by Unknown
Chapter One
It snows again overnight, foot and a half outside the back door, so Nick’s not surprised when Falvey texts him for a ride into work. sorry, she says, a little punctuation frowny face like she’s sixteen and texting him from her third-period study hall. my car’s for shit in this weather.
For shit in this weather is an understatement. Taryn drives a rusted-out rice rocket that rolled off the assembly line sometime during the Clinton administration, all stripped-down tires and uneven paint job. She’s a good driver—Nick’s been riding with her for a year—but the night of the first big storm last November, she skidded off the road into a snowbank on Route 7, no traction at all. Another driver dialed 911 when he saw her airbag deploy. Nick was the paramedic who got the call.
“So,” she said when he jumped out of the bus. Her nose was broken and bleeding, snow in her bright red hair. “This is embarrassing.”
Now she never drives after more than a foot falls.
This morning she’s standing on the curb with her hands jammed deep into her pockets, same place as she’s been every other time he’s picked her up. Nick wonders why she doesn’t just wait inside the house like a normal person, if she’s worried he’s going to come up the walk and knock on her door or something. Wonders what’s going on in there. Taryn doesn’t talk about her family at all, but he’s pretty sure she lives with her folks, maybe a brother or two. Her place is one of the triple-deckers down the far end of town, kind of ramshackle, row houses all crowded together like teeth in a skull that’s too small.
“Thanks,” she says when she swings herself up into the passenger seat of the Tahoe, tilting all the heating vents toward herself and pressing her fingertips against them. She’s got a pair of cheap dollar-store gloves on, the stretchy kind, holes in the webs between her fingers and thumbs. “Freezing.”
“I woulda honked,” Nick tells her. “Could’ve waited inside.”
“I know,” she says, shrugging. She’s small, Falvey is, narrow shoulders moving inside a puffy coat a size too big. “But you’re doing me a favor, so.”
“I pass by here anyhow,” he says, which isn’t technically true. “You’re on my way.”
Falvey grins wide and crooked, like she’s not buying what he’s selling. She smells like vanilla through her coat. “If you take the ass-backwards route, maybe.”
Well. Can’t argue with her there. It’s scenic, Nick thinks and doesn’t say. He knows she’s onto him. Falvey. She’s been onto him for a year. Nick finds he doesn’t much mind. “Maybe.”
They ride in silence after that, engine humming, pale light outside tempting sunset even though it’s barely midafternoon. Western Massachusetts is miserable this time of year, all gray skies and spindly trees, snowbanks gone black and crusty. The fresh fall helped clean up the landscape, but the end of January has it going slushy along the sides of the highway. Nick glances at Falvey, back at the road. He waits. He’s pulling in to a parking spot at the back of the station before she speaks again.
“I broke up with Pete,” she announces, then bolts out of the car before Nick can so much as turn the key in the ignition.
So.
That’s how it starts.
Well, okay. That was maybe less graceful than Taryn intended to be.
She hustles through the back door and down the hallway toward the locker room, yanks her uniform on over her thermal. She’s been a blurter her whole life, is the truth of it—a panicker too, which you’d think would make her a bad fit for emergency work, but almost two years as a medic and she hasn’t actively killed anybody yet, so who the hell knows.
He was just being so quiet, that maddening taciturn thing he does when she just wants to shock him to see what will happen, all maybe and you’re on my way. Like hell she is. Kanelos lives alone way out by the old high school, closer to Stockbridge. Taryn knows because she’s been.
Just the once though. Just the night of the fire.
She checks the roster, then heads out to the rig to check her supplies. She’s a quarter of the way through her list when Doc bounds up like a giant poodle, wispy dark hair and a neat pair of pearl studs in her ears. She grabs the peds kit right out of Taryn’s grip. “Are you okay?” she asks, her face a caricature of surprise and concern. “I heard about you and Pete.”
