The Firefighter's Match

by Allie Pleiter

  He looked up with surprisingly weary eyes. “I was heading back to Gordon Falls for the night and thought maybe you’d appreciate a lift. I can have the helicopter bring you back first thing in the morning. I’m sure you need a change of clothes, if nothing else.”

  That took a lot of nerve. He of all people knew he’d yanked her out of her cottage in the middle of the night and she hadn’t been back since. Where did he get off taking some kind of backhanded pity on her rumpled appearance? JJ’s cousin, Charlotte, who lived in Chicago, had sent keys to her tiny apartment while she was away on an importing trip, but it barely sufficed. All the shuttling back and forth to the hospital meant JJ could barely find ten minutes in a shower, much less a decent wardrobe change.

  “It’s a three-hour drive, JJ. You’d eat up half a day just getting there and back. I can have you in Gordon Falls in forty minutes. You could fix yourself dinner in your own kitchen. Sleep in your own bed. Think of it.”

  The craving to get out of here washed over her with startling force. Her eyes fell closed for a second, hungry for peaceful sounds of the river. Some actual food. The last piece of apple pie sitting uneaten in her fridge. A full breath of sweet riverbank air. One night out there would perk her up like a thousand cups of coffee. She needed it, and badly. Badly enough to consider taking Alex Cushman up on his disingenuous offer.

  “Come on,” he sighed, frustration twisting his voice. “I’m trying hard to be nice here.”

  That was it, wasn’t it? “You’re trying really hard. And I can’t help but wonder why.”

  He ran his fingers though his sandy-blond hair. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t really know why.”

  Come to think of it, he didn’t look much better than she did. They must really be panicked up there at WWW and Adventure Gear. After all, she didn’t think he was supposed to divulge as much of what he knew as he had in the chapel.

  He added, “I’m stumped, actually. I’m usually the first person out the door when complications like this happen.”

  “Is that what Max is to you?” she snapped back, annoyed at herself for even beginning to fall for his clever act. “A complication?”

  “No. Not at all. That’s just it...Max is a person. A man. Someone whose life is forever changed and I can’t do anything to make it right again.” He fisted his hands and looked at her. “Look, I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know why I can’t get your brother—or you—out of my head when putting things out of my mind is ordinarily a particular gift of mine.”

  He stood up and began pacing. “Not that I didn’t try.” He flipped one hand toward the window. “I couldn’t even get as far as Denver, and normally I’d be in another hemisphere with something like this. Sticking around to beat my head against problems I can’t fix isn’t my style. And there’s nothing I can really change here. I don’t have the slightest idea what I’m doing, only that I can’t...” He clamped his hands on either side of his face as if the notion actually gave him a headache. “I can’t...not...help even though I don’t see how I can help.” His ventured another look at her with pained eyes.

  She had to give Alex Cushman one thing—the man radiated charisma. His presence filled the room wherever he went. A quick Internet search the other night had told her Alex was the bold visionary behind Adventure Gear, the world-traveler enthusiast who embodied the company’s high-energy, high-integrity reputation. Where Sam Cushman was the clever empire builder, Alex was the free-spirit driving force behind the brand.

  True to his last comment, he also had earned a reputation for disappearing overnight, often at inopportune moments. According to the magazine profiles—and there were many—Alex got away with it because most of those times he showed up weeks later with some exotic new idea that became AG’s next hot product.

  To a small but enthusiastic audience, Alex was an icon. Even though she’d never heard of him, people seemed to follow him almost more than they followed Adventure Gear. He was Steve Jobs mixed with Indiana Jones with a bit of rock star folded in. The photos she saw portrayed a carefree explorer, a handsome treasure hunter living the life other people could only dream of. That man bore little resemblance to the disheveled guy grasping at words in front of her.

  “I’m not trying to play you, JJ,” he said so softly she could barely hear him. “Can you believe that?”

