Crash Lights and Sirens, Book 1

by Unknown

  He makes it all the way to his truck before realizing he forgot to give Caitlin the books he ordered for her off Amazon.

  He doesn’t go back.

  Chapter Nineteen

  She gets back into the kitchen and finds Jesse picking at some leftover spaghetti, hands like pale, twitchy spiders and a sweaty-white face to match. “Look,” he starts, some lame nonapology on his lips. Taryn holds up her palm to cut him off.

  (It’s your fault, Caitlin told him after Pete, her voice all injured accusation. It’d be nice to put the blame on him now, absolutely, but Taryn knows it isn’t true. Everybody thinks they can fix her. Some things aren’t meant to be repaired.)

  “Just take care of it,” she says. “Whatever the fuck you’ve got going on.” She tosses the popcorn bag in the trash, leaves the greasy bowl in the sink for the morning. “You have cash to fix the window, or no?”

  “Not on me.” He’s gone oddly docile now that Nick’s gone. He looks about twelve years old. “I can get it though.”

  Taryn shakes her head. She knew Nick wouldn’t hurt him, was pretty sure he couldn’t hurt Nick. It scared her, seeing them go at each other like that. She doesn’t know how this house got so fucking violent all of a sudden. She hasn’t been paying enough attention. She let herself get distracted, and everything spiraled out of control. “Don’t bother,” she says.

  Upstairs she washes her makeup off and changes into her pajamas. Presses her face into the pillow so Caitlin won’t hear her cry. It feels terrible, it feels so incredibly bad. Taryn sucks in breath after breath as quietly as she can and tries to stop shaking underneath the quilt. She’s broken up with guys before. She was with Pete a lot longer than Nick, so it stands to reason that this shouldn’t feel so hugely, wrackingly—

  Fuck.

  Around two she almost texts him: I’m an idiot, I didn’t mean it, let me come over and I’ll make it up however you need. Her finger’s hovering over the send key before she changes her mind. Because that’s the definition of insanity, isn’t it? Doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome? Romance, love, whatever—it isn’t going to happen for her, that much is clear. She thought it was different this time—she thought Nick was different, she really did—but she was wrong.

  He’s not on the schedule the next morning, thank God, but Doc is, her hair pulled into a perky tail at the crown of her head. “Oh no,” she says, taking one look at Taryn’s tired, puffy face. “You broke up with Kanelos too?”

  Taryn blinks. She thinks of what it was like after Pete, how the last thing she wanted to do was talk about it with anyone, how her first instinct was to deny everything and act like it never even happened. She wants to be like that now, wants to be tough and impenetrable, but either this is a different kind of breakup entirely or otherwise being with Nick has softened her exoskeleton in some miserable fucking way because she finds herself nodding, and after shift at a wine bar in Stockbridge she lets Doc buy her an absurdly expensive bottle of pinot noir even though it’s only four in the afternoon.

  “Are you okay?” Emily asks once they’re settled. She’s looking at Taryn like she’s expecting her to fold in on herself and disappear at any moment. “Want to talk about it?”

  The question would piss Taryn off if it came from anyone else—like the bottle was a buy, like Doc thinks she’s owed the gory details now—but after everything that happened with Rosemary and how quiet Doc kept about it afterward, Taryn trusts her. Has trusted her, really, going on a long time now. “I don’t know,” she answers honestly, gulping her wine. It’s dark in the bar, nice ambient lighting that lets her pretend it’s later in the day than it is. “I just… I don’t think I can date now, is all.”

  Emily furrows her immaculate brow in sympathy. “Yeah?” she asks, turning her body on the stool to give Taryn her full attention. “Too soon after Peter?”

  Too soon after— Taryn outright laughs in shock, nearly spitting the wine. Of course. Of course that would be what anyone would assume. She was with Pete for almost a year, about to move in with him, whereas she and Nick have only been dating for a couple months. From the outside, it probably just looks like she rebounded, no harm, no foul.

  For a horrible second, she wonders if that’s what Nick thinks.

  “No,” she tells Doc finally, rolling the glass’s stem between her fingers. “It wasn’t that. There’s just, you know. Some stuff in my life right now.” Even as she says it she realizes it would have been easier to lie, go along with the obvious narrative. A few months ago, that would have been her first instinct.

