by Caro Carson
It was an odd role for her. She was usually required to do something. When did she ever just stand still and clap for someone else? She was inexperienced, frankly, when it came to being this kind of girlfriend. Heaven knew her last boyfriend, dependable David, had never done anything that attracted spectators. It wasn’t a criticism; she never did anything that required spectators, either. It had been easy to be a good partner to David. He was a hospital administrator. Her mother had approved of David.
Her mother. Brooke had another support role to play today. She planned to keep pretending to Zach that this wasn’t the most dreaded day on the calendar, and then, once Zach had left for his overnight shift at the firehouse, she would visit her mother. Already, her mother was furious with her for spending only dinner with her instead of the entire day.
You know how difficult this day is. How can you expect me to visit her grave by myself?
I don’t expect you to, Mom. I’ll go with you after dinner. There will be plenty of daylight left.
Her mother had been appalled, disappointed, and in every way furious with Brooke. That was nothing new.
In previous years, Brooke had tried to limit the amount of her involvement in her mother’s misery, which meant she’d felt her mother’s wrath. In the end, Brooke always caved in. She loved her mother, and she’d loved her sister, too.
But this year, she had something specific to do on the anniversary of her sister’s death. It couldn’t be postponed. She couldn’t reschedule it. Zach’s firefighter competition gave her that concrete reason she needed to finally limit the amount of time she spent in maudlin reflection, offering comfort to her mother that would never be accepted.
This one year, just this one year, Brooke wanted to try spending the anniversary of her sister’s death in the sunshine with an excited crowd. She wanted to live life. She wanted that life to be normal.
A siren sounded, and Zach and his opponent took off at a run, each throwing a man-size dummy over their shoulders as they raced up the staircases to the top of the tower. Zach took the stairs two at a time despite his heavy uniform and heavier dummy. His strength and speed amazed her, although Brooke had always known he was in great shape. She’d intimately traced the muscles of his legs. She’d admired the bulk and definition of the quadriceps. She’d cupped the powerful gluteus maximus in her hands, feeling the muscle flex as each stroke brought them to that shattering moment of abandon...
No one knows what I’m thinking. I refuse to blush.
She tilted her head back with the rest of the crowd. Zach and his competitor were now perched on the platform, each raising a bundle of fire hose to the top of the tower by hauling in three stories of rope, hand over hand. She remembered the flex of muscles of Zach’s bare chest and shoulders as he held himself over her in bed.
She felt the flush on her cheeks. Okay, so all her knowledge of Zach’s body was sexual. She hoped Zach’s crew would assume she was just warm from the temperature. Although it was early in the day and early in May, the temperature would reach the mid-80s by afternoon.
Zach ran down the tower stairs, a half flight ahead of the other guy because he’d hauled in the fire hose more quickly, but it was close. Brooke glanced from the digital timer at the finish line to Zach and back again. The other man gained a few steps and the crowd cheered louder as the race got closer, but his competitor’s late effort wasn’t enough. Zach crossed the finish line first.
Brooke let out a single whoop of relief. She clapped while the crowd hooted and hollered. She looked around at all the fist pumps and wolf whistles, and clapped harder. Although Zach was bent over at the waist to catch his breath, he raised his arm to acknowledge the cheers.
He straightened to accept a bottle of water. When he took off his helmet and smiled at the crowd, women whistled. He looked almost unbearably handsome with his hair wet and crazy, his skin shining with a healthy sweat. Brooke’s heart did a little flip in her chest, and she was very proud in that moment to be this firefighter’s girlfriend.
She wouldn’t be his for long, of course. Zach’s reputation as a playboy had been earned, and they never talked about their emotions, but for now, Brooke intended to enjoy this bit of normalcy.
When her time with Zach was through, she’d go back to being her mother’s only surviving child. For the rest of her life, there would be plenty of time to mourn for the lost possibilities.
* * *
Zach won two more rounds.
Brooke watched the races while surrounded by various members of Texas Rescue. Zach’s partners from Engine Thirty-Seven, Chief and Murphy, grew more boisterous with every round, but Brooke found herself clasping her hands together in silent anxiety. Her façade of normalcy was slipping.
She couldn’t relax, because she couldn’t stop thinking like an emergency physician. The more rounds Zach had to complete, the more fatigued his muscles became. Muscle fatigue led to accidents. She didn’t like the height of the tower, and she worried that a slip on the metal stairs would make a man fall—would make Zach fall—to the asphalt below. Her medically trained brain maintained a catalog of the kinds of injuries that would result.
Murphy and Chief had no such concerns.
“Quarterfinals next,” Chief said.
“Hell, yeah.” Murphy let go of his girlfriend long enough to high-five Chief. Then Murphy slid his arms around his girlfriend again, hugging her back to his front.
The same way Zach wrapped his arms around me on the porch yesterday morning.
But it wasn’t the same.
