Fire at Sunset: The Firefighters of Darling Bay 4

by Lila Ashe

  It was Bonnie’s turn to draw back. “What?”

  “You don’t listen. Maybe you don’t listen to anyone.”

  She felt herself wince. “It was just a joke.”

  “Come on, Bonnie.” Caz stood, standing naked without shame in front of her. She could almost see the heat rising from him, and it wasn’t desire or lust like it had been last night. The night before, his hands had been wide and strong, giving her nothing but pleasure. His mouth had been firm and insistent, teasing her to heights she truly had never known before. That would have been the thing to tell him. That’s what she should have said. She shouldn’t have made a stupid crack about her virginity. It wasn’t funny. She got that.

  Now his hands were tight at his side, and she could see the strain in the muscle that jumped in the side of his jaw. His mouth was a hard line, no sign of the man who’d made her moan in the dark.

  “I’m sorry?”

  Caz lifted one eyebrow. “That’s it? A question?”

  Bonnie scrambled into a sitting position, wrapping the sheet around her as she went. It was still tucked in at the bottom of the bed, though she wasn’t sure how that was possible, given the way they’d swum through the sheets the night before. She wasn’t as easily confident in her body, not like he was. She couldn’t just sit unclothed with Caz Lloyd, in his house, while he watched her with those angry eyes. “No. Not a question. I’m sorry. I thought it would make you laugh.”

  His voice was softer, but he was still far away. “It wasn’t funny. If it had been your first time, I would have been different with you. Slower. More gentle.”

  She tried a smile. “You were gentle the third time.”

  Caz didn’t smile back. “You made me think I’d hurt you.”

  Shaking her head, Bonnie held out her hand in the hope that he would take it. “You didn’t. You were perfect.”

  Her hand just hung there between them. He didn’t take it. “You can’t just lie to take the pressure off something.”

  “Hang on a sec, buddy.” He wasn’t her buddy—not that… “You can’t call a joke a lie.”

  “Yes, I can. And I do.” He stepped into his jeans, yanking them up unceremoniously. Then he tugged on a light blue T-shirt that made his eyes seem even icier. “Tell me how you feel about me.”

  Oh, no. She had no idea how she felt about him. Not a clue.

  “Come on, you’re overreacting,” she said, knowing she probably shouldn’t. But he was. It wasn’t a big deal. She’d teased him, and he hadn’t liked it. She’d try not to do it again. That was all he could ask for, wasn’t it?

  “You don’t even know, do you? Do you ever have any honest emotions?”

  It felt like a slap. “What?”

  “I saw your face the other day, with the ducks.”

  The ducks? He was going to bring them into this?

  “You were upset. And the one thing you wouldn’t do was show it.”

  Bonnie swung her shoulders in small circles, suddenly feeling the tension she was carrying in them. “I was totally fine.”

  She hadn’t been fine, not even a little. They’d had a call of ducklings in a drain. The engine had been assigned, but she and Caz had been in the area, and they took the call. Ducks stuck in storm drains were common in the spring. They had a special long-handled net they kept folded under the jump seat just for that purpose. Caz had chased the mama duck across the street and over to the pond in Murray Park. Using the net to encourage them, Bonnie had herded the six ducklings across the busy street while Caz blocked it for her. With soft little plops and happy chirps, the babies had followed mama into the pond. A happy ending. Two couples and three families out for a walk stopped to watch. Two of the parents filmed their kids watching the ducks. Everyone was laughing.

  Then a little girl shrieked. “It’s gone! Something took it! Mommy!”

  They all followed her pointing finger. More children’s screams followed as, one by one, the ducklings were grabbed and swallowed by the giant koi that Darling Bay City Hall was so proud of.

  It had been terrible. Bonnie herself had wanted to scream. She’d picked up two rocks and then stood there juggling them awkwardly in her hands while the parents’ eyes begged her and Caz to do something, anything, to stop the carnage. She couldn’t throw the rocks—they’d just hit the ducklings. They couldn’t go in the water—the ducklings would panic and bolt. The mama duck swam frantically, quacking her alarm, as—one by one—all her babies were taken.

