by Julia Kent
Jeremy lived in the moment. Every second was new and invented on the fly.
Which was why Mike had to rescue him from so many bad situations for so long.
The past few years of being settled with Lydia hadn’t changed him in some radical way. And yet being in a permanent threesome relationship had helped him in some primal way, like having wings you don’t know how to use and learning they have a function.
And that with the right help, you can soar.
“Jeremy?” Compassion leaked through the phone as Lydia said his name. “What about you? Are you okay?”
He looked up, squinting to keep the rain out of his eyes, using his hand as a shelf, and watched Dylan and Mike. They were about ten feet from the top, so close, and they’d paused. He could see Mike rest against a taut Dylan, his body a flat board supporting Mike’s weight. The last ten feet would be the hardest. One man waited at the top, reaching out.
The rest happened in a flash. Literally a flash, as the night lit up like a massive fireball exploded in one of the large, lumpy clouds that he saw hovering right over them, the sudden illumination both awe-inspiring and horrifying.
A crack, like a match the size of a hundred-year-old pine tree being struck against the box of Blue Tip matches, made him leap in the air, his eyes wide with terror as a puff of smoke exploded out of the woods right behind the trucks.
What the fuck was that? Ozone filled his nostrils and his ears buzzed like a beehive had taken up residence between his ears.
“What was that?” Lydia’s voice sounded like she spoke through helium and molasses.
“I don’t know,” he said, except his own voice came through a silk-filled paper bag.
He watched as Pete reached down to grasp Mike’s arm, the older man’s hand tight against Mike’s biceps, and Dylan gave a heave-ho shove that got Mike to the top. He collapsed in Pete’s arms, and Jeremy’s eyes filled as he watched Pete tenderly drag Mike to the back of the ambulance, open the door, and the guy wearing the reflector jacket leaned over, the two of them shuttling Mike inside.
We did it, he thought. We fucking did it.
“Mike’s up top,” he rasped into the phone, his voice husky and shaking.
“He’s what?”
“Pete’s got him. Pete and some guy wearing a reflector coat.”
“Joe Stillman,” she explained.
“Who?”
“Joe Stillman. Fire and Rescue Chief. Oh, thank God, Jeremy. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she cried into the phone.
It’s not over yet, he thought, as Dylan practically rappelled back down the path, his feet sliding constantly. The trickle had swelled, he saw, more sand washing down with the water. He wondered if a true mudslide could happen, the kind you see on the California coast during too much rain.
The kind that could bury a man standing at the bottom.
“Something caught fire,” he muttered, not really thinking, just watching as Dylan reached the halfway point. Following the line of the rope, Jeremy saw that it was attached to the back of the truck. If Pete and Reflector Man were taking care of Mike, who would pull him and Dylan up if the ground disappeared beneath their feet?
“Fire? It’s pouring rain and you’re worried about fire?” Lydia asked.
“Lightning. Something exploded right behind the trucks,” he told her, rubbing his wet eyes, looking again. The smoke seemed to dissipate, and he didn’t see flames.
If lightning could strike once, though, would it happen again?
“JEREMY!” Dylan shouted, almost at the bottom of the path. He waved.
“Gotta go,” he said into the phone, ending the call without another word to Lydia, Jeremy trotting over on instinct, and without any talk whatsoever, Jeremy imitated what he saw Mike and Dylan do, the two walking up the mountain, Dylan looping the rope as he went along.
“They won’t pull us up?”
“No. They need all of them to help Mike.”
Jeremy’s heart went cold.
“That bad?”
“You want the truth?”
“Fuck yes.”
“It’s bad. The head wound is through the dura and to the bone.”
Jeremy didn’t know what “dura” meant, but he could understand the grimness in Dylan’s voice.
Regret consumed him. He should have said, “I love you” to Lydia before getting off the phone. They didn’t say it very often, but he meant it, the ache inside for everything to be fine hurting more and more.