Murphy was holding his girlfriend simply to get a better look at her cleavage, Brooke was certain. Brooke could hardly avoid getting an eyeful herself. Murphy couldn’t have been more than twenty. He wore his firefighter’s T-shirt, but his girlfriend was dressed like some kind of Japanese anime character. Her thick bangs and pigtails looked childish, but her black lipstick made her look as if it was Halloween, and her low-cut top showed cleavage worthy of any comic book heroine. It was almost endearing to listen to them whisper their sci-fi sweet nothings to one another as they copped inappropriate touches which they thought no one else noticed. They were acting their age. They were normal.
When Zach had held her like that, he hadn’t been checking out her body. He’d been offering her comfort, which she’d needed after freaking out over a pediatric patient who could have died like her sister had.
Not normal.
Zach won his quarterfinal matchup. Murphy and Chief went crazy, like men watching a touchdown at a football game. In contrast, Brooke immediately checked her watch to calculate how much rest time Zach would get before the semifinals. Of the two reactions, she knew Murphy and Chief’s was the normal one.
She excused herself to wait for the semifinals in the friends and family tent that Texas Rescue had set up. Nearly everyone seeking shade was female, so Brooke gave herself a point toward being normal on that score. The other girlfriends had some amazing cleavage on display, just like Murphy’s girlfriend. Brooke felt a little prudish in her modest blue tank top and red shorts. As she entered the tent, the cleavage crowd were gathered around a girlfriend who was showing off a diamond ring, looking delighted to be moving on to the other group in the tent: the wives.
The wives were a fairly frazzled lot. The men in the competition were all young, so their wives were young, too, each one juggling one or two small children. Toddlers fussed and tried to escape their strollers. Sippy cups and snack boxes abounded. A diaper was being changed in a corner of the tent, something that made the microbiology major in Brooke shudder, but hand sanitizer was being passed around liberally as well. The wives, she noticed, didn’t have time to admire each other’s rings.
She didn’t envy them, but she could respect them. Brooke had chosen a career that made it nearly impossible to be a good mother. She worked nights, weekends, holidays. No child would be able
to depend upon her to bake cupcakes for school or show up for a dance recital. That was perfectly okay. Brooke didn’t want to be a mother.
If she never had a child, she would never end up like her own mother.
All of these women, each one who fussed over a child, who retrieved a sock from the dirt or who wiped a messy face, were vulnerable. One slipup, and their child could be harmed. Could even—like her own sister—be killed. And the women would never be the same again, just as Brooke’s mother had never been the same.
At this moment, precisely eighteen years later, Mother was waiting for her, waiting to weep over the child who’d never made it to kindergarten.
Brooke shivered, goose bumps running down her spine. She took a bottle of water from one of the Texas Rescue coolers and sat on a metal folding chair in the middle of the bubbly girlfriends and the tired mothers and the fussy children. She lingered a while, because as isolated as she felt, this was still better than sitting alone with her mother on the anniversary of her sister’s death.
Mother had wanted her to stay with dependable David. Mother would have loved Tom the radiologist. But why? So that Brooke would get married and have children and be as vulnerable as her mother had been?
No, thank you.
She knew who she was. She had her life mapped out. She was a dedicated physician, a woman who’d chosen career over family. She was lucky to be dating Zach, who understood the demands of her job. Their casual relationship worked for them.
Not so casual, yesterday.
She’d felt so brittle, afraid she’d crack if she talked about her sister after treating the accident patient. Zach hadn’t asked for details, but at the touch of his hands in her hair, she’d started talking, anyway. Zach had broken the coffee cup for her. It had fallen apart, but she hadn’t. Not really, if she didn’t count the tears she’d shed in her dreams.
Sleeping with a woman who had nightmares about a long-deceased sister wasn’t the kind of relationship Zach had signed up for, and Brooke wouldn’t subject him to it much longer. She’d just get through the rest of this day, survive the ordeal with her mother tonight, and then, starting tomorrow, she’d be herself again.
Brooke finished off her bottle of water and stood, ready to leave. She didn’t belong with either group in this tent, but a moment of indecision held her still. She couldn’t go back to the spectators and high-five with Murphy and Chief. There was no point in leaving early to see her mother, because she wasn’t the daughter whose presence her mother missed.
She didn’t belong anywhere.
But Zach understood her. She wished she could see him; he’d hold her hand.
Instead, she was holding an empty water bottle. She could at least find a recycle bin for it. Then she heard him, that deep cowboy bass carrying over the children’s babble and the girlfriends’ chatter. She turned, and the sight of him knocked her off balance. He wore his fireman’s beige turnout pants, their baggy fit making his red suspenders a necessity, but his T-shirt fit tightly, his chest muscles defined under the black material. Zach was laughing not with a group of women, which wouldn’t have surprised her at all, but with a child.
One child, thrilled with the adult attention, was a magnet for more. Child after child came over to see Zach. He crouched down, tickled one child in the stomach, and pretended to double over from another child’s tiny fist punching his chest. Then he saw Brooke.
He stood and patted various kids on the head, wading through his sea of admirers until he reached her. He’d changed into a clean, dry T-shirt, she could tell up close, but his hair was still a tousled mess. He was, as always, the most handsome man she’d ever seen. He pulled her close and kissed her, mouth closed in deference to his young audience, but hard enough to let her know this was no absentminded peck.
“Knock, knock.”