  Then they’d had been dispatched to standby at a possible trench rescue (it hadn’t been one—just a guy who trapped his leg while digging in his backyard) and they’d had to drive away from the crying children and aghast parents. Bonnie’s hands had been shaking, and she’d been glad Caz was driving. She’d felt daggers behind her forehead, pain that might have been tears, pain she would never admit to. Over ducks, of all things. Three CPR failures in a row, she felt fine. But ducks, apparently, broke her.

  At the station, she’d popped three Excedrin Migraine and then made “Why did the duck cross the road?” jokes while she made chicken Marsala that night. She felt the headache throb as she cut the meat.

  Now, Caz just stared, his arms rigid at his sides. “I understand pushing back the feelings we have about people. If we felt everything normal people feel in our job, we’d go crazy.”

  It was true. That’s why she didn’t.

  He went on. “But you almost melted down after the ducks. Your voice shook for an hour afterward. I bet you didn’t know that.”

  She hadn’t. “I was—”

  “That night, in bed, you had a nightmare, do you remember that?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You were crying.”

  “I was not.” Over ducks? Her? Really?

  Caz rolled his eyes. “I was an inch away from you on the other side of the partition. I could hear you.” He looked down and then back up. “I thought about going to you, but you stopped as fast as you started, and then your breathing was deep again.”

  So intimate, to know each other’s sleep this well. It was almost more intimate than the mostly not-sleeping they’d done the night before. “I don’t remember that,” she said. She did, though, remember the raging headache she’d woken with the next morning, and the way her eyes had been puffy. She’d thought it was odd, and she’d taken a few more Excedrin and pushed it out of her mind.

  “I know you don’t remember. It was a feeling, that’s why.”

  “I’m not a robot. And you’re one to talk. You don’t tell anyone anything. You’re lecturing me about being honest?”

  “Oh, honey,” he said, his voice low and rough, rocks on gravel. “I’m always honest. You think those things I said last night weren’t true?”

  He’d called her gorgeous, intoxicating, sexy as hell, and then, this morning, he’d called her love. “I—I don’t know.”

  “How do you feel about me?”

  Only one word pulsed in her brain, but it was out of reach of her mouth. “I…think you’re…super fun.” Good grief.

  “I was falling in love with you.”

  Was.

  Caz continued. “But you can’t even admit you like me.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” What she’d done last night, the way she’d kissed him—did she really have to attach words to that?

  “Nope. Use your words, Mad. Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me something I want to know.” There was something under his voice, a wish that Bonnie could hear, could almost feel, as if he’d held it out to her to take. His voice softened. “Come on, Mad.”

  She opened her mouth.

  The words didn’t come.

  Bonnie could almost see him lose his patience. He’d held onto it, and just like that, he let it go.

  No. More than that. He let her go. She could see it—she wanted to stop it, but it would be like holding back the tide that rushed up every night, drowning the legs of the Darling Bay pier.

  “I’m going to go next do
or and check on my father.”

  Bonnie scooted backward until her back was pressed against the headboard. Her voice was small. “I’ll wait here.”

  Caz’s voice was soft. “Nah. That’s okay.”

  Shock knifed her. “But—”

  His hand moved slightly as if he were going to try to touch her, but he was still feet away and he made no effort to get closer. “Bonnie—it’s probably better this way.”

  What way? What way was he talking about? Leaving her naked in his bed? Alone? “You’re kicking me out?”

  “No. You can stay as long as you want.”

  But he wasn’t coming back to bed, to her. He was going to check on his father, and then he’d stay with him. In the other house. She could see that.

  Caz open the door. He gave one glance over his shoulder. His eyes were ravaged. Had she done that? Just by making a joke? But inside, she knew it was bigger than that. He’d asked for her honesty. Truth. It was what mattered most to him—that she be able to tell him how she felt.

  And then she hadn’t. She couldn’t.

  The door shut softly behind him.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Kicked out. She’d been kicked out.

