Kiss Me Gone (12 page)

Mary smiled, seemed to stand taller, her confidence growing as the seconds ticked by.

"The station lost one of their members last winter." She walked past me to the kitchen table and Laurie's three tidy piles.

"Yes, Adam O'Rourke." With almost two weeks of exploring Dare's body, I had finally made it around to his back, surprised to find that he had added a tattoo since the photo shoot. He had selected a skull wearing a fireman's helmet with his stations designation. Below that, two names, Michael Burke and Adam O'Rourke, with the date each died.

"Another explosion," I added, suddenly seventeen and hearing all over again that my daddy -- my hero -- had died.

"Yes, but it wasn't some little old lady with oxygen tanks." Combining them into one stack, Mary placed Laurie's materials inside her folder. She put the two pages she had taken out earlier face down on the table. "A meth lab exploded."

The word "meth" jerked my attention away from Michael's death. It didn't seem possible that she could have found out, but there was no other point to her telling me about last year's tragedy.

"Needless to say, there's a certain sentiment around the station house about people affiliated with the drug. If any one of the firefighters were to somehow become linked to it, the entire station would turn against him."

I remained silent, the muscles of my stomach and chest tightening as she continued her soliloquy. Facing away from me, she reached one arm out, instinctively knowing that I looked at her. An imperial hand gesture ordered me to come closer.

Damning my compliant feet, I approached the table. Her hand coiled around my elbow to hold me in place. She flipped the first sheet over. A very unflattering picture of my one-time lover, Jason Bridge, appeared in the upper left corner. Beneath it his name, date of birth, race, gender and identifying physical marks. On the remaining two thirds of the page, the booking report from the last night I had lived in his house.

The police had kicked down his front door with a warrant for his arrest. Unknown to me, he had been cooking meth in a trailer on his mother's farm. I already knew he wanted to use my body to make money -- I still had the fresh bruise on my face that night from having refused his demands a few days before. The only reason I was in the house when the police busted in was because Jason wouldn't leave the house without locking me in the closet, my hands and legs bound and a dirty rag in my mouth. I had only been released from the closet half an hour before the warrant was served.

Even though I had spent even less time in Jason's apartment than I had in Dare's home, it seemed like I would never escape the past.

Knowing she no longer had to physically hold me captive, Mary released my arm and ran a finger down the page to a line she had highlighted in bright orange.

Civilians on scene: Eden Alexandra Abbey, 20-year-old white female.

"Do you really want my son in a burning building with a crew that thinks he would be better off dead than fucking a meth dealer's whore?"

I didn't answer, didn't know what I would say if my brain had been capable of speech at that moment. Even if her question was outrageous hyperbole, and I prayed that was the case, Dare's friends would turn their back on him in other ways. The entire time I knew him growing up, not once had he ever considered working as something other than a firefighter. It was clear from our last two weeks together that he was still the same brave little boy ready to run into an inferno and emerge a hero.

Hell, "Dare" wasn't even his legal name. Mary and Frank had named him "Daire," which sounded to my non-Irish ears like "dir-eh." His first grade teacher, every bit as Irish as Dare's parents had dropped the "i" after he jumped from the second story window of her classroom after another boy had dared him to fly like Superman.

Deep down, he would always be Daire "Daredevil" O'Donnell.

Mary flipped the second page. My name wasn't on this sheet, just a list of all the crimes for which Jason had been arrested. "Pimping and Pandering" was highlighted four times.

"Does Dare know you prostituted yourself?"

"I never--"

She broke into my denial with a bitter laugh. "Now you're lying to yourself. Even if you never spread your legs or opened your mouth for one of his customers, he didn't let you stay in his apartment for free. You fucked a pimp, dear girl. There's only one kind of woman who does that."

Opening her folder one last time, she put Jason's pages at the top of the pile. Tucking the file under her arm, she turned to me. Her gaze sparkled. Pure pleasure twisted her mouth. "I'm going to the station now. I understand there's an all hands situation they are dealing with. When he returns from the fire..."

She gave the folder a little jiggle, the gesture all she needed to finish her threat.

Bloody Mary brushed past me. Halfway to the entry closet where her coat hung, she started to hum, continuing the tune as put on her gloves. I faintly recognized it as the
Battle Hymn of the Republic
.

By the time she finished and was shrugging into her coat, she was halfway through repeating the first verse.

He is trampling out the vintage / where the grapes of wrath are stored...

More than trampled, I listened as she turned the deadbolt to leave, tears already tracking down my cheek. I stood there crying for a few more minutes, my legs unsteady and my body swaying, until, with a resigned sigh, I walked over to the side table where the day's mail waited. Surprised by Laurie's visit, I hadn't checked to see if the state had delivered my ID yet. Like flipping a coin, I decided if the ID wasn't in the pile, then I would wait and brave the possibility that the first word out of Dare's mouth when he returned from the fire would be "whore" or something equally hateful. If the mailman had delivered the ID, I would take it as the final sign needed that Mary Ivers was right and I had no place in Dare's life.

And it really would be the final sign, not the first. I knew Dare had turned down invitations to other get togethers with his friends. A party, an opening in a better bowling team than the one he currently played with, a billiards and then a dart tournament with his friends at one of the sports bars, and more.

He didn't tell me, I overheard. There were likely others that had come up on the days he had to go into the station. He wouldn't even let Cam, who had grown up in another state and wasn't dating anyone who hated me, into the house when the man stopped over. One-by-one, Dare was losing his friends without Mary revealing the meth connection.

