Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
“I’ll try to schedule all slips for your day off,” I say, aiming for light and missing by a mile.
He huffs; it sounds like pain trying to be a laugh. “I’ll just sleep in the trailhead lot.”
“You already drive by my house like a very handsome raccoon.”
He doesn’t smile. His eyes drop to my mouth. The air frays. Heat crawls up my neck that the hospital’s fluorescent bulbs never gave me. He steps in, not enough to touch.
“Say the word,” he says, voice rough velvet. “Tell me to back off and I’ll give you distance you didn’t know existed.”
“And if I don’t?” I ask, not backing up, not breathing right.
His nostrils flare. “Then I start making lists of ways to keep you warm that don’t involve hypothermia blankets.”
A short, shocked sound escapes me that might be a laugh if it didn’t shake like a warning bell. “Axel.”
Someone yells our names from the bay. Cole. Of course. The spell pops. We step apart a fraction, both of us breathing like we just ran the ridge again.
“Debrief,” Cole calls. “Then paperwork. Then I’m buying pancakes for this idiot when he’s cleared, and if either of you argues I’ll reassign you to hydrant checks for a month.”
We nod like obedient soldiers. Axel doesn’t take his eyes off me. He touches my sleeve. It’s nothing. It’s everything.
Then he’s gone, crossing the bay back to the ambulance with a gait I could pick out of a lineup of a thousand firefighters—loose shouldered, coil-sprung, a man who knows where every exit is and still chooses to walk toward the heat.
I drag a hand down my face and follow, trying very hard to remember how to be the version of myself that doesn’t tip toward him like a needle finding north.
The mountain will take you if you forget what you’re doing. The heart will too.
Today, neither did.
Barely.
Chapter Nine
Axel
The ambulance smells like metal, antiseptic, and adrenaline. The heater fans thrum in the ceiling; the rig rocks once as someone slams a door out in the bay. We’ve just handed Evan off to the ER, and the whole box still holds the echo of sirens, like the sound stuck to the walls.
Savannah steps up into the back without asking and closes the double doors behind her. The click lands like a bolt sliding home. For a beat, all I hear is both of us breathing—the ragged, after-a-storm kind you can’t hide.
She’s flushed and wind-chapped, hair messy from her beanie, eyes still too wide. She moves past me in the aisle, steadying herself with a hand to the cabinet—and then she touches my arm.
Just a warm palm over my sleeve, quick, like she’s making sure I’m solid.
I am. Unfortunately.
Heat hits like a freight train. Every nerve I have turns its head and looks at that point of contact. My body leans before I think better of it.
“Don’t,” she says, soft.
“Don’t what?”
“Pretend that—” She frowns. Her mouth does something like a smile and like a wince. “It’s just that you always were there. Until you weren’t.”
I go still.
She takes her hand back. The air cools where she leaves me.
“Maybe we should talk about when I left,” she finally says.
“Yeah?” I brace one hand on the counter behind me. The metal is cold. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”
“Why didn’t you—” She cuts herself off, reorders, starts again. “You can’t act like today—like the last week—isn’t dragging us into the same room we spent ten years avoiding.”
“I’m not acting,” I say. “I’m here.”
“And you’re also…” She searches my face. “You’re… hiding. You’re letting me do all the talking and you’re hiding.”
I huff something that isn’t a laugh. “You want my insides on the table?”
“Yes,” she says, sharp. Then softer: “Please.”
I should dodge. I should stall. I should send her to Cole for debrief and go punish myself on the rowing machine until my lungs stop burning with the shape of her name.
Instead I say the thing I never planned to say.
“Ask me then.”
She blinks. “Ask… you what?”
“What you’re circling. Ask it so I don’t get cute with half-answers.”
She pulls in a breath that lifts her shoulders. “Why did you give up on us?”
The question happens to my ribs like a pry bar. I hold her eyes, take the pain, and shake my head once.
“I didn’t,” I say.
“Axel—”
“I never did.”
She stares at me long and hard, like she’s checking my pupils for lies. “You let me go. You watched me leave—you knew where I was going. You didn’t—”
“I wrote to you,” I say, and it comes out rougher than I meant. “Every month.”
She goes very still. The heater hum is suddenly too loud.
“Every month?” she repeats.
“For ten years,” I say. “Sometimes more. Sometimes less. Birthdays. Holidays. Nothing days when it wouldn’t shut up in my head until I put it down.”
She swallows. “You’re lying.”
I shake my head.