  She’d had sex with Caz, a man she hadn’t even planned on liking. She’d actively disliked him, in fact. Where had that gone? When had she become the bad guy?

  And then he’d kicked her all the way out of his house.

  Somewhere, this must have been covered in Miss Manners, wasn’t it? Dear Miss Manners, A man made love to me six ways to Sunday and then, in the morning, he asked me to go home. Should I be offended? Thank you, Confused in Darling Bay

  Answer: Dear CIDB, You raise an interesting point. But it sounds like there’s something you left out, so in this letter I’ll leave out the answer and see how you like it.

  Dang.

  Bonnie locked her bike to the rack she’d insisted her mother install outside Darling Trinkets. The rack was steel painted gold, shaped in the form of a bicycle. Only her mother could find a twee bike rack.

  The shop bell tinkled overhead as she entered, and she heard her mother call, “I’ll be right with you! Just dusting a few crystal bowls!” That was code for taking off her flip-flops and slipping on her pretty-but-not-comfortable heels she wore in the store. She thought people (especially older men with money who liked anything Civil War era or older) preferred her to look old-school feminine. Bonnie had seen the way men put cash on the counter for whatever she told them might (or might not have) come from a tobacco plantation in Virginia, and thought her mother might be right about her theory.

  “It’s just me,” Bonnie called. “Just your daughter.”

  “Just my daughter?” Marge came around the corner, one flip-flop on, the other foot barefoot, her arms open. “What could be better?”

  Her mother hugged her tight.

  That was normal. That’s what her mother did.

  What Bonnie did wasn’t normal.

  She burst into tears.

  An hour later, she’d managed to stem the waterworks to an occasional sniffle. She hadn’t been able to tell her mother what had happened. Bonnie and her mother didn’t talk about sex, and they certainly didn’t talk about what happened afterward. Marge didn’t even ask, and for that Bonnie was grateful. She couldn’t have put it into words. (What would she say? She joked about being a virgin and that’s what brought this all on? She knew that wasn’t it. She knew in her heart that she’d blown it with Caz by not showing him herself. Maybe that part of her was broken. And the fact that she’d lost him—something she’d thought wouldn’t matter at all—hurt so deeply, she wondered if she’d pulled something internally. Somewhere near her heart.)

  But her mother knew—in the way her mother had always known—exactly what she needed. She tucked Bonnie up in the back of the shop, behind the huge walnut desk, in Bonnie’s favorite deep chair. She wrapped her in an afghan that smelled faintly of mothballs and the cinnamon candles that sat in a box nearby. She put a glass of water near her, and a placed the latest People magazine on her lap.

  The bell jingled and Marge started to slip off her flip-flops to put on her heels. “Oh, honey. Do you want me to go put up the closed sign? I will.”

  “No, go. Go. I’m fine.”

  “Oh, Bonnie. My bright shining star.” Her mother smiled at her, and Bonnie had a sudden, vivid memory of the day Gramma had died. Bonnie, at almost eighteen, had been inconsolable. It was her first loss, her first experience with death.

  Bonnie had been the one to find her. She’d gotten up early, as she usually did, and she’d made them tea. It had been their tradition, all through Bonnie’s high school years. Bonnie’s mother liked to sleep in, getting up and racing through a shower only an hour before she had to open the store at ten. But Gramma Honor, since she’d moved into the back room after a bad fall, had taught Bonnie what was fun about getting up early. Tea, for one. Gramma Honor would hold the cup in her hands, breathing in the steam. Then she’d sip and say, “Can you feel it? The caffeine? Wait for it. I know you hate waking up early, but here it comes. Burns cleaner than a coffee rush. Just you wait, my bright shining star of a granddaughter.”

  Then Gramma Honor and Bonnie would make bets about what Bonnie’s father would forget when he left the house (always something—a hat, his wallet, his keys), and her grandmother almost always won the bets and loved crowing about it even more than winning the nickels Bonnie had to fork over out of her allowance. Her grandmother made getting up early into something exciting and fun, every day.