And Mike—if he didn’t come out of this, there would be so much unsaid. Most of that was meant to be unsaid, spoken in little ways every day through the simple act of being together with Lydia, but if this was it, Jeremy wanted a few words to pass between them. He might not be sure which words, but he knew some of them would be attached to emotions that were trying to crawl out of his body and bury themselves in a past where he was blissfully oblivious to moments like this.
When you could lose so much so quickly.
Later, in the dry warmth of their house, nestled under the sheets and a thick comforter, and in years yet to come, Jeremy would remember this moment as a turning point, an abrupt pivot in his understanding of the world.
Right now, though, he was a man climbing a cliff one step at a time, being buttressed by another man whose partner was already en route to a hospital that was about to receive two unexpected trauma cases.
Please don’t let it be more.
To his surprise, the final few feet up the cliff were easy, his long legs spidering with ease, his muscles cold and tight but able to make the leap up. Land. Grass. Safety.
They had made it.
Another crack of lightning and everything splintered, a large tree ten feet to Jeremy’s right exploding, then falling, peeling off a chunk of cliff and an enormous boulder, his eyes unable to take it all in, his head a million buzzing bees, the nonverbal body language of everyone around him telling him one thing:
Disaster.
He looked down at the bottom of the cliff to find a large boulder, taller than him, rocking slightly at the base of the path, the tree skittering down, landing with a satisfying crackle, branches shushing in the wind.
“What the fuck!?!” Dylan called out.
“You sure do have great timing,” Alex said with a grunt.
Jeremy was done with this day. Done.
Dylan dispensed with formalities and jogged over to Pete and Joe Stillman, said a few words, and walked right to the other truck, pulling away, driving slowly.
Jeremy walked to the ambulance, Mike on his back on a stretcher and Reflector Man tending to his wounds. Through the haze of post-rescue relief, he recognized Joe Stillman.
“How bad is it?”
“I need a face transplant,” Mike groaned.
“What?”
“A true friend would give me his face,” Mike added.
“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Jeremy snapped, elated and pissed at the same time. “Just use a flap of your ass to sew on as a replacement. No one will notice the difference.”
Pete grinned at them both. Joe cast a glare of disgust.
“If you’re gonna upset him like this, you need to leave.”
“He’s not upsetting him, Joe. He’s helping.”
Joe just snorted and finished putting butterfly bandages up and down what Jeremy could now see in the light: a solid, deep line going from under the earlobe up to just under Mike’s pupil.
Another inch and he’d be blind in that eye.
Alex and Josie appeared in his peripheral vision, and before he could wonder why, the tiny space began to spin, Jeremy’s legs turning to numb jelly, his body shivering. Crouched over Mike, his body folded like a yogi’s, he felt claustrophobic, instantly too big and too small at once, and the sight of Mike’s strong face cut like that, the blood seeping between the thin strips of bandages that marched up his face like steps, made his world go dizzy.
“Josie, you hop in the truck with Mike Pine’s dad. Help with him. Okay?” A
lex’s voice was tight. She nodded and disappeared in a wave of shaky, shimmery colors that turned Jeremy’s gut into a pit of eternal nausea and fire.
“I can’t believe,” Mike muttered, “that of the two of us, you managed not to fall. You’re the clumsy one. I’m sure-footed.”
“They say the longer you’re in a relationship, the more you reverse roles.” He gave Mike a fake grin and tried to suppress the sense of unreality that was overpowering him.
“Now that you mention it, you are starting to get an ass that’s nice and sweet like Lydia’s.”
“Hey!” Pete protested. “None of that talk! She’s my daughter.”
Jeremy heard everything from two hundred feet away as the world spun.
“Easy there,” Pete said, two hands gripping Jeremy’s arm and shoulder. “Let’s get you out of here so Joe and Dylan and Alex can tend to—”
Mike twitched, then suddenly jerked, his legs kicking Jeremy’s shins and making him yelp, his arms like noodles being tossed on a blanket.
