Slide, page 16
Maggie smiled and gave the pan a brief stir. “A mama’s got to take care of her boys, Pietro, now come and sit down. I want to hear all about what you’ve been up to. How was your weekend?”
She glanced at Ash, but he was suddenly busy studying the pattern on the tablecloth in front of him. Understandable. For a moment I didn’t know what to say either. I couldn’t tell my mom about the beating I’d taken from a baseball bat, or the altercation with Sean, or the amazing sex I’d had, so the majority of the weekend was out. It didn’t leave much, and the eventual answer I came up with sounded even lamer when I said it out loud: “Same old: work, TV and sleep. What did you do this weekend? Did you play poker with Mrs. Schneider again?”
Her short attention span was our saving grace, and she was soon chattering away again about everything and nothing. We spent the rest of the evening eating and laughing, and I thought we’d gotten away with it until it was time to leave.
Ash said good-bye first and headed down the stairs. I lingered a few moments to give Maggie the bear hug I knew she wanted. I was going to be busy for the next few weeks. I didn’t know when I’d get over to her place again.
Maggie returned my embrace with a strength that belied her small frame. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay? You can have my bed.”
I pulled away and gave her a stern look. “Mom, we’d sleep on the couch if we stayed. You’re not giving up your bed for anyone. But we can’t. Ash has to work tomorrow.”
It was an economical version of the truth. We’d stayed at her place before, huddled up on the couch and making out like teenagers. It was fun, but it wasn’t going happen tonight. I’d hidden my injuries for a few hours, but I couldn’t keep that up much longer.
“Okay,” Maggie said, clearly unhappy. “You’ll be back soon, won’t you? You both work too much.”
I rolled my eyes. “You sure it’s me you want to see, or just Ash?”
“Oh, stop,” Maggie scolded. “Quel ragazzo ha bisogno dell’amore di una madre. Why’s he so sad today?”
I repressed a sigh. It was all very well her telling me he needed a mother’s love, but how the fuck was I supposed to give him that? I leaned down and kissed her cheek a final time. “He’s fine,” I said. “Really. I’ll see you soon, okay?”
Maggie shook her head. “Liar,” she said sternly. “I won’t pry, but don’t you think I’m fooled.”
She pressed a heavy bag of leftovers into my hands, and we parted ways. I descended the stairs with a smirk. She’d packed enough food for a week, but it would be gone in a few days. Left to his own devices, Ash would eat dessert for breakfast every damn day until it was all gone.
Ash dozed off on the way home. I watched over him while he slept, reflecting on the odd way the subway always put him to sleep. It was strange, because he was prone to claustrophobia if he was contained in any other situation—cars, buses, elevators. He wouldn’t go near any of them. Across from me, he looked really young with his hood pulled up and his head lolled back on the seat. I wanted to sit next to him and put my arm around him, but of course I didn’t. Cuddling on the subway was a risky game. Instead I just stared at him and tried to unravel the bizarre few days we’d just lived through.
Somehow, I’d gone from being connected to him in the most intimate way possible to feeling he was more detached from me than he’d been for a long time.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I’D BEEN back on shift for two weeks, and already it felt like I hadn’t had a day off in months. The combination of missing my bed and pining for Ash sucked.
A few days ago we’d said good-bye, knowing work was going to keep us apart for the foreseeable future. That morning, Ash crawled back in bed fully clothed and went back to sleep on my belly. Luckily for him, I woke up just in time to send him to work. I loved watching him when he’d just woken up, all grouchy, disheveled, and gorgeous. It made my day. That morning, I watched him run out of the door with his heavy eyes and mussed-up hair and it was all I could do not to drag him back—drag him back and revisit every little thing we’d done the previous night.