  Fuck. He really did break her.

  “Hmm,” Doc murmurs, absorbing the new information. Her voice is careful. “Family stuff, you mean?” She hasn’t just kept quiet about that night with Rosemary, Doc—she’s never so much as mentioned it. Lynette has asked a few times, just discreetly, how’s your mom and all that, but Emily hasn’t said a single word. Looking in her eyes now, Taryn realizes that doesn’t mean she hasn’t thought about it. That she hasn’t worried.

  “Yeah,” she says. “That’s what I mean.”

  Doc nods, for once not adding anything more. They finish their wine in a delicate silence.

  “Thanks,” Taryn blurts when they’re parting at their cars. “I mean it, Emily, seriously.” She feels stupid and clumsy, like girl talk is a language she doesn’t know how to speak anymore. She hasn’t had a close friend since high school. “How’s, um. How’s Ed?”

  Emily laughs in her face, though not unkindly. Her smile is wide and white, thousands of dollars of New England orthodontia. “Next time, ask that question while we’re still in the bar,” she advises Taryn, clicking her automatic locks. Her car jumps to life with a polite chime.

  Taryn shoves her hands in her pockets, feeling sheepish. “Right. Gotcha.” A better friend than she deserves, absolutely.

  Emily goes on, like it’s better late than never: “He’s kind of a dick, actually,” she says. It’s warm today, and she’s got her pale pink fleece tucked into the crook of one elbow, these neat little diamond earrings winking in the sunlight. “Ed, I mean.”

  Taryn blinks. No kidding, she thinks and doesn’t say—girl talk, Jesus, what even is the appropriate response to that? “That sucks,” she replies after a moment, the best she can come up with. “You deserve somebody who’s going to make you happy.”

  Emily smiles at that, then darts forward and hugs Taryn hard and surprising. “Yeah,” she says, squeezing. Her perfume smells expensive and faint, like almonds maybe. “You too.”

  Taryn sits in her car for ten minutes after Emily drives away, breathing. She cries for a while. Finally she goes home and starts dinner for the kids.

  She and Nick manage to avoid each other all week long. She thinks he might have changed his schedule, switched over to nights when he knows she’s trying to be home as much as possible. Or maybe she’s being paranoid. It’s not like her to be watching for him out of the corner of her eye like this, like some middle-schooler who got dumped on the playground at recess. It’s not like her to feel so irrationally hurt. She’s the one who ended it, after all—their entire relationship happened on her terms, so in theory there’s absolutely no reason for the painful little catch in her chest when she checks bus assignments at the start of every shift.

  Come Thursday morning, the gig is up. Taryn’s tightening her ponytail on her way out of the locker room and there he is, chatting with Ortiz, looking at a photo of the guy’s newly healthy baby daughter—the little girl in the picture turned chubby and rosy postsurgery, Nick’s smile gone genuine and wide. Taryn feels a bizarre swoop of hope followed immediately by a violent twist low in her stomach, the feel of something dry and grinding. Sweat prickles underneath her scratchy uniform.

  He shaved his face, is the first thing she notices. He was keeping a day or two’s worth of beard on there, ’cause she liked the scrape of it, but. S’gone now.

  Ortiz is no dummy, that’s for sure, or otherwise word’s go
tten around. Not half a second later he’s clapping Nick on the shoulder to say bye, a “See you out there, Falvey,” tossed behind him as he books it down the hallway. Nick gazes at her for a minute, impassive.

  Taryn swallows her heart down with no small amount of effort. “Hi,” she says.

  Nick keeps looking, hands shoved in his pockets. He must have just finished a shift, to be out of uniform now—nights then, just like Taryn thought. She doesn’t know how she feels about being right. “Let’s not, okay?” he says. “It’s fine. We don’t have to do this part.”

  It’s not fine though, because his voice is the coldest she’s ever heard it. Taryn is pretty sure she’s experiencing actual nausea. “We said we wouldn’t be awkward,” she offers lamely, trying for a smile.