  Six months ago she would have laughed at a speech like that and walked away. Afghanistan’s first lesson had been that “allies” who insisted they were trustworthy were usually the first to fire once your back was turned. Now, drained and wound too tightly, enough of her—maybe too much of her—was eager to believe him. Nurse Leslie’s words, not to mention the compelling intensity of Alex’s eyes, kept chipping away at her resolve. When Max wasn’t lashing out at everything and everyone, he was a wounded pile of grief. Mom was at a total loss for what to do and how to behave, waffling between giving orders and fits of tears.

  All of which made a night out of here feel incredibly tempting. She really did need to swap out her clothes and put a few details in order—she didn’t have too many friends in Gordon Falls to call on for help just yet, so everything that needed to be done, she’d have to do herself. And then afterward...her own bed. Oh, the bliss a good night’s sleep in her own bed would be. And he was right—she’d never get faster transportation to and from home than Alex’s helicopter.

  “I’ll take you up on your offer. But, just to be clear, I don’t know if I believe you.” She felt compelled to add, “Yet.” She held his eyes, giving him her best combat “don’t mess with me” glare.

  “Fair enough.” Alex took out his cell phone and began punching in numbers. “I’ll meet you downstairs in the lobby in twenty minutes.”

  * * *

  This felt wrong. That was the only thought pounding through Alex’s head as he found himself out on the Gordon Falls river dock again in the middle of the night. Alex’s talent was usually his ability to find peace in the craziest of settings, to dig out the nugget of adventure waiting underneath every pile of chaos. The more chaos, the more he became energized by the prospect of a rich adventure to take him away from it all. And then he’d come back with a solution. That was how it always worked.

  But not tonight. Not even close.

  Here he was, doing the right thing by JJ and her brother, making sure they had everything they needed to face the challenge ahead, and he felt worse than ever. In fact, based on the prickly knot in his stomach and the fact that he’d been awake for nearly 30 hours now, Alex felt he’d gone horribly wrong. I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to be doing here, Lord. Every time he prayed for guidance, begged God for some kind of direction, all he got was a strong intuition telling him to “stay close.” I came back. I brought her home tonight. I should feel some kind of peace about that, shouldn’t I? I should be fast asleep instead of sitting out here on this dock again.

  The light went on in JJ’s kitchen, and Alex checked his watch. 2:40 a.m. The universal surrender symbol of insomniacs everywhere...turning on the kitchen light at some insane hour. The good sleepers? The ones who just wake up for a glass of milk or to get a Tylenol? They just work by the light of the open fridge. Only the truly hopeless go ahead and turn on the lights.

  The hopeless. With something between a grimace and a smirk, Alex snapped on the boathouse light that cast a pale yellow glow over the dock. If nothing else, JJ would know she wasn’t alone. He leaned back against one of the dock pylons, pulled out his ukulele and began to play softly. As he strung together random chords, he found himself praying for JJ, asking God to either send her down to talk or send her to sleep.

  Ten minutes later he saw her figure coming down the path to the dock. She looked pretty bad. The warrior strength he normally saw in her was clearly fraying around the edges. “Couldn’t sleep, even in your own bed?”

  “I think I nodded off for an hour or two.” She rolled her shoulders as if they pinched. “Not enough.” She eased herself onto the bench th
at sat on one side of the dock and looked down on him as he dangled one foot in the river. “You play that thing a lot.”

  Alex tried to do a bit of a flourish at the end of a chord and messed up hopelessly.

  She raised an eyebrow at the fumble. “You’re not very good.”

  It was the closest thing to life he’d seen from her in days. “No, really, tell me how you feel.” He modulated up two keys, trying to redeem his skills but tangling one finger so that a jarring dissonance floated out across the river. “Okay, I’m no virtuoso, but I have fun with it.”

  “Fun.” She sighed the word, as if it were something forever out of reach now. He couldn’t say he’d feel differently under the circumstances, and Alex was the kind of guy who knew how to have fun just about anywhere. “Think Max will have fun ever again?” she asked.

  There was a hopeful, optimistic answer he should have given, but it felt like lying out here in the dark. “I want to think so,” he offered. “No matter what they tell you, I don’t think Max’s life is over.”

