Something Worth Saving

by Chelsea Landon

  This December would mark his sixth year with the Seattle Fire Department, a place his father had spent his entire career.

  The Ryan family came from a long line of firefighters. It was in their blood, apparently.

  Around one that afternoon I got a text from Jace asking me to stop by the station when I could. It wasn’t unusual for me to drop by the station when he was working, so I told Shanna I’d be back later. She made me promise to bring back coffee. Remember my theory on why I moved to Seattle? Starbucks. On every corner. Shanna appreciated that, too.

  When I got to the station, I could see Lauren standing by the open bay doors next to Jace’s dad.

  Lauren liked to bring the kids by to see their dad, too. At least that’s what she said, but she also wanted to check out the firefighters.

  As my sister talked and my kids ran around the fire trucks, I glanced at Jace. He looked nervous.

  “So . . . ” His head tipped in the direction of his phone and then at the ground. He was dancing around something, and while I had an idea of what he was wanting to say, I had no idea it was about his cell phone and the video Gracie had managed to capture that morning. “Lauren called me. Apparently our daughter is good at filmography these days.”

  Okay. That wasn’t what I was expecting. I was expecting him to cancel on our night together. He did that often.

  “Say what?” A little surprised, I handed him a tall Americano.

  He smiled, taking the coffee before reaching into the front pocket of his navy blue slacks and handing me his cell phone. Leery of the contents, I felt my heart pound a little as I thought about what she could have possibly recorded this morning when she tossed the phone under the door. “She apparently played it for Gavin today.”

  Shit.

  Once I pushed “play,” I wished I hadn’t.

  “You have to be shitting me!” My mouth hung open. A few gasping breaths might have escaped, but the reality was that our four-year-old daughter had recorded us having sex.

  No, you couldn’t see anything in particular aside from the ceiling but the noises were not good. They were not noises a child should have heard. And though she technically didn’t hear those noises – we were behind a locked door – she had recorded them.

  The worst part? I’m getting to that. If you needed anything worse.

  “Don’t you fucking stop.” And grunting and the dog barking and kids crying.

  Awful. Just awful.

  Jace, who could barely keep a straight face, broke out into laughter, completely entertained by all this. “The best part is the end.”

  He meant the worst part. I’m sure of it.

  And then it was there, the end he spoke of. The worst I spoke of.

  What was it you ask? Jace walking across our bedroom floor, naked, in all his glory.

  Yeah.

  My sister and her kid, and my kids saw this.

  “Fuck . . . ” He turned the phone slightly. “I look good from that angle.” With his arms around my shoulders, he leaned in, pointing to the screen as he let his voice drop. “And bigger.”

  Jace apparently thought it was hilarious and couldn’t stop laughing, and was impressed that he looked bigger from that angle.

  “What the fuck are you laughing about, dipshit?” Slapping at his shoulders, I couldn’t understand why he thought this was funny.

  “Oh, just admit it. It’s funny.” His arms went up, trying to defend himself, when Logan and Kasey, Jace’s brother, came walking out, both grinning.

  Fools. They’d already seen it.

  “Parents of the year right here, boys!” Kasey announced, smacking Logan across his chest. Laughter broke out among all three of them.

  Logan was Jace’s best friend. They were rarely apart, although they had completely different personalities. While Jace was laid-back for the most part, relaxed and thoughtful in his ways, Logan was lively and reckless. He wasn’t as tall as Jace, shorter by a few inches, but most thought they were brothers rather than friends.

  Lauren, my sister, who’d followed Logan out, had all three kids with her and a basket. On the days she stopped by the station, Lauren would bring the boys some kind of homemade treat that she purchased from the bakery down the street and pretended she made the shit herself.

  “So, Aubrey.” Lauren was eating this shit up. Slightly relieved she didn’t want to kill me for subjecting her son to that, I realized quickly that living with my crazy sister, he’d probably been subjected to worse in the past. “I see you had a nice morning.” Her arm wrapped around my shoulders. I was being handled a lot. “Feeling less stressed, are we?”

