie grabbed before Fitz could climb to his feet.

  Fitz couldn’t hear the details, but the low cadence of Birdie’s speech told him it wasn’t a major emergency. “What’s up?” he called when Birdie stopped talking.

  “Accident on the twenty-one, out near the guys’ farm. Non-injury, just needs an assessment and a tow. Sandra called Bruce,” he said, referring to the town’s sheriff, “but he’s tied up with Davis at the Gazette.”

  “Why is Rene at the Gazette?” Fitz asked, climbing to his feet. He knew Rene Davis, the mayor, was stressed about the town’s budget, and that the paper was capitalizing on it for lack of other interesting news.

  “Not a damn clue,” Birdie said. He was reaching for the keys to the station’s car, but Fitz beat him to it.

  “I’m done here in about twenty, and I was going to take the car over to Max’s shop for an oil change, so I’ll swing by the accident and take care of it on my way. Let Sandra know for me?” Fitz didn’t give Birdie time to argue, grabbing his bag on the way out.

  He wanted the drive—even if it was going to be dealing with some irate out-of-towner who didn’t know how to look up from his fucking cell phone on their long, winding roads. Already he was annoyed, but seeing Max would help since there were always kittens around and he preferred them to people most days.

  It was days like this which reminded him why he’d chosen to stay—why nothing beyond Cherry Creek had much of an appeal. Maybe he was alone—but there were worse things. Maybe his life was small, but he made a difference to these people, and that mattered to him more than anything else in the world.

  Chapter Three

  Antoine Tremblay had never truly been alone. Not even from conception, when the fertilized egg split into two identical parts creating mirrored images of two boys who spent nine months wrapped together. His mother—who had been staunchly anti-hospital—had still gone in for her required ultrasounds and had several strange, wavy images of two hands holding tight to each other for the long six months she’d known she was having twins.

  Antoine was born first at twenty-seven weeks, six minutes ahead of Marcel, in a birthing center down the road from the hospital where he spent the next three months of his life trying not to die. They were both barely two pounds, and too small to really exist outside of the womb, but they were fighters.

  Antoine had always felt a little responsible for his twin. Marcel’s blindness was discovered just weeks after he was first sent home—and Antoine didn’t really recall a single year in his earliest memories that didn’t involve hospitals, and surgeries, and big, clunky eye-patches strapped to his brother’s face.

  Marcel was blind. It wasn’t anything he came to terms with because it just existed as his reality from the moment he became self-aware. Marcel was blind, just like Marcel was shorter, and had a freckle under his right eye, and always wore his hair longer. They’d never adapted to a change. They’d always known how to live a life that accommodated a blind person. It just…was. And maybe it wasn’t normal according to other people, but then, nothing about their life had ever been.

  His father loved the term nomadic—had loved what it represented. There was no such thing as home apart from the four of them, bouncing all over the globe at whatever university wanted his father’s research and expertise that semester. There was no sense of stability except knowing he could count on his mother to find a place with a small garden, and that his father would disappear for days on end, and that Marcel and Antoine would rely on each other for anything they needed.

  But it was in Puerto Rico—when he was twelve—that he decided living like that was his hell. He felt bad about it too. He knew most people would give a limb to be able to travel the world without a single care where they’d lay their head or what they’d eat, but he was exhausted. He wanted a bed that was just his—a pillow he bought from a store, a cheap set of sheets, a comforter with whatever new, trendy Disney character that was making the rounds. He wanted to make a friend he could keep—not one that would end in a broken promise to keep in touch. He wanted to feel like his feet were on solid ground.

  “When I grow up,” he said to Marcel as they laid on the beach, faces turned up to the sky, “I’m going to have an apartment.”

  “What will it look like?” Marcel asked. He had thick, wrap-around sunglasses that looked like they belonged on an eighty-year-old man, but they were necessary. His glaucoma made the light painful, and frankly, Marcel had never cared whether or not he was trendy.