  JJ slumped farther down on the bench. “Max is going to sue.”

  Alex didn’t know what to say to that. He wasn’t surprised. He waited for the defensive impulse to rush to the surface, the protective response to save Adventure Gear from what might be the most public and damaging lawsuit in the company’s history.

  “Aren’t you supposed to try to stop me? Isn’t that what your brother, Sam, wants?”

  “Sam’s a panicked idiot.”

  “It’s your company, too. Aren’t you panicked?”

  Alex chose a new chord. “I hadn’t realized it until just now, but yes. I am scared of what will happen to AG. Only scared isn’t the same thing as panicked, don’t you think?” Some dark and surprising place way down deep inside entertained the thought that maybe AG ought to fall. That shocked him. His entire life’s work up in flames over something so regrettable as what happened to Max Jones? The thought turned his stomach to ice despite the summer night. Scared? Absolutely.

  “Over there, they’d tell us fear was your friend. It did things to your body, to your senses that helped to keep you alive. They’d always tell us that when you stopped being afraid was when you got yourself killed.”

  Her words pricked him. He had stopped being afraid for himself, mostly because some part of him had stopped caring. Never getting in over his head had always meant not getting too emotionally invested, but when did that apathy take over and why hadn’t he noticed before this? “Did you ever stop being afraid?” he asked. JJ had hinted at being in combat earlier, but this was the first she’d brought it up with any significance.

  “Once. A local translator—a nice guy, friendly—went out of his way to help us. Gave us some useful information that could have gotten him in a lot of trouble with the local insurgents. It was the first time I didn’t feel like I had to check things out four times before I trusted the facts. I’d forgotten how freeing it feels to be able to take someone at their word.”

  In all his travels, he’d never been in a situation that called for that level of caution. “Wow.”

  “Yeah, I said something like that when the barracks went up in flames. He’d spent three weeks feeding us great intel just so we’d let him close enough to blow up our camp. So in answer to your question, no, I don’t ever stop being afraid. Not anymore.”

  Alex began playing “Amazing Grace”—not in cheery chords but one lonesome note at a time. “I’m not here to blow up your family, JJ.”

  “You know, they all say that.” Her hand went to her forehead. “Right before they light the fuse.”

  She thought of him as a spy? Plotting an ambush against her family? Ouch. “I want,” he started slowly, not even sure where his own statement was heading, “to figure out what the best possible outcome of this whole mess is. Honestly, I don’t know if that means your family sues our company into oblivion, or the studio pays, or what.” Something about the tension in her hand, the way it clutched her forehead as if in pain, made him add, “I want you to come out of this okay. I don’t want this to be another war.”

  JJ laughed—a dark, hopeless kind of laugh that echoed in the most awful way out across the water. “Too late. Max is back there fighting for his life and you want this not to be a war?” She angled herself up on one elbow. “You’re the enemy. Well, you or the studio—probably both of you. You have to know that. This is the worst kind of war. Nobody wins this one, Alex, nobody.”

  Maybe it was the look in her eyes, maybe the lack of sleep, but her remark lit fire to something in Alex’s gut. “So you’ve decided, have you? There’s no way out of this horrid mess and nothing’s left but pain and loss. That’s how you’re going to play this—like Max’s life is over?”

  JJ sat up. “You’re going to sit there and tell me it’ll all be fine?”

  “No. It won’t all be fine. But what’s possibly served by you deciding it’s all over but the penalty?” The ukulele hummed with the blow as Alex nearly slammed the instrument down on the dock. “I don’t know what the lawyers are telling you, but every cent AG has—every cent the studio has—won’t undo what has happened to Max’s life right now. When I say I want to help, I mean something more than throwing money at the problem and pretending that that makes it go away. Can you stomach the fact that what I want might actually be whatever’s best for Max? Can you give me enough credit to look beyond my company spreadsheet here?”