  Let me tell you a little bit about Lauren. She’s creative and fun-loving, entertaining, beautiful, and absolutely everything you would want in a sister. But she’s also out of touch with reality, tends to run the gamut, and unfortunately, rarely taken seriously. Even by me. And my mother, her take on Lauren . . . don’t get me started on that.

  “Shut up.” She let me go, stepping back slightly. “Why were they playing with cell phones, anyway? I told you not to let Gracie play with cell phones. Last week she called Guam.”

  Not that we really went by that in our house. After all, who had she recorded this morning? Her parents having sex. Excellent role models we all were.

  “Hey, I didn’t give it to her.” Lauren shoved Jace back a little. He literally couldn’t stop laughing. “This jerk gave it to her as a peace offering when she wouldn’t come inside this morning. It’s his fault.”

  “You should think about why she didn’t want to come inside, Lauren,” Jace taunted, as if he had grounds for taunting. At this point he needed to keep his mouth shut. “What do you do to my princess during the day?”

  “Your princess?” Lauren gasped, feeding into his bullshit. He did this on purpose. If he got a rise out of my sister, his day was complete. “Your little princess called me a bitch this morning, dumped over an entire gallon of milk, and tried to shave her brother’s head with a vegetable peeler, all in the matter of three hours.”

  And people wondered why I didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom or run a daycare.

  Jace continued to laugh. It was amusing to him because he’d never spent an entire day with them alone. Either of them.

  “Where are the kids?” I finally asked, looking around, only to see them nowhere in sight.

  “Yeah, Lauren.” Jace was in full-on piss-my-sister-off-completely mode by pulling her shoulder-length blonde hair and poking at her shoulders. Anything to get a rise out of her. “Where are the kids?”

  Trying to calm herself, with flushed cheeks and messy hair, she straightened out her leather jacket by running her hands over the front pockets, kicking at Jace. “They’re inside with Wade and Axe.”

  “You left my kids with Axe!” I nearly had a heart attack. Axelson (Axe) Peterson was never someone you wanted your kids around. Unless, of course, you wanted them to grow up to be lunatics with whorish ways and substance-abuse problems. Believe me when I say not all firefighters are morally sound. There are guys like Axe who have seen some fucked-up shit, and it takes its toll on them. “Nothing good comes from his mouth. They’re probably learning worse words than ‘bitch’ by now.”

  As I began to claim my children inside the station, Jace piped up again, laughing with his boys. “We should look for better childcare!”

  “You’re lucky I don’t turn you over to CPS.” Lauren followed behind me, grumbling all the way until we got to the door and Jace added his next spark to the fire.

  “Oh, admit it, Lauren, you liked the video,” he yelled across the apparatus bay.

  “I’m going to kill your baby-daddy.” Lauren glared at him and then turned back to me “You will never marry him because I’m going to kill him myself.”

  “Oh, don’t do that . . . you saw the video.” I laughed and pushed the double doors to the station open. “He’s got nice pipe.”

  She laughed, too, as we had the same sense of humor. I didn’t have much time
and needed to get back to the shop, so I gave my kids a quick kiss, slapped Jace again in the stomach, and then made my way back across the street.

  YOU MIGHT think by the interactions with Jace that all was good. We were happy, we had two kids, he teased me, flirted, all that.

  You would think that.

  But there was more to it.

  I love him. I do. Very much so. There was no one else for me.

  Let me tell you about the darker sides, the ones that had me wondering what I actually meant to him and where this was going. You’re curious now, aren’t you?

  Most stories start out with how they fell in love. That’s the easy part. That’s the part where oxygen meets heat, spark occurs, and a fire is started. What happens when one part of the triangle we know so well is taken away?

  What happens when the heat’s gone?

  Fire goes out. Eventually.

  He loved our kids, and I had no doubt he loved me. But there were times when I wondered if I was just what had fallen into place. Good for the time being. You know?