Joe and Alex gave each other a look that made Jeremy’s heart tap dance as they secured Mike and spoke to each other, Alex checking Mike’s pupils as the seconds passed, the relentless violence of Mike’s unintentional movement sending Jeremy out of his own mind.
“Seizure,” Alex announced, Joe’s fingers in Mike’s mouth, gloved and careful, a thick wad of gauze inserted between teeth that snapped against each other like Mike was trying to break glass.
Mike’s eyes rolled up until he looked like something out of a horror film, his bright baby blues long gone, replaced by red-streaked eyeballs that turned him into someone else.
This can’t be happening, he thought.
It just can’t.
Chapter Nineteen
Josie
By the time they got Mike Pine to the hospital, he was a sickly grey color, jaw tight with pain, sweat coating his body with a new round of wetness, the scent different from the rain bath he’d experienced for so long. She watched him closely, noting the signs of shock, cursing herself for leaving nursing and spending the last few years away from medicine.
She felt so damned useless.
She’d joined the rescue crew with a promise to Laura that she would make sure Mike came back safe and alive, and Laura had practically shoved her out the door, begging her to do whatever she could to help. Sandy and Lydia would help Laura, and maybe her friend was right.
Maybe she was better suited to being in the middle of the action. Standing around at the camp office felt like torture.
The ER team swept Mike away on a stretcher, the familiar doors slamming shut in her face, locking with a finality that said, You don’t belong here anymore.
She was a civilian. A family member. Just someone consigned to the waiting room like everyone else, sucking down crappy coffee and stuck with her ear to her phone for hours, updating everyone else.
She was one of them, the families she’d had to block out when she’d done emergency room rotations as a student nurse and realized it wasn’t for her. Too stressful. Too intense. Too many emotions from people she couldn’t comfort.
“I guess that’s that,” Mike Pine Sr. declared. “We got him here safe. The doctors have to do the rest.” His hat was soaked and he had the haggard look of an old man who needed a hug and a hot meal. “I’m going back to the campground to see Mary. You need a lift?”
“No, thanks. I’ll stay here. Alex will be on his way with the other Mike.”
“He saved my boy. I’ll give him a proper thanks after all this—” His voice choked. Josie never knew what to do when other people expressed difficult emotions, so she gave him a wan smile and patted his arm.
His eyes glistened, but the tears never overflowed.
And he simply turned away without another word, leaving her alone.
She didn’t mind.
Where the hell was Laura? As soon as Jeremy had delivered Mike safely to the top, Miles had rushed him here, his injuries bad but probably not life-threatening, she’d guessed. The nasty breathing problem was the biggest worry. If he’d punctured a lung, this would be bad.
But not as bad as the other Mike. Michael Bournham. Head wounds in that rainy, cold environment were a nasty, unpredictable injury. Resigning herself to spending the next few minutes alone before chaos ensued again, she went down the hallway in search of that crappy cup of coffee, driven more by ritual than caffeine.
Two heads of wet, long blonde hair burst through the ER entrance.
“Where’s my Mike?” Laura gasped, her hair flopping in wet, dark strings down her arms and chest.
Darla gave Josie a look that said a thousand sentiments all squeezed into the way her eyes narrowed with a questioning compassion.
“You drove her here?” Josie asked Darla, who nodded.
“No way she was driving alone, not like this.”
“Thank you.”
Laura collapsed in Josie’s arms, then tightened. “Where is he?”
“They’re working on him.”
“I need to see him.”
“Not yet. The medical team needs to triage.”
“You’re not telling me something.”
Damn. The woman could read her too well. “He’s breathing funny.”
“That’s your medical diagnosis?”
“Laura.” Josie took her friend by the shoulders, squaring off face-to-face. “Laura, he has a fractured elbow and wrist at the very least, an injured pelvis, contusions and scrapes all over the exposed skin of his body, and he came in gasping like someone with broken ribs or a lung collapse. They need time to assess and treat.”