Just the memory of it was enough as I crawled into the back of the ambulance under the pretense of restocking. I slumped back on the gurney and closed my eyes. It wasn’t too hard to picture it. That particular evening had found us both at home with nothing to do, and we’d spent it eating pizza and fooling around on the couch. A residual shiver of pleasure ran through me. Ash had worn me out until I was a mumbling wreck passed out in a heap beside him. Maybe he was right and I was getting old.
“You awake back there, asshole?”
I started, reality calling a halt to my shameless trip down memory lane. Irritated, I pushed my hat back from my face, scowling at Mick with the only eye I could be bothered to open. “What?”
He glared right back. “We’ve got a run, dumbass.”
Shit. I hadn’t heard a thing. My daydreams must have been more of a snooze. I checked the drug packs and equipment, gave myself a shake to wake up properly, and climbed back into the front seat.
I bent over to retie my boots as Mick hit the lights. “What have we got? Not more crazy geriatrics?”
We’d spent almost our entire shift the night before dealing with old folk with dementia. It had culminated with an old dear who’d peeled all the skin off her arm because she thought it was a damn orange. Calls like that used up a lot of my patience. I couldn’t face another night of that crap.
Mick shook his head. “Nah, it’s not that. We’re going over to North Side because they’re backed up at a warehouse fire. It’s an assault in the park.”
“PD on their way?” I said, instantly wary. The support we had in our own neighborhood was questionable enough. Relying on cops we didn’t know was even worse.
“They’d better be. We’re not getting out of this damn bus until they get there.”
Technically, I was better qualified than Mick, but he’d been doing the job longer than me, and on the street experience meant far more than a piece of paper. If he said we were staying in the bus, we were staying in the damn bus.
I sat back and watched the city fly by as perhaps, inevitably, the nature of the call took me back to the last violent incident we’d attended a few weeks before. My bruises had faded, but in that time not a trace had been found of the fugitive husband or his missing daughter. Even the news channels had forgotten them. In a few more weeks I probably would too, but as we drove across town to our job, the memory of the battered woman remained on my mind. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing another one.
We pulled up at the scene, and despite our skepticism, the police were already there. An officer met us at the park gates and led us through the small crowd of people gathered around a crumpled body on the ground. I reached the victim first and crouched down. Closer inspection revealed the body to be that of a teenaged boy. He was young, probably no more than fifteen, and he looked like he was one of the street kids who slept under the bridge in the area. I stabilized the boy’s neck before turning his head away from the concrete and starting from the top, as Mick surveyed our surroundings and spoke with the police. A wave of shock washed over me as I took in the kid’s face. He’d been smacked against the ground over and over until his features were battered beyond recognition.
Damn.
I felt sick to my stomach. Even after five years on the job, the brutality of what one human being could do to another still got to me. With a heavy heart, I checked the boy’s airway, neck, and chest, and quickly concluded he was in serious trouble. He undoubtedly had broken ribs and had probably punctured his lung. With a weak and fading pulse, he was clinging to life by a thread, and he wasn’t going to make it if we didn’t move fast.
Mick dropped to the ground on the other side of the boy. I expected him to nod and radio the call in. He didn’t. Instead, he held my gaze and shook his head. “I’ve got this, Pete,” he said quietly.
“What?”
Silently, he eased the kid’s back off the ground and the nausea already brewing in the pit of my stomach took on a new intensity. The boy was lying in a pool of blood stemming from where his trousers were shoved down to his knees. I swallowed and turned away, knowing without looking any closer that he’d been violently raped and brutalized in the worst possible way.
“Pete, I’ve got this,” Mick said again. He told me to go back to the bus and fetch some equipment he didn’t need, and I couldn’t get away fast enough.
Every paramedic had something: an Achilles heel they couldn’t see past. Kids. Burns. Suicide. Mick couldn’t deal with dead babies, those heartbreaking calls to an infant that had inexplicably died in its sleep. He couldn’t even look at them, much less put his hands on them. For me, it had always been rape. Man. Woman. Child. It didn’t matter; I’d seen them all. From the very first time I’d scooped a broken woman from a city alleyway, it had always torn me up. It hadn’t got better as the years had gone by, and my relationship with Ash had made it worse.
