He knelt down with her, giving her a sweet, hot kiss on the forehead. He pulled up his boxers and jeans, then wrapped her into his arms and declared, “Now I can die a happy man.”
“Don’t die,” she said, and there was real fear in her voice. She wasn’t playing around.
“I won’t. I promise,” he said, and it felt true. Everything with her felt true, especially the rapid beat of her heart. He could feel it against his chest.
“You can’t promise that,” she whispered in a thin voice.
“I know. But I want to,” he said, wrapping his arms tightly around her, holding her there on the floor of his bar where no one could see them. Then he gently placed a hand on her chin, making her look at him. Her brown eyes were so pure and deep, but there was so much sadness in them. “When you told me you’re not in the place for a relationship. Was that the truth?”
“Yes. And no,” she said, and he could tell it was hard for her to admit that much.
“Yes, you’re not in the place for a relationship? Or not with me?” He motioned from her to him.
“You said the same thing about yourself,” she pointed out, her tone edging toward defensive.
“I know,” he whispered, then leaned in to kiss her forehead again, then her cheek, then her lips, giving the softest kiss he’d ever given her. “But things changed.”
She laughed. “Because of that super-awesome, amazing blow job I gave you?”
He laughed, too, but then let it fade. He needed to make it clear to her that this wasn’t because she’d given him the blow job of a lifetime. He was going to have to make it patently clear that there was so much more going on than the way their bodies collided into each other like magnets. He hadn’t reached out to her today as he’d promised, because he’d spent the time thinking about how it would feel not to see her again. The answer was simple—awful. And now it was time to let her know.
“No. Because of how I feel when I’m with you.”
She drew in a quick breath. “How do you feel when you’re with me?”
Now it was his turn to inhale, steeling himself for what he was going to say. “Like I’m living in the present. Not the past.” The admission didn’t hurt as much as he’d thought it would. It felt freeing.
She placed a gentle hand over his cheek. He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them. “Can you tell me what happened in Chicago? Because I think it’s a big part of what’s going on in here,” she said, tracing a line across his forehead.
He felt a stabbing pain in his chest, as if his organs were constricting and seizing up, but when she ran her hand over his jawline, the soft pads of her fingers tracing him, that tightening went away.
He pushed his hand through his hair. “You know when you asked me about the family here? The kids and that fire a few weeks back?”
She nodded, listening intently.
“The reason I didn’t want to talk about it is because of why I came here in the first place. I love it here now, and that’s partly because it’s everything Chicago wasn’t for me anymore. Because everywhere I went I couldn’t escape the memories of this one fire where I lost two of my men,” he said, and his voice threatened to break, and hell, he didn’t want to lose it in front of her or anyone. But then she reached for his hand, squeezing tight, and that gave him the strength to keep going, to tell her the full story.
“It was a cold night in February. Someone left candles in a condo when they went out to the movies. It was one of those things—you’re rushing to leave, to make it to the theater in time, and you forget. Ladder 10 got the call when it started, and the fire was raging in minutes. Pretty soon, the whole top floor was consumed,” he said, steeling himself as the images threatened to choke him.
“I was on one of the lower floors with the chief and my buddy Sawyer, fighting the blaze. We did everything right. Did it by the books. We were safe, we took precautions, and we were just trying to fight the beast. Then a wall collapsed.” He lowered his hand sharply, like a drawbridge closing, to demonstrate the speed. “The chief saw it coming. As soon as it started to fall, he pushed Sawyer and me to try to get us out of the way,” he said, giving voice for the first time to the reel that played behind his eyes. The story hurt in the way that thick sobs do when you try to hold back, but not quite in the suffocating way it had felt inside his head all these days. Maybe just telling it was what he’d needed, coupled with the caring way Megan watched and listened as he spoke.
“I was the lucky one,” he said with a small scoff. “Or so they all said after, because all I suffered were shoulder injuries. Trust me, I sure as hell didn’t think about how much my body ached at the funeral a few days later when the chief and Sawyer were laid to rest. All I thought about was what happened. Sometimes it’s still all I think about. I replay it, I study it. I try to figure out if there was something, anything, I could have done differently. I tried to tell myself that Sawyer’s death was the equivalent of a friend being hit in the crosswalk by a car that ran the light.”