  It’s the wrong thing to say. Nick’s face turns stonier, if that’s even possible. And God, she left him, she knows she did, but witnessing the transformation still hurts worse than anything. She doesn’t want to watch as he steels himself against her. “What do you want, Falvey?” Nick demands. “You wanna be pals now or something?”

  Taryn does, actually. For some reason it’s colossally important he not hate her. Which—yeah, she should have thought of that before she dumped him, but. There it is. “I’m sorry,” she says instead. It comes out even lamer than her first try at an olive branch.

  Nick shakes his head. “What for?” he asks, like he completely doesn’t believe her, like he thinks she’s the worst person alive. He walks away before Taryn can so much as formulate a response, down the hallway and out the door to the parking lot. She doesn’t call after him.

  She deserved that, she guesses. It stings like an open wound anyway.

  The start of shift was a whole five minutes ago now. Ortiz is no doubt waiting in the ambulance bay alone, wondering what’s keeping her—or not wondering, if he’s smart. Taryn stands there for an extra second anyway, counting doubles until she’s sure she isn’t about to burst into tears. It feels like it takes a long time.

  You always let me get away with it, she told Nick once. At the time she felt bad about that, how patient he was and the way he was constantly letting her bad behavior slide, how imbalanced it made everything seem. She was in the driver’s seat from start to finish, no question.

  Here’s what she didn’t admit, though: that she liked it. That it made her feel powerful.

  You always let me get away with it.

  Well, Taryn thinks, shoving out the doors to the ambulance bay. Not anymore.

  Nick walks away from Taryn in an angry haze, storming out to where his truck is parked without acknowledging Jerry’s wave or anything else. He’s livid. He’s so fucking pissed. One thing, one thing he asked her not to do—please, please don’t run away from me next time I say something you don’t like—and of course she goes and does it, and then she has the balls to want to be his goddamn buddy? Nick peels out of the parking lot way faster than he needs to, takes the corner so hard he almost skids.

  He loves her still, like being shot through the stomach. It wears on him, how much he does.

  The days blur uselessly together, work and sleep and shower and repeat. He opens the diner. He turns Ortiz and Jerry down for beers at Old Court. He borrows Stevie and Erica for an afternoon, takes them to a movie and out for Chicken McNuggets and milkshakes after. Lets them run off the sugar in the park until the sun starts to set.

  “You okay?” Io asks when he brings them back, looking at him hard in the white glow of the porch light, Stevie pulling a coin out of Nick’s ear before he trots off toward his bedroom. The twilight air is damp and cool. She smells blood in the water, both his sisters do; Alexandra’s bringing casseroles over again, chicken parm yesterday morning even though he was working a double and wouldn’t be around to eat it.

  Nick nods, shoves his hands in his pockets. He can’t decide if it’s a blessing or not, to be known so well. “Fine,” he says, and Io nods.

  He goes home and walks Atlas, tries to read for a while. He’s back to spending hardly any time upstairs. He feels something like heartburn underneath his sternum every time he walks into the master and sees the clean, muted paint job, the new duvet he’s sleeping under by himself. The whole fucking room echoes something terrible, now that the carpet is gone. His sisters were right all along, he thinks dully. It’s way too much house for one person and a dog.

  He pictured Falvey moving in here, while he was finishing this bedroom. He can admit it now, that he did. It makes him feel like a moron, but back when he was picking out the creamy white Benjamin Moore paint and the duvet cover, back when he was hanging the new curtains on their rods—he thought about it, is all. He thought about it. And he knew her family was always going to come first, that her siblings were always going to be a part of the package, but he had it in the back of his head that maybe someday, way the hell down the line—well. He put an extra-bright bulb in the bedside lamp in the room at the far end of the hallway, in case whoever wound up sleeping there liked to read.

  Eventually, he starts sleeping on the wide couch downstairs permanently.

  Easter comes and goes, late this year, especially with Alexandra’s insistence on celebrating the traditional Orthodox date. Nick spends most of the weekend with his sisters, helping Io and the kids dye the bright red eggs. It’s relaxing, mindless work. On Sunday, when everyone taps their eggs together around the table at dinnertime, Stevie’s is the last to break.

  “That means good luck for the rest of the year, buddy,” Nick tells him.