He was just twenty when I met him, but before that, he’d lived a whole life I knew very little about. His teenage mother died when he was a kid, and he lived in foster care and group homes before he finally ended up on the streets. I wasn’t an idiot; I knew something had happened to him. There was no other explanation for the way sex and physical contact could be so difficult for him. What I didn’t know was who, what, where, or even when.
Sometimes it hurt that he didn’t trust me enough to tell me, but when I saw the broken body of a young boy, I was… relieved that he hadn’t? Grateful? Shit, I didn’t even know, but there was no escaping the fact that when I looked at someone who’d been hurt in the worst way, I always saw something I recognized: fear, shame, and other emotions I couldn’t name. They were familiar, too familiar, and as hard as I tried, I couldn’t look at the kid on the ground without seeing Ash’s face.
It took me a few minutes to compose myself. I took a deep, reluctant breath, grabbed some random packs from the bus, and headed back to the scene. Thankfully, Mick was pretty much done, and the boy was loaded and ready to move.
I drove to the hospital while Mick stayed in the back with an uncomfortable-looking beat officer. I hit the lights and wove my way through the city traffic as quickly as I could. For a few minutes, not mowing someone down required my total concentration, but all too soon the hospital appeared in front of us and it was time to leave the boy to his fate.
In my heart, I knew it was bad, and I couldn’t shake the heavy sense of guilt as we left him there on his own. If he really was the street kid we believed him to be, nobody was going to miss him.
LATER that night, we brought another patient to the hospital, and one of the nurses told us the kid had died. Our suspicions about internal bleeding had been tragically accurate. Every major organ had been kicked beyond repair, and he’d never had any hope of survival. He died half an hour after we left him without ever opening his eyes again.
We gave our statements to the police and left it in their hands. Our job was over, but theirs was just beginning. Next of kin, postmortems, forensics. They reckoned the kid had been abducted and tortured before he was dumped in the park to die, so for them, the investigation was going to be seven shades of horrific. The whole thing sickened me, and the more I heard, the worse I felt. I just wanted to go home, but because Mick had taken the job alone and spared me an ordeal I couldn’t handle, I sent him home early and cleaned up the bus by myself.
We’d had a busy night, and it was just after five when I left the firehouse and headed for home. I stepped out into the night. The cold air did nothing to clear my head. The kid’s fate weighed heavily on my mind and took me to some really dark places. I walked home, considering that maybe dying from his injuries was for the best. At least that way he’d never have to live with what happened to him; he’d never have to rebuild his life around the night he’d been brutalized in the worst possible way. I couldn’t see a way past it. How did someone come back from that?
I turned it over and over in my mind, but as I reached my building, I gave myself a mental kick. Thinking like that was just twisted. However bad life was, it was almost always worth living, and I was in the wrong job if I believed any different. Shit, everything in my life was wrong if I truly believed the kid in the park was better off dead.
The thought made me shudder as I slid the front door shut behind me. I leaned my head against it, closed my eyes, and toed off my shoes. A hot shower was calling to me, but before I did anything, I knew I was going to walk through the apartment and check on Ash. Pathetic or not, I needed to know he was safe.
“Hey.”
I jumped a mile at the sound of his voice. I opened my eyes, and he was standing right in front of me. For some reason, seeing him relaxed and safe wasn’t as relieving as it should have been. It was six in the morning, and he was supposed to be asleep in our bed. “What are you doing up?”
The aggression in my voice hurt my ears. Ash frowned as my harsh question took him by surprise. “I heard you come in,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
I pushed past him into the kitchen and wrenched open the fridge. “Where did the milk go?”
“We ran out?”