Taryn resists rolling her eyes. Doc, whose real name is Emily, is one of the only medics who’s younger than Taryn herself. Allegedly she’s taking a year off after college to study for her MCATs, but Taryn’s pretty sure the real reason she came home was to be near her lame, sniveling boyfriend. Taryn hated Doc like a reflex the first day she turned up for training, quilted Vera Bradley purse and Boston College diploma, but then one night last summer she single-handedly kept a crazy lady from stabbing Taryn in the jugular with a plastic fork in the food court at Lee Outlets, and ever since Taryn has been, like, weirdly fond of her.
“I’m fine,” she tries, on the off chance the universe has shifted in some significant way and that will be enough to satisfy Doc’s curiosity. She doesn’t want to talk about it, weird Nick-related outbursts aside. She was going to move in to Pete’s nice condo in Great Barrington that used to be a mill or some fucking thing, and now she’s not. End of story.
Not for Doc. “What happened?” she demands, breathless.
Taryn sighs. Doc’s dumb boyfriend is a buddy of Pete’s from the hospital, so she guesses a grilling was inevitable. She tears off the second page of the checklist, handing it to Doc so at least they can get some work done while they have this ridiculous conversation. “I thought you said you heard,” she hedges. The truth—that it was a wrong fit from the very beginning, that Pete was nice and practical and moving in with him seemed like a good idea until the moment it suddenly and definitively didn’t—feels both too simple and too horrifying to admit out loud.
Doc just stares at her.
“Porn addiction,” Taryn says. “Mine, not his.”
“Can you stop?” Doc’s eyes narrow. “That’s not a real answer.”
Taryn lets out another breath. She hopes they go nonstop all night, one call after another. Two shifts ago it was insanely slow and Doc sat in the passenger seat and talked to her about Kegels for three hours straight. “Nope,” she agrees, turning her attention to the syringes. “Work your list.”
Nick’s riding with Lynette, a part-timer and mother of four girls with a husband she disdains to varying degrees, depending on the time of day and her mood. Nick’s known Lynette since training, more than ten years now. Their first shift out alone together they delivered a baby in the backseat of a smashed-up Ford Taurus. Nick was twenty-two years old.
“Don’t ever get married again,” is what Lyn says today, before hello or anything else, which gives Nick a taste of how the evening’s going to go. Then, “You’re late.”
“Yeah, sorry.” Nick settles himself into the passenger seat. Lynette likes to drive. “Falvey’s car crapped out again, so.”
“Oh, Falvey’s car did?” Lynette smirks. She’s got that look on her face that women get when they think they know something, which Nick doesn’t entirely appreciate. Her hair is short and practical, a stubby little tail at the back of her head. “So that’s still happening then.”
Nick feels his eyebrows creep up. “What is?”
“You and Falvey.”
“Me and Falvey nothing.” The radio crackles. There’s a three-car accident up near the junction of I-90, but two other teams are closer. Nick leans his head back against the seat, praying for a distraction.
“All right,” Lynette says airily. She reminds Nick of his sisters when she gets like this, only older and less Greek. “Good thing, seeing as she’s closer to Audra’s age t
han yours.”
“Wha—Taryn?” Nick blinks. “She’s not.” Audra’s Lynette’s oldest kid, who used to come play in the rig when she was little and run the siren. Nick would sit her on his lap. “Jesus, Lyn.”
“What?” Lynette half-smiles again, reaching for her coffee. “You just said, you and Falvey nothing.”
Nick works real hard on watching the snowbanks roll by.
It’s an easy enough shift, broken ankle at a roller rink and a woman hyperventilating inside an elevator at an office building downtown. They catch two calls for chest pain, both from shoveling, then treat some kids who fell through the ice on a pond near Becket for hypothermia. Lynette peels off their wet boots and socks in the back of the rig to check for frostbite, pinching each tiny toe to pink.
At a quarter to eleven they gas up the bus and cruise back to the Barn, Lyn heading home to her family while Nick gets cleaned up, planning to stop off for a beer. There’s a dive bar around the corner that’s real popular with medics, the Old Court Irish Pub and Restaurant. Any given night it’s packed full of EMTs discussing this nasty fracture or that, cluttering up the bar. Still, Nick can count on one hand the number of times he’s spotted Taryn Falvey inside.