  I didn’t want to think that way.

  Let me put it to you this way. You know those couples who have sex all the time? The whole “can’t wait to be inside you, screaming your name at the top of your lungs” — is that real?

  In the beginning, yeah, it’s pretty accurate.

  But the reality is that after a while, you not only get sore, or get a UTI or something equally as frustrating, and the newness slows to a comfortable pace.

  My point?

  One day all relationships get comfortable. You can’t have sex all the time, unfortunately, but for me, when the comfort came, that was when I really fell in love with Jace. It happened one morning. I remember the day it hit me, and I remember telling him.

  Dates, remember?

  This day?

  July 2, 2008.

  He’d just gotten off his shift, and came over to my apartment and sat down on the couch like he owned the place. But what really got me was how comfortable we were. And he brought me coffee. That helped, too.

  “I love you,” I said, all but blurting it out. He smiled and I stared at the coffee, pretending to play it off that I more or less told my sweet creamy addiction I loved it and not Jace. But he knew me.

  “It’s about time you admitted it out loud. Your eyes said it months ago.”

  “And when did you see that, smartass?”

  He wiggled his eyebrows. “When you were screaming my name.”

  Always a gentleman.

  Later that same night, I asked, “So what about you?”

  He smiled, coyly. “I love me, too. I’m a lovable kind of guy.”

  Moving from my place next to him, I straddled his lap. “Oh, just tell me you love me, you pussy.”

  As he drew me close, his chest pressed to mine. “So dirty,” he growled. “I love it . . . ” His lips were at my ear then, a low whisper that made me feel dirty, in a good way, while shivery tingles attacked everywhere nerves were present. “And I love you.”

  As you can see, it was good.

  December 17, 2008, I found out I was pregnant with Gracie. And both of us were excited and had no doubts about having her.

  After Jayden was when the happiness began to fade. With the realization that we had two kids, not a lot of time and even less time together, the relationship was slipping from what it had been before. I don’t know when it happened, either. If I did, I wasn’t seeing it clearly then, and I certainly wasn’t doing anything to change it.

  So how do you change that? How do you keep the fire going?

  How do you rekindle a relationship before it’s too late?

  “THIS PLACE looks amazing!” I knew that voice for sure. Brooke walked in, smiling as usual as she looked over the shop.

  Brooke Jennings was my best friend and married to Jace’s best friend, Logan.

  Brooke. What can I say about that girl, other than she was an amazingly strong woman with a personality that matched. No one who knew her would ever say a bad thing about her. If you ever needed someone to confide in, she was the one. You told her a secret, and she kept it.

  Shanna reached for her, wrapping her arms and one leg around her slender frame. “Goddamn, girl, you get sexier every time I see you!”

  She was right, too. Brooke, who struggled with being a knobby-kneed little tomboy as a kid, was now a tall brunette with long hair flowing down to her mid-back, long layers that wrapped around a heart-shaped face, and doe-brown eyes.

  “Oh, stop.” Brooke laughed, hugging Shanna tightly.

  In my world, I had three best friends: Brooke, Shanna, and my sister. I told all three pretty much everything. Same with them. We were the fab four.

  I hung out with Kasey’s wife Kari, too, but she was usually pretty busy.

  “Damn, girl . . . seriously, do you just get hotter every day?” Shanna was still eyeing Brooke and her brown sweater, which was paired with skinny jeans and suede boots. If Shanna were a lesbian, she had already called dibs on Brooke. Most of us would. She was amazing-looking.

  We laughed, leaning against the counter at the rear of the store, talking about our day and a little about kids. Brooke noticed my jeans — I never wore skinny jeans — and smiled, her hands over her mouth. “Sweetie, you look great!” She knew my fear about skinny jeans. I thought for sure pear-shaped women shouldn’t wear skinny jeans. “Any girl with an ass like yours should embrace it!”