Brooke looked down to see a small child rapping his fist on the beige canvas of Zach’s turnout pants.
“Who’s there?” Zach asked.
“Thammy.”
“Sammy who?” Zach picked up the black-haired boy and held him high to finish the joke face-to-face.
“Thammy MacDowell.”
Zach laughed. “Is that right? I just met a boy named Sammy MacDowell a minute ago, right outside this tent, and he told me the same joke.”
“That was me!” The little boy splayed his hands over his shirt eagerly.
“It was? Are you sure?”
Zach, big and grown, kept up the silly conversation with the child, who couldn’t have been more than three. Slowly, Brooke sank back onto her folding chair, the cold metal seat chilling the backs of her thighs.
Zach belonged here. Brooke had always known that women liked him, of course. Men liked him, too, whether it was old Harold Allman clinging to him for courage or Jamie MacDowell commiserating with him over some sports team’s loss.
But kids...
Kids adored him. It was easy to see why. He talked to them directly. Zach laughed at whatever little Sammy MacDowell said to him.
Brooke’s empty water bottle made sharp popping sounds as it crumpled in her hand. I hate kids. Had she really said that out loud to him?
Zach did not hate kids. Still, that didn’t mean he wanted a family of his own, did it? Not Zach, the heartthrob of Engine Thirty-Seven. Not Zach, who could have any woman he wanted. He was just being patient with this particular child because Sammy was Jamie MacDowell’s son, and Jamie and Zach were old high school teammates. It was a football thing, right?
Sammy’s mother came over to retrieve her son. Zach talked with her easily, in no rush to hand the child back. She was young and pretty, the perfect all-American wife. Brooke sat there, taking in the picture they made: Zach and the woman and the toddler.
Brooke’s image of Zach as a ladies’ man crumbled. He was a good man, hardworking and handsome, a natural with kids. Someday, he’d marry a woman he loved, father children he loved, and live happily ever after in a house with a white picket fence. He’d have a good life. A normal life.
It would never include her.
Holding nothing but crumpled plastic in her hand, Brooke stood and silently stepped away.
Chapter Ten
Brooke paused outside, blinking, letting her eyes adjust to the sun after the shade of the tent.
The bright Texas sun couldn’t blind her to the truth: she lived under a black rain cloud. Had been living there so long, she forgot it sometimes, until days like today. Some people just had less good fortune than others, and her good fortune had run out eighteen years ago today.
Zach’s had not. The longer she stayed with Zach, the longer she prevented him from meeting the right girl, the one he could marry and have a family with. She needed to take her black cloud and go.
I don’t want to leave him.
Her mother had accused her of being selfish today. For once, her mother might be right.
A bright green recycle bin sat a few yards away. Brooke walked close enough to toss in her water bottle. With nothing else to do, she stood by the bin of discarded plastic, lost in gloomy thoughts, when strong arms slipped around her from behind.
“Are you feeling religious?” Zach asked quietly.
She must look as serious as her thoughts. Not really religious thoughts, but certainly reflective—
Zach squeezed her. “Because you look like the answer to my prayers.”
She really ought to be used to these jokes by now.
He let go of her only to grab her hand and pull her along behind him. “Come on, we’re making a break for it.” He smiled at her over his shoulder and tugged her behind him at an easy jog, heading toward the edge of the parking lot and the red fire engine with the number thirty-seven painted on its side. He didn’t stop until they’d run around the cab to the side of the engine away from the crowd.
&n
bsp; “Finally,” he said, crowding her against the warm metal of the truck. His kiss was greedy yet skillful, a blend that threatened to wipe out all her resolve to let him go and find someone better.
She slid her palms along his black T-shirt, skimming over the red suspenders that crossed his shoulder blades, relishing the feel of the defined muscles of his back, his shoulders, his neck. This side of the truck was private enough. Brooke wanted him, badly, and he obviously wanted her, too.
She let her thumbs drift along his jaw, telling herself she should end this now. Well, soon.
Oh, to heck with it.
Just for today, then. Just for the rest of the afternoon, she would cling to her fantasy and pretend she was a normal woman in love with a normal guy.
In love?
No, she couldn’t go there. Zach had said he was her friend as well as her lover. That was all she needed.
But oh, she could love him. She wanted the best for him, even when that meant she couldn’t have him.
If she wasn’t in love with him, she was close, so dangerously close that her legs felt weak at the realization. She clung to his neck a little harder.
“Baby,” he murmured against her mouth approvingly, as if her weakness meant something good instead of something dreadful. “I’m addicted to this. Two hours apart is too many. I’ve been watching you in the crowd, wanting to jump that barrier and grab you up every time you did that proper little clap.”
His thoughts were so much less gloomy than hers, she had to wait a beat to shift gears and let her thoughts match his. To let her thoughts be normal.
“I’m trying to get the hang of cheering,” she said, forcing herself to smile. “I can’t get that ‘whoop, whoop’ thing down that Murphy and Chief do.”
“Don’t change. Your clapping is cute.”
“Cute? Me?”
“It’s like having a princess applaud me.” And then he kissed her with a carnality that would make any princess mindlessly toss away her crown.