  “It’s going to have two bedrooms—one for me, and one for you.”

  Marcel laughed. “We’re not going to live together when we’re adults.”

  “Yes,” Antoine said, and there was a ferocity in his voice he didn’t quite understand—wouldn’t be able to understand until he was years and years older. “Yes, we are. We’re brothers.”

  “Brothers don’t live together forever. That’s weird. I’m going to have a husband and a dog.”

  It was not the first time his brother had said something like that, and it made Antoine’s gut twist—hot and angry. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

  Marcel made a soft noise and turned to face Antoine, reaching across the sand for him. Their fingers tangled, and Antoine looked at how much they matched—same shape, same rich tan from how much time they’d been in the sun. “We’ll always be twins. Living apart isn’t going to mean anything different.”

  Antoine didn’t trust himself not to be afraid—not to feel anger over his brother’s refusal to just accept the inevitable—Marcel was going to need him forever. So, he said nothing. It didn’t matter anyway. Marcel would figure it out soon enough.

  He thought about that conversation years later, in San Francisco long after he’d finished his MBA, long after Marcel established himself as a yoga teacher at a studio downtown. Marcel was dating some asshole—staying with the guy which was fine by Antoine because he was still close by, and Antoine was starting to feel suffocated by his brother’s presence.

  Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he always believed Marcel’s independence was nothing more than a carefully constructed fantasy. And maybe, somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that would come back to bite him in the ass.

  Which it did, after Marcel packed up everything he had, moved over a thousand miles away, then announced that in spite of breaking up with his asshole boyfriend no one liked, he was staying. He wasn’t coming home. He wasn’t taking money from his parents or Antoine. He was moving on with a life that didn’t include the people who had been his family up to then.

  “How could you let him do this?” his father demanded. His parents had been in Denmark, but on a whim, they’d chartered a flight to California and he found himself face-to-face with them for the first time in years. “How could you just let him go like that?”

  It was the first time Antoine asked himself that question—or rather, it was the first time he searched himself for the answer. “He’s a grown adult.” And it was hypocritical of him to say that, because he’d been responsible for making Marcel’s life harder when he moved.

  Antoine didn’t know much about what happened after Marcel left—only that he was involved with someone new, that it was serious, and this person was a
lot younger. He’d been unkind about it though, had spent weeks implying that Marcel didn’t know what was good for him, that he’d never make it on his own. And fuck, he hadn’t meant it. He was scared, and he was jealous. Marcel had faced roadblocks with every turn he made in life, and somehow, he was happy. Somehow, he was in love and he was settled, and Antoine was stuck in the city with an empty apartment and nothing to show for his life.

  Marcel didn’t need him, but god—he needed his brother. He didn’t want to be alone.

  “He’s never lived on his own like this,” his mother said, worrying her hands together. “Someone’s going to take advantage of him.”

  Antoine pinched the bridge of his nose. “Haven’t you been preparing us our entire lives for this?”

  “It’s not the same as you,” his father said. He took a step toward Antoine and looked furious. “It was your job to watch him.”

  Antoine’s eyes went wide, and everything he had allowed himself to believe, to participate in, to matter—it all came crashing down like a tidal wave. “Jesus. We’re not children! He can do this on his own.”

  “With some teenager? Some uppity little…little brat who thinks he can take advantage of a blind man?” his mother shouted.

  Antoine couldn’t help but laugh. “Marcel doesn’t get involved if he doesn’t want to. No one has ever taken advantage of him.”

  “Brad,” she started, but Antoine held up his hand.

  “Marcel walked away from him. He didn’t take Brad’s shit. Brad didn’t leave the relationship with more than he brought in. Marcel did fine.” And it was the most honest thing he had said about his brother in years.

  He felt that tiny spark of self-hatred for how he’d been with Marcel flare to life, a roaring fire consuming him from the inside out. How had he been such a shitty brother all these years? They were of the same genetic material—they were almost the same person, and Antoine had let it come to this.