  That terrible morning, there had been no warning. Of course, Bonnie had thought about losing her grandmother at some point in the future, but it wasn’t a real thing to worry about. It wouldn’t—it couldn’t—happen for years and years, not until Bonnie was old enough to know how to handle it. Gramma Honor was strong, anyway. Besides that fall and the broken clavicle that went with it, her health couldn’t have been better. She had the blood pressure of a forty-year-old and the cholesterol of a runner.

  So there had been nothing to prepare Bonnie for opening her grandmother’s door, tray in hand, to find nothing in Gramma’s bed but the shell of the person she’d loved.

  Bonnie had dropped the tray, breaking both tea cups, burning her feet with the scalding liquid.

  She’d known.

  Funny, she’d hadn’t exactly known what she’d known. If she’d been asked, she wouldn’t have said Gramma Honor was dead. But she knew the woman she loved wasn’t in that room.

  Without remembering moving, she’d found herself in her mother’s darkened bedroom. “Mom. Mama, wake up.” She hadn’t called her mother that since she was eight and broke her arm in a fall off her rollerblades. “Mama, come.”

  In her grandmother’s room, Bonnie’s mother had touched Honor’s cheek, felt her cold skin.

  “What do we do?” whispered Bonnie. There had to be something to do.

  Marge sighed and sat on the edge of the bed, keeping one hand on Gramma Honor’s lower leg. “Nothing, honey.”

  “CPR.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No, we have to try.” Bonnie pushed past her mother’s legs and started tugging on her grandmother’s shoulders. “We learned it in P.E. We have to get her on the floor.”

  “Bonnie.” Her mother tried to still Bonnie’s hands.

  “We have to do something.”

  “Honey.” Her mother’s voice broke. “She’s gone. She’s cold. Look, her hands are still. We can’t—we can’t get her back.”

  “But there’s nothing wrong with her.” There wasn’t, except that she wasn’t breathing. Gramma was healthy. On her old ten-speed, just last year, at eighty-seven, Bonnie’s grandmother had almost managed to pass her on the way the strawberry stand. “She’s healthy. There’s nothing wrong with her.”

  There was, though. There was one thing wrong. Her grandmother had left the room. Without Bonnie, without asking permission, without saying goodbye, Gramma Honor had
left her.

  Bonnie had felt her eyes fill with tears. “No.”

  “Don’t cry,” said her mother.

  Don’t cry? When there was nothing else to do? Anger had filled Bonnie. “If I’d gotten up earlier, I could have saved her. It’s my fault.”

  Her mother had grabbed her then, hard, pulling her to her chest in a hug so tight Bonnie lost her breath. “Don’t you ever say that again. It’s not your fault. Do not say that again. You were the brightest part of her life. She called you her star for a reason. You’re the brightest part of my life. Keep being that, my love. Keep shining bright. No tears, just be strong. I need you now.”

  Her mother said that over and over that terrible week. I need you now. Bonnie, at almost-eighteen, had taken her job seriously. She hadn’t gone to school, even though it meant missing the last week of her senior year. While everyone else ditched school to go to the senior picnic, Bonnie had been working with the funeral home. While her friends took the long school bus ride to grad night at Disneyland, Bonnie had been ordering the flowers, putting the obituary in the paper. Under her watchful gaze, her mother fell apart. Her father made it his full-time job to take care of her mother, leaving everything else to Bonnie.

  And she’d risen to the occasion. The only time she’d felt completely helpless was at the funeral itself, when she’d gotten up to say a few words. There, in front of the microphone, she’d only said, “My grandmother—” before her voice clogged with tears. She couldn’t speak around them. She’d felt nothing but helplessness and anger. Her father had walked up the few steps to the podium to help her, but Bonnie had stubbornly shaken her head until she could swallow hard enough to finally push back the tears. Then she’d been able to speak about Gramma Honor.

  Her mother was right. It was better not to cry. It was better to push the feelings back. Keep them under a layer of stubbornness. And if you told yourself something hard enough a hundred times over and then a thousand more (I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine), you started to believe it.