“Lung collapse? His lung may have collapsed?”
“We don’t know. Alex said it was a possibility.”
“Is Alex back there?” Laura pointed to the double doors.
“No. He’s still at the scene with Mike Bournham.”
“Did they get him up?”
“He...” Josie couldn’t quite put this into words. This was exactly why she sucked at emergency medicine. “He has a bad head wound. I don’t know anything other than the fact that Dylan and Jeremy got him up safely. The rest is unknown.”
“Oh, God. Poor Lydia.”
“Poor you.”
“Poor Mike!” Laura wailed. “Poor Mikes! This is all my fault.”
“None of this is your fault,” Josie soothed, hugging Laura. Darla looked over Laura’s shoulder and mouthed the word coffee. Josie nodded and Darla took off down the hallway, walking at a slow, respectful pace, unusual compared to her normal fast energy.
Josie took a deep breath and let it out slowly, her hot air heating Laura’s wet hair.
“It’s all my fault. If only I hadn’t invited Mike’s parents. He wouldn’t have run and he wouldn’t have fallen off the cliff and then Mike Bournham wouldn’t have found him and gotten injured trying to help and I’ve done all of this. I did this, Josie. I made all these bad things happen because I was trying to do one good thing. One.”
“The fact that Mike had a freak accident is not your fault. Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop trying to feel like you have control over an awful mess by taking on responsibility for it.”
Laura looked dumbstruck.
“What?”
“You did nothing wrong. You’re trying to beat yourself up for this so you feel like you can somehow control it. You didn’t make Mike run off a cliff. You didn’t make a freak thunderstorm soak the hill. You didn’t make Mike Bournham slip and fall down the cliff. You didn’t do any of those acts, Laura. All you did was take a step toward reconciliation with Mike’s parents that went horribly wrong because other people made choices to act in certain ways. That’s it. Stop thinking that any of this is your fault. The worst thing you did was contact Mike’s parents behind his back. You can settle that mistake with Mike when he’s better. But the rest? The rest was random. Bad shit happens to good people. It’s. Not. Your. Fault.”
Laura’s mouth tremb
led. “When did you become so smart? You sound like a psychologist.”
“I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.”
Laura sniffle-snorted.
“No, really. I did. Well, two nights ago.” Portland, Maine felt like another lifetime. She idly wondered where Marlene, Uncle Mike, Aunt Cathy and Calvin were, but she didn’t need to borrow any more trouble. Hopefully, Cathy and Mike had her mom in check. Marlene was a walking crisis, but sometimes other crises loomed larger.
Laura gave her a dark look.
“I mean it all, Laura. Don’t internalize what happened. Sit down. Wait with me. Let’s talk about how we’re going to unravel two hundred wedding guests and a huge event, because I think the paparazzi are going to find out about this rescue mess soon, and I don’t think anyone’s going to be up for the wedding tomorrow.”
“And it’s raining and so many people are in tents tonight!” Laura added.
Josie bit back a smile. At least she got Laura to stop thinking, for a few seconds, about Mike. Everything she just said to Laura was true, but what she wouldn’t admit was that all that advice had been said to her over the past few years by Alex and his mother.
You know—the clinical psychologist.
It was so much easier to urge her friend to listen to it than to accept it herself, she marveled, as Darla delivered three cups of coffee that reminded Josie that hospital coffee in emergency rooms is bad by design, intended to make you never want to spend any extra time there.
Then again, who would want to?
Darla guided Laura to a chair and gently nudged her to sit, all three women gripping their coffee cups, absorbing the warmth into their palms. The waiting room was half full, with people in various states of illness waiting their turn. A mother cradling a feverish toddler looked anxiously at the clock, making little cooing sounds to calm the child, who whined quietly.
Josie felt so, so helpless everywhere she looked.