Which is why he’s so surprised to see her, parked on a stool next to the WASPy-looking rookie they all call Doc, her head thrown back laughing.
Nick settles himself at the other end of the bar, ordering a Harpoon and concentrating on not watching, concentrating even harder on not feeling caught out. A beer at Old Court has been his after-work habit for a lot longer than Falvey’s been around. He did the math on her age, PS, a lull right around dinnertime and nothing else pressing to occupy his brain for the moment, and Lynette was wrong—she’s not closer to Audra’s age than she is to his. Actually, the split’s dead even. Nick isn’t sure if that makes it better or worse.
He minds his own business for a full drink and a half before he chances a look and finds Falvey staring right at him, smirking. Subtle, this girl is not. Nick raises his eyebrows; Taryn raises hers back. Then she shakes her head like she’s making fun of him and gets up to pee, disappearing toward the back of the bar. Nick’s so intent on not waiting for her to come back that she sneaks up on him, elbows him roughly in the bicep. “Hi,” she says.
“Hi.” She’s wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt and her uniform pants, braid unraveling over one bony shoulder. Nick wants to give it a tug. “How’d it go?”
“Fine.” This close up she smells warm, a thermal, human smell. There’s something wrong with the showers in the women’s locker room, Nick remembers Lyn saying, no hot water. “Alcohol poisoning over at the college. Boring stuff.”
“Hoping for something gorier?”
Falvey grins. Three beers deep, Nick guesses. She’s antsy, but she isn’t drunk. “Always am,” she confirms.
She’s not kidding—Falvey likes the hard cases, construction accidents and complicated extractions, cars crushed like soda cans or wrapped around trees. Most rookies freeze up at least once their first couple shifts, all of it suddenly terrifying and real, but Nick trained Falvey himself and never once has he seen her flinch. “You need a ride home?” he asks.
A head shake. “Nope. I can go with Doc.”
Nick nods. There’s something about the way she’s standing there, the close angle of her body and the stubborn tilt of her jaw. Nick gets the feeling she’s trying to prove something, though he’s not sure what it is. She was with Pete for a long time. “You wanna talk about it?”
“The ride I’m getting from Emily?” Falvey makes a face, that teasing look from earlier, like despite his best efforts she can see underneath his skin. She knows he likes her, that much is pretty undeniable at this point. It would be embarrassing if Nick ever let himself think about it for more than a second. “Kind of self-explanatory, don’t you think?”
Nick raises his eyebrows. “Okay, Falvey.” He digs a ten out of his pocket and leaves it on the bar. He’s tired, he doesn’t know what the fuck she wants from him, on top of which tomorrow is his morning to open the diner, so he needs to be up by five o’clock. He thinks about the night of the fire, her skinny legs muscled tight around his waist. Stops thinking about it. “See you tomorrow.”
He left the Tahoe parked back at the Barn, and he’s half a block gone when he hears her footsteps behind him. “Hey,” Falvey hollers, boots quick and steady on the frozen sidewalk. “Hey!”
Nick turns around, waiting for her to catch up. “Yeah,” he says, trying not to sound as surprised as he feels. Falvey’s not the kind of girl to give chase. “Something you need?”
Falvey frowns like a kid picked last in gym class, like she was expecting something in there and he didn’t deliver. She’s not wearing her coat. “That was rude,” she tells him snottily, and after that she puts her mouth on his.
See? Panicker. This was a panicky move.
Taryn doesn’t know what she’s doing, just that she needs to do something and biting Kanelos’s tongue in an alley is the closest available option. Her credit card is maxed out. She’s twenty-four years old and still living at home, a falling-apart prison where the heat is perpetually being cut off and the water runs yellow for a full minute after you turn it on. Her car is so old, standard-issue snow tires don’t even fit properly. Three days ago none of that mattered because she was finally getting out, finally moving in with Pete, but now—fuck.
She thought she loved Pete. It’s embarrassing to discover she just loved how normal he made her feel.
She catches Nick off guard at first, this soft oof when she comes at him with her full weight and no warning. If he’d reacted a half a second later they probably would have wound up cracking heads and that just, like, would have been that.