  Though I thought I needed to lose fifteen pounds, Brooke and Shanna both told me how good I looked. But that’s what friends are for, right? I was positive Brooke would tell me I looked great even if I had on sweatpants and unbrushed hair thrown up in a messy bun. She was that friend.

  I guess that was what I needed, and it was just like Brooke to know. She knew what everyone needed. She knew birthdays and anniversaries, and never forgot a name.

  “What’s Amelia want for her birthday?” Brooke and Logan’s only daughter was turning five on Sunday.

  “Princess dress-up stuff.” Brooke showed us a picture on her phone of Logan and Amelia from last night. “She’s really into Brave.”

  My hand rose to my mouth as I began to laugh. A few customers walked in, their enthusiasm for the shop buzzing in the far right corner near the display of our “Harvest Hallow” scent. “For her . . . or her daddy?” There was Logan, dressed up in the full attire, with even a long red wig.

  Aside from Jace, I couldn’t think of a better father out there who put the needs of their kids before anything, aside from firefighting.

  “I need to go get Amelia at school. So you guys will be there?” Brooke asked, slipping her phone inside her bag and taking two steps toward the door.

  “Yep. Need me to bring anything?”

  Brooke rattled off a few things, and asked me to bring the “worms in dirt” dish I usually made for birthday parties.

  Growing up, I had never had close friends, aside from my sister. So when I met Brooke when Jace and I started dating, I instantly realized what I missed — having good friends who wouldn’t walk out on you and who held you to standards they never kept themselves.

  Now I had Brooke. One of the best friends a girl could have.

  Before Brooke left, she stopped at the door, smiling trying to hold back her laughter. “Nice video this morning, Aubrey.” And then she shook her hips.

  Turning to Shanna with tight lips, I glared at her. “You told everyone, didn’t you?”

  Shanna smiled. “Just the people who would find it entertaining.”

  Leave it to Shanna. She was the gossip queen. Never tell her anything unless you wanted the world to know.

  Jace sent a text around four and said he would be off at five; his shift was only eight hours today. That left me with enough time to pick up the kids and take them over to Jace’s parents’ house and make it back to our place before he got home.

  “Do you care if I leave early?” I asked Shanna when I saw Jace’s name flash on the screen of my phone. She hollered
an “okay” from the back room just as I picked up. “Hey, you still getting off at four?” Usually when he called it meant that there had been a change in plans. Happened all the time.

  “Yeah. I will.” Something seemed off. His tone was lower than usual. “I have some very specific conditions when I get home.”

  “Yeah, wh—”

  He cut me off immediately. “Eh, no interrupting.”

  I laughed, letting him continue.

  His voice dropped, and a sexy rasping whisper drew out his racy request. “I want you wearing that black dress you have and your red bra. That’s it. No panties. And when I get there . . . you do whatever I want. No questions.”

  “All right.” Sometimes a girl likes to be put in her place. It’s fun. It’s naughty, and I honestly believed that it could bring back what was missing.

  Who was I to deny my firefighter?

  Nothing more was said, and he hung up. Jace did this sort of thing often. He liked to be in control to a certain extent. Nothing dominating or anything, just . . . in charge from time to time.

  I was guessing he was still fairly horny after being cut off earlier. Or maybe he saw we needed this. Maybe he could see the tension, too.

  Just as I was grabbing my purse from under the counter and searching for my keys, I heard the chime.

  “I’ll be right up,” Shanna said, peeking her head around the corner. “Give me just a minute.” She was in the middle of an order. I could smell the apple cinnamon scent rolling amid the shop.

  “Okay. I got it.”

  “Hey . . . Aubrey.”

  When I turned around, I was met with a face I had hoped to forget.

  Remember when I said I’d left Boise for a reason?

  Ridley Harrison was that reason.

  And he was standing there in front of me.

  Jace once told me that when smoke fills a room, it banks down the walls to the floor. When that happens, there are layers of smoke at different temperatures, with the coolest being on the floor.

  That’s where I was. On the floor.