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)
Her laugh chokes and turns into something that makes my knees think about quitting a second time. She pulls in air like she’s mad at it, then steps back an inch, then another, unpeels herself with visible reluctance. Her hands stay at my coat until the last possible second and then fall, fingers flexing as if the ache needs somewhere to go.
We exist in the after for a minute. Snow collects in her lashes. Heat waves wobble off the engine. The barn hisses behind us.
“You hit your bottle,” she says, clinical again, because she trusts me with two things at once—her panic and her training.
“Yeah.” I roll my shoulder. “It’ll have a bruise. So will the floor.”
“Come by the medic bay. I want eyes on it after we clear scene.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say again.
We move back into the work like the people we’re paid to be. We finish the mop, cut the smolder out of the rafters, soak the hay. The farmer’s wife thanks us with hands that miss and land and miss again, too much weather for a sentence. Savannah talks to her the way she talks to kids—calm, steady, eyes level.
When we roll hose, she’s beside me, coiling in rhythm, shoulders brushing mine with every pass. The crew sees it and gives us the grace of not noticing out loud. Captain hums a scrap of something that might be a hymn or a bar song. The engine ticks itself cooler.
On the road back, she rides in the passenger seat of the ambulance, profile cut sharp against a sky that can’t decide if it’s done with snow. I follow in the engine and fight the urge to tailgate like a teenager who needs to see brake lights to breathe. At a stop sign she glances in the side mirror and finds me. Her mouth curves, small and real. It lands like a hand to the chest.
Back at the station, we do the ritual all over again—lines, tools, order from mess. Savannah corners me near the medic bay with a look that has command in it. “Let me see your shoulder.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I tell her for the third time this morning, which earns me an eye roll that makes me smirk.
In the quiet of the bay, she peels my coat back gently and works the harness off me. Her fingers find the spot where the beam kissed my bottle and caught some of me—there’s already a mean purple bruise blooming under my collarbone, tender when she tests it. She prods, listens to the grunt I don’t want to give, and hums and clucks, verdict sliding steady over worry.
“You’ll live,” she pronounces.
“I tend to.”
She hesitates. My breath does the same. Then she bends and presses her mouth once, soft, to the edge of the bruise. My vision whites out for exactly one heartbeat.
“Savannah,” I say.
She straightens, eyes bright and stubborn.
“You came back to me,” she says, as if that’s the diagnosis and the cure.
“Every time,” I say, as if it’s a promise I know how to keep.
Her mouth curves at one corner. “Okay.”
I want to drag her into the quiet room. I want to tell the building to take a ten and lock the bay and kiss her until the bruise is old news. I don’t. I tap two fingers against my temple and drop them to my chest—a salute we started as kids.
“Shift’s not over,” I remind both of us.
“It better not be,” she returns, dry, and the humor in it breathes more life into me.
We move back toward the sound of the crew. Before we hit the doorway, she catches my sleeve and I turn because I always will. She rises on her toes, close enough that only the wall could be eavesdropping, and says softly, “Don’t make me chase you to kiss you later.”
I can’t help the smile. “Deal.”
Snow starts again outside. The river will be singing by dark. The barn will smoke until dusk. The bruise will flower and fade.
And somewhere past that—when the kitchen is empty and the bay is dark and the world stops asking for our hands for one damn minute—I’m going to take her to the river and kiss her with no alarms, no witnesses, no promises we can’t keep. Just her and I. The way we were meant to be.
Chapter Twelve
Savannah
The station is too quiet.
It shouldn’t be. After a barn fire that big, after screams and smoke and alarms that still ring in my blood, the place should be loud with cleanup and chatter and the usual chaos. But the others drifted home hours ago, and the night shift hasn’t started yet. I’m trembling, but I’ve been pretending I’m not. Sitting on the bench in the empty turnout room, gloves still in my lap, trying to count breaths. It isn’t working.
My hands won’t stop shaking.