  Her eyes narrowed. If she had a “war face,” he guessed he was looking at it. “You really expect me to sit here and believe you have Max’s best interest at heart?”

  That was it exactly. No, JJ couldn’t expect that of Sam—even Alex knew better than to expect that of Sam—but he’d always thought himself as Sam’s opposite in things like this. As the guy who never made things about the money. He wanted to shout “Yes!” but even as he considered the answer he could see how impossible that must look to her. It was making him crazy that he had no idea what to do here.

  “He said he wanted to die.” The words were barely audible. Soft as they were, they hit him like cement.

  “What?”

  “This morning, when Mom was meeting with the rehab people, he looked right at me and said he wanted to die. And don’t tell me he didn’t know what he was saying because if you could have seen his eyes...” Her voice trailed off and he knew she was trying not to cry.

  Even with all their problems, Alex thought about what kind of knife would go through his heart to hear words like that from Sam. He got up off the dock. “JJ.”

  “No.” She put her hand out, tucking her chin down in determination. “Don’t you dare.”

  “We’re not going to let Max die. Nobody is.” He ignored her stance, walking toward her even though she spread her fingers farther in defiance.

  “Says who? What if that’s what he wants? What if he can’t stand the thought of living like some kind of vegetable? What then?”

  “What if he recovers? What if he can make some kind of amazing life even if he doesn’t walk again? We have no idea what’s possible right now and...”

  She raised the outstretched hand, and for a moment Alex thought she might slap him. “Don’t! Don’t you dare say we.”

  It wasn’t something he thought about. It wasn’t a tactic or a response or even a conscious choice. It was as if something pulled him beyond his own strength or wisdom, and he simply ducked around her arm and held her. She stiffened, but he would not let that stop him. This wasn’t a smart choice, but there wasn’t any choice involved. She pounded his arm with her hand as her head dropped to his chest, her body still rigid and angry. Alex would have allowed her to hit him as many times as she needed to in order to let him close.

  “Don’t,” JJ said, so much softer this time. “Don’t.” Her hand came down against his shoulder again, but this time it just lay there, lifeless. “Don’t.” He felt the heave of her words against his chest. There was a powerful anguish in how she halfheartedly pulled away, but he would not, co
uld not relinquish his hold. He could feel how her jaw worked as she choked out a single, reluctant sob, and he tightened his grip around her, closing his own eyes to the swirl of pain that threatened to knock them both over. JJ pushed out the words, “He can’t die,” through what sounded like gritted teeth.

  The pain she was in lit that old, familiar urge to run—to outpace the pain before it dragged him down. Instead, Alex tightened his grip. It didn’t matter if JJ believed it yet, but he promised himself that running was no longer an option. Not from this. Not from her.

  Chapter Eight

  “He can’t die.” The words felt like they tore themselves right out of her beating heart, startling her. She hadn’t even realized how much she feared losing Max. How much the threat of his loss tore open unhealed wounds.

  “Hey, there,” Alex said in this voice she almost didn’t recognize for its closeness and tenderness. “No one thinks Max is going to die. I was with you when you first talked to Dr. Ryland, remember? I didn’t hear anything like that from him or anyone else.”

  JJ wanted to pull away from Alex but couldn’t. She’d been holding herself up for so long that it felt wonderful to be held up by someone else. Still, after a luxurious minute, she made herself duck out of his grasp and walk to the edge of the dock. “Yeah.” She couldn’t even pretend at enthusiasm. It was hard enough to get to a weak agreement.

  “Yes, really.” Alex turned her by one shoulder, staring hard. “What happened to you?”

  She rolled her eyes. “My brother fell off a cliff, remember?”

  “Not that,” he scoffed gently, tilting his head to meet her eyes. “There’s a wound a mile wide in there. Was it...back in wherever you were?”

  JJ sat down on the edge of the dock, watching the reflection of the stars sparkle on the ripples of the current. It was easy to see why Max thought she’d find some peace out here—it couldn’t be farther from what she’d known in Afghanistan. “I don’t really want to get into it, okay?”