The uncertainty and confusion in his voice irritated me. I shut the fridge with a bang and straightened up, knowing I had to get him out of my face. I didn’t want any damn milk, but my bad mood was flowing out of me before I could stop it. He needed to go away before I pissed him off enough to retaliate. “You should go to bed.”
Ash crossed his arms over his bare chest. “So should you,” he countered. “Are you okay?”
For a split second, I considered explaining the horror show that had made my night so bad, but with his soft, dazed eyes holding mine, I just couldn’t do it. He didn’t need to know… and I didn’t want him to know. In the half-light of the early morning, the lines between my job and my love for him were too blurred. I needed him to go back to bed, where I knew he was safe.
“I’m going to grab a shower,” I said flatly. “I’ll see you later.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A WEEK or so later, I finished a double shift six hours early. A couple of guys wanted some overtime, and I was all too willing to cut loose in time to hit a bar with Mick. I probably should’ve gone home. It had been eight long days since I’d come home from the shift from hell and taken it out on Ash—we’d hardly exchanged a few words since. The atmosphere between us took me way back to the days just after he’d moved into my place. He was my lodger back then, not my lover, but the way we were skirting round each other now didn’t seem all that different. I missed him, but I couldn’t say I blamed him. I’d rejected him, and I’d let the situation deteriorate to the point where we were passing each other on the stairs without exchanging more than a grunt or two.
It sucked, big-time. I knew Ash. If I’d had the balls to deal with it right away, he would’ve put his arms around me and instantly forgotten every harsh word I’d ever said to him. But it was too late; I’d let it fester, and for someone with a mind like his, there was nothing worse. He would have spent the whole week telling himself it was all his fault. Knowing I’d let him made me feel like a real jackass, and the longer it went on, the more I felt like I’d done something I couldn’t fix. I was a stubborn asshole when I was in a funk, and in turn, Ash was like a ghost. Not a good combination when things were strained.
“Cheer up,” Mick said a few hours later. He slid back into his seat, placing a beer and a second shot of bourbon in front of me. “Are you missing your beauty sleep?”
I shook my head and reached for the bottle. “No, it just feels weird to be chilling when we should be working.”
He grinned, “Don’t get used to it. We’ll be back out there again tomorrow.”
I threw back the shot and swallowed with a rueful shake of my head. “Don’t give me any more of those, then.”
“Deal.” Mick downed his own shot. “I’ve got to split soon, anyway. Kate’s pissed at me because I was supposed to fix the garage door and she caught me snoozing in the car.”
I laughed as the booze began to loosen me up. “What were you doing in the car?”
Mick shrugged, “I don’t know, probably looking for some crap Janie lost. I swear I just closed my eyes for a second. Next thing I knew, it was six o’clock and Kate was standing there pissed as hell. Surprised she didn’t make me stay there.”
I laughed again, louder this time. Mick was notorious for dozing off in random places around his house. It wasn’t unheard for Kate to dump cold water on him to wake him up. There were more heinous crimes he could commit, though. If that was the worst he’d done, she should’ve considered herself lucky.
“So,” Mick said, eyeing me with a speculative smirk. “What’s been eating you this week? You’ve been all broody and shit. Have you been giving Ash a hard time too?”
I took a swig of my beer. “Just being a dick,” I said. “You know how it is.”
I didn’t need to explain. He was familiar with the bullshit of taking the job home, and he knew me well enough to know the murdered kid in the park was probably still playing on my mind.
“You’re an asshole,” he agreed. “But ignoring that won’t fix it. Just man up and apologize.”
I flipped him off. I didn’t talk to him about Ash much, but we’d worked together a long time and he knew my bad habits. Besides, though he was yanking my chain, it wasn’t his nature to let something slide when he had an opinion. Behind the grin, the old jerk was giving me a pearl of his wisdom.
Mick shrugged again when I failed to take his bait, his amusement clear in his eyes. “Fair enough, but if you’re in the doghouse too, all the more reason to drink up and go home, right?”