That’s not how it happens.
Instead he kisses her back like he was waiting, one big hand curling around her rib cage and the other one cupping her skull. Taryn makes a sound at the back of her throat. And all right, yes, she’s been single for thirty-six hours at this point, probably she should slow her roll, but God—she just wants to forget for a while. Her cold hands slip up inside his jacket, underneath the soft waffle of his shirt.
Nick growls. “Falvey,” he says, and it sounds like a warning, but she kisses him again and he nudges her back into the shadow of the building instead, her spine thudding off the brick. She’s freezing everywhere except the places he can touch. He’s a good kisser. Jesus, she forgot that after the fire—made herself forget it—his capable mouth and the scrape of teeth along her bottom lip. He tastes like the beer he was drinking inside. “What are you doing?”
Taryn shrugs. She doesn’t want to talk about it, thank you. She doesn’t want to talk, period, so she kisses him again to shut him up and goes to work at the buttons on his jeans, right here in the alley beside Old Court where anyone could see them. Nick groans against her mouth.
“Hey.” His voice is low and ragged. Taryn ignores him, working a hand inside his boxers and feeling him jerk against her palm. “Hey.” Nick grabs her wrists, not hard but hard enough to stop her, his jeans slipping low on his hips. “Easy, tiger.”
“Nick.” There’s an edge in her voice she’s not crazy about but God, she wants this, and she’s pretty sure she can get it from him. “Come on.”
She should have known that was the wrong way to play it. Right away Nick gets that expression he gets sometimes when a vic is too far gone for them to do anything but push morphine, no hope at all. “Jesus, Falvey,” he hisses. Taryn notices with a mean kind of satisfaction that his voice is wrecked. “Can you talk to me for a second?”
Taryn scowls. All of a sudden she’s hugely embarrassed, a stupid ginger flush creeping all the way up her body. He’s still holding on to her wrists. “What are you, a romantic now?” she asks, aiming to sound as bitchy as possible.
Nick raises his eyebrows. “That’s it, Falvey.” He blows out a noisy breath, rubs at the back of his neck like there’s an ache there. His body is so, so warm. “I
was hoping you’d bring me flowers.”
She’s about to say something else when Doc’s voice rings out around the corner like a siren, sounding borderline hysterical. “Taryn!” Doc hates Old Court, to the point where Taryn can barely leave her alone to pee. “Where’d you go? You forgot your coat!”
Taryn tips her head back against the brick, hard enough to hurt. “I forgot my coat,” she tells Nick uselessly. She is not going to cry.
“Yeah, I noticed. Taryn.” Nick reaches up and smooths her hair back off her face, gentle. She leans into his touch without entirely meaning to do it. “What the hell?”
Taryn shrugs. His eyes are dark in the orange cast of the streetlight. “Gotta go,” she says softly, and skirts back around the corner to let Doc know she’s safe.
Chapter Two
Nick gets up at four thirty and lets the dog out—he wasn’t sleeping worth a damn anyway—leaving the radio news on a low hum while he fumbles through coffee and a shower. By the time he gets back downstairs, Atlas is whining at the door to come in.
“Sorry, buddy,” Nick mumbles as the mutt curls up by the floor vent, huffing. It’s still full dark out, the back porch light casting pools of white onto the new snow outside. Atlas tracked wet paw prints across the tile. “Cold, huh?”
He got Atlas after Maddie died, almost three years ago now. It was a rescue adoption, the shelter guys swearing up and down Atlas was half Labrador even though all evidence pointed to the contrary, his kooky ears and the wrong body shape entirely. Nick went through with it anyway, mostly to shut his sisters up, both of them a hundred and ten percent against the idea of him living alone. At the time a dog seemed like less work than a fight, and if that hasn’t turned out to be strictly true in the long run—well. Nick doesn’t hate the company.
When he pulls up in the truck Alexandra’s already waiting outside the diner, leaning against the stonework and finishing a cigarette. The smoke disappears in wisps above her dark, curly head. “Thought it was my morning,” Nick says as he hops out of the Tahoe. The sky’s graying up on the eastern side of town, his breath just visible.
