Page 16 of Never Alone
I had never kissed anyone in my life.
It hadn't been for lack of offers. I had been turning down a particular kind of offer for a long time. Every woman who'd ever approached me had been after one night. I wasn't built for one night.
I shut off the water and got dressed. The rest of the crew was asleep in their bunks.
I lay on my bunk and stared at the ceiling.
I couldn't shake how she'd looked at me. My body remembered the moment my head was trying to forget. Her lips on mine. Soft. Warm. The way she'd held my face. Her eyes when she pulled back. Her hair loose around her face. Her neck. The dip at her collarbone where the T-shirt collar had pulled away.
I stopped.
I was thirty-four years old. I was not going to lie in a bunk thinking about a woman's collarbone like a teenager with no discipline.
I turned on my side and made myself go to sleep.
The kitchen was quiet at six.
These calls took a toll. Every man at the table had pulled people out of windows in the dark. Every man at the table was walking into the next morning with the kind of tired that wasn't body-tired.
I poured my coffee and sat down. Davis was at the table with the newspaper. Hutch was at the counter with his cereal. The radio was on low. Nobody said anything.
I was grateful for it.
It would come back at me. I knew that. The crew would find their second wind, Martinez would be back from jury duty, and a lieutenant getting kissed on a lawn was not the kind of thing that stayed un-ribbed in this firehouse for long.
Just not this morning.
I got through my coffee. Read whatever Davis was done with in the paper. Sam came out of his office around seven, walked through the kitchen on the way to the bay, and didn't sayanything to any of us. The shift change came. We handed the truck over to B-shift, did the briefing, and signed out.
I walked out to my truck in the lot.
The morning was gray. The air was cold, the way Havensworth was cold in November—not the cold that bit, the cold that sat on your shoulders and reminded you the year was almost done.
I sat in the truck with the keys in my hand.
I should have driven home. I'd had two hours of sleep, maybe three. The bed in my own house was the appropriate next stop for a man at the end of a shift like that.
I started the truck and drove to the hospital instead.
I didn't know why I did. I only realized what I'd done when I shut the engine off in the parking lot.
What was I doing here?
Lieutenants checked on the people they pulled out. That was a thing lieutenants did. It wasn't weird. I'd done it before—for a man I'd pulled out of a kitchen fire on Reynolds, for a kid who'd come off a bicycle in front of an oncoming truck and lived. Most lieutenants did. The hospital was on my way home if I was loose about whaton my waymeant.
I was being loose about it.
I got out of the truck, locked it, and crossed the lot to the ER entrance.
The triage nurse looked up when I came in.
"Lieutenant Weston, Station 33. We had a house fire in Westbrook overnight. Mother and son for smoke inhalation. I wanted to check on them."
She tapped at the keyboard.
"St. George. Natalie and Noah."
I nodded.
