Total pages in book: 162
Estimated words: 156796 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 523(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 156796 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 523(@300wpm)
So unless someone was taking a moonlit stroll, I couldn’t take my chances on someone else noticing it. It could be too late.
The phone was to my ear and the shrill dial tone never seemed louder, nor did a response from the other end of the phone seem to take longer.
“911, what’s your emergency.”
“My name is Lauren Garden and my apartment is on fire,” I said, my voice raspy yet somehow even. “It’s 35 Ocean Blvd. Hurry,” I pleaded.
“Miss, I’m going to need you to—”
I cut the call off. I didn’t need a trained professional, miles away and safe in their office, to try and calm me down. I needed to do that. Plus, they couldn’t save me. Nor could the man whose image had been tattooed on my mind since I awoke with death in my throat minutes—or was it hours?—before.
I had to save myself.
And standing half in, half out of my apartment wasn’t going to do that. I had to make a choice.
As I was about to take my chances with the integrity of the ladder, I paused. One side of my body was prickled with goose bumps as the air assaulted my bare skin, the other burning with the rapidly increasing temperature of my apartment.
The apartment that was on fire.
A fire that would likely rip through most of my possessions before the local fire brigade could put it out. We didn’t have a round-the-clock crew in Amber. We were a small town, barely needing the few paid firefighters we even had. The rest were volunteers, which meant they would need to yank themselves from their beds, race over to the station, wait for their crew, and then come over.
My apartment would likely be cinders by then.
As well as everything inside it.
My paintings.
I had pulled my foot back in the room and was halfway to the door before I figured out what I was doing, I reached back and yanked at the throw I had on the end of my bed.
It was stupid. Reckless. Maybe suicidal to go back into the structure that was on fire when the fresh air and safety was only feet—and a short, treacherous climb—away. But it was also unthinkable to let years, decades of my work, those pieces of my soul, just melt away and become nothing but ash.
They were my memories.
All the beautiful ones, and more importantly, all the ugly ones. How was I supposed to even live with myself if I didn’t at least try to save some of the only things I had left of him? Of myself before he was gone?
With one hand, I whipped off my nightshirt, thankful I was wearing a cropped Calvin Klein tank underneath. It wouldn’t do much for the local firefighters to rescue my topless self from a burning building.
Or your shirtless corpse, a voice shot at me. The sensible voice that was also urging me back to the window as I sloppily tied my shirt around the bottom half of my face.
For the second time in recent months—the first being when I’d hopped onto the back of the motorcycle in the middle of the night—I ignored that voice.
And I used the throw still in my hand to turn the handle and wrench the door open. Heat assaulted me with such force that I was certain my skin had been flayed from my face.
It hadn’t, but I likely would’ve needed to pencil in an eyebrow appointment—if I survived, that was.
Though smoke was thicker and my vision blurry, I still saw the flames. Caught them eating up sections of my sanctuary without mercy, without hesitation. The vision of my home being taken away from me, literally before my eyes, punched me in the chest harder than the wall of smoke and flames.
Move, a different voice than the one before ordered. If you’re going to do this, there’s no time to stop and mourn, to be weak. You’ve got to be quick if you want to succeed. If you want to survive.
Again, without thinking, I slammed the door to my bedroom shut, having realized I’d left my window open, and standing in the doorway was not only eating away at time, it was giving the flames what they needed to breathe, to quicken. The one thing I needed to breathe—oxygen.
My eyes focused on the room, the way the fire was thickest at the front of the apartment, eating away at the frame of the structure already. It was closing in on the door to my studio, but it had yet to fully engulf it.
Which meant this idiotic crusade could still work.
And I moved. Against the smoke that clutched my throat from the inside, that worked into my eyeballs like glass, and the heat of the flames that were fingernails ripping at my skin.
I wrapped the blanket around myself to try to protect my bare skin from the worst of it. But it wouldn’t do much.