  Stevie frowns, peering at his perfect egg. “Are you sure you didn’t let me win?” he asks suspiciously. Nick didn’t.

  It’s late by the time he gets home, overfull with cheese pastries and the special Easter cookies that taste exactly the same as they did when he was a little kid. All he wants is to walk Atlas and collapse on the couch. He’s still on nights, avoiding the flip of Falvey’s red hair with a vengeance, and with the shift on Saturday plus the celebrations he’s had maybe six hours of sleep in the past forty-eight. Nick can’t be sure, but he could be getting too old for this shit. Most paramedics burn out at thirty-five, forty tops, back problems or exhaustion or both. He’s got a few good years left, certainly, but after that—

  After that, who knows.

  (He knew, before, with Taryn. It kills him to admit it now, but he knew. That extra bedroom didn’t have to stay a study forever—a crib and a rocking chair would’ve fit fine by the window.

  Nick would’ve taken a desk job.)

  He’s exhausted by the time he keys off the Tahoe, climbing up the steps of the wide porch in a haze. So exhausted, he almost misses Falvey sitting there.

  “Jesus Christ, Taryn,” he gasps, sounding way more like his mother than he’d like. She scared him, the sudden movement of her head turning and the moonlight catching in her eyes. “The fuck are you doing here?”

  She shrugs, unfolding herself from where she’s been sitting huddled up against the wall. “Waiting for you.”

  Nick blinks. He helps her up without meaning to do it, this instinctual reach for her hand so she doesn’t lose her balance. He lets go as soon as she’s upright. “Why?”

  Taryn shoves her hands into her pockets. “I was wrong,” she says bluntly, no preamble at all but still a hint of accusation in her voice like it’s his fault somehow, you made me fall in love with you or whatever. “Okay? I just keep waiting and waiting to not feel shitty and miserable anymore, and I take the kids places and I do all the regular things and like—” She breaks off abruptly, making a face. They’re still standing outside on his porch. “It’s not working. It’s terrible. So if you could just let me in and tell me what I need to do to fix this, I’ll do it, and we can just, like. Go back to how it was.”

  Nick opens his mouth, closes it again. At first he thinks he’s misunderstanding. This is the last thing he was ever, ever expecting to hear from her, how she’s the kind of person who moves on and doesn’t look back. He took her seriously from the first momen
t she called it off, never once let himself entertain the idea she might change her mind. For a second he can’t tell how he feels about it.

  “Can you say something?” Taryn demands, hair blowing in the chilly May wind. She looks young standing there, young like he hardly ever thinks of her anymore. She lets out a laugh, sharp and brittle. “Seriously, stop looking at me like that and say something.”

  Yes, is his instinct. Fuck, of course he wants to say yes, he fucking loves her, he wants to bring her upstairs and get her naked and let her fix it however she wants to. Wants to tell her nothing was broken to start. He’s been here before though, the night at the restaurant and a hundred other times, and he honestly doesn’t know if he can handle her jerking him around again. If your choices are feel like shit now or feel like shit later, he reminds himself. And he already feels like shit now.

  Nick shakes his head almost before he knows he’s going to do it, rubs through the hair at the back of his neck. He is so, so tired. He is so, so done. “You should go, Falvey,” he says.

  Taryn actually takes a step back. “Seriously?” she says again. She looks shocked, blindsided, like it never once occurred to her that he might turn her down. And that—that irritates him. “You’re not even going to let me come inside?”

  “No, Taryn, I’m not.” It comes out meaner than he intends. Or fuck, maybe it comes out exactly as mean as he intends, what does Nick know. His head is a jumbled mess. “Sorry you waited here so long.” He pulls out his keys, stepping around her toward the door.

  Falvey’s face twists in his peripheral vision, angry as well as surprised at the dismissal. She’s stunned every time he fights back, Nick realizes. It doesn’t make him feel great about how he handled this relationship. “I don’t get it,” she says, frowning. She looks like Stevie with his egg, waiting for the punch line.

  Christ. Halfway between Lynette’s daughter’s age and his, Nick remembers, like the chorus of an old song coming back. She’s so spoiled. He loves her so much. “I know you don’t,” he tells the door, twisting the lock viciously. “And that’s why you gotta go.”