Slowly I thumbed through the stack. Two flyers, a water bill, a credit card solicitation. Not seeing anything else, I closed my eyes and gave the flyers a quick shake just to be certain nothing was sticking within their folds. I heard the rustle of paper and then something hit the floor with a flat thunk.

Looking down, I saw the pre-printed envelope, my name and Dare's address through the clear window. I picked it up, my thumb smoothing across the surface until I felt the plastic rectangle contained inside. I slid a finger beneath the back flap, felt the thin paper slice at my skin and barked a laugh. It wasn't enough that the world wanted me out of Dare's life, it had to make me bleed first.

Sucking at the paper cut, I unfolded the sheet to which my ID card was glued. The girl in the picture smiled. She smiled because Dare had crouched down below the camera despite the clerk's protests and wagged his eyebrows at me. She smiled because her body was deliciously spent from a night in bed with the man making her laugh.

She smiled because she was in love.

With fresh tears wetting my cheeks, I walked into the bedroom I had been sharing with Dare and gathered up the few things I could call my own.

Eden -- more than three years later

Approaching the ambulance that had become my second home since I received my EMT certification, I handed a tall breve latte and a slice of banana bread wrapped in paper through the ambulance's driver-side window.

Smiling, my partner, Felix Hernandez, threw a wink that would have been sexy if I didn't already know that he had a voracious appetite for cock. "Thank you, chica."

"Thank you," I countered before crossing in front of the vehicle with my own cup and morning treat to claim the other seat. "It was sweet of you to pay for everything."

"It's your two-year anniversary on the job, what was I supposed to do?"

I chuckled and shook my head. "Uhm...go inside and do the ordering instead of handing me a twenty and telling me to get something for myself, too."

"You know the rules."

"Right," I nodded. "Newbie always grabs the coffee for the senior team members, even if said newbie's last job was President of the United States. And under no circumstances will anyone with less than five years on the job be designated as a non-newbie."

This had become the rule for our team six months earlier when Felix had marked his fifth anniversary as an EMT.

"You're finally learning." Extending an open palm, he tapped the pads of his fingers against the fleshy surface several times. "Where's the change, Bae?"

"You do know 'Bae' means 'excrement' in German, right?" I asked, digging into my breast pocket for the ten left over after paying for the coffee and slices of banana bread. If Felix was going to have a nickname for me, I wanted one that didn't make my stomach churn every time I heard it. Even "Ed" was better than "Bae."

He took a sip of his breve latte, a small dot of cream lingering on his mustache as he finished and flashed a smile at me. "Are we in Germany, Bae?"

"Negative," I answered, already surmising that my latest renaming attempt hovered on the brink of failure.

"Are we speaking German?" he continued, his thick brown eyebrows dancing. "Because all I heard on the last sound check was English and a pinch of
Espanol
."

"Well..." I hesitated, trying to think of at least a few words we had spoken since starting our shift that would bolster my argument. Memory failed me so I lied through my teeth. "Several words can be traced back to Teutonic tribes, which--"

"Tribe Teu-whatsit?" He asked, charging forward as he always did before I had a chance to explain. "What the fuck are you talking about, chica?"

The often crude language was part and parcel of working an ambulance team with Felix. I had grown accustomed to his foul mouth, even took pleasure in his exaggerated delivery -- and it was always exaggerated.

Taking exception with anything he did was impossible. He had been my mentor from day one, was
muy guapo
despite his addiction to dick, and was a giant of a man who could dance around a multi-car pile up with all the grace of a prima ballerina.

And when it came to saving lives, he knew his shit better than anyone I'd met in the last two years.

Reclining my seat for a more comfortable defensive position, I took a sip of the dark roast coffee before elaborating on my logic. "A lot of German tribes migrated into England back in the Dark Ages. They displaced the Celts, fought the Romans..."

I stopped talking as Felix reached for my slice of banana bread. Laughing, I slapped at his hand. "Hey, what's the deal? No take backs!"

He managed to steal a thick pinch and pop it into his mouth. He swallowed, took another sip of his coffee and answered. "Anniversary Girl doesn't need any cake. She needs to get laid and stop spending so much time cuddling up with her college textbooks."

Finding his logic far and away superior to mine, I handed over the rest of my banana bread. I hadn't had sex in three and a half years, not since the night before I left Hagersburg -- the last night I had spent in Dare's bed and in his arms. Things were starting to get cobwebby between my legs. And I focused every spare dollar and minute I had in finishing up my two-year degree.

"I don't have time for men," I lied, pulling the seatbelt across my lap as the dispatcher called our unit number. "And books are a hell of a lot less complicated than men."

"ALS 536 ready for instructions," Felix responded to home base. Taking his finger off the call button, he shot a smile in my direction. "Have it your way, Anniversary Girl. That just means more cake and cock for me."

The location coming over the line erased his grin. A vehicle had collided with a pedestrian at the base of the Sky Island Scenic Byway.

About fifteen minutes away from our location on the northeast side of Tucson, the area was a favorite spot for tourists to hike and run. Locals avoided it like the plague, especially during sunrise and sunset when the scenery proved distracting to even the most conscientious drivers.

In the two years since I'd been hired on as an EMT, our unit had been dispatched to the site half a dozen times. Twice the responding cops should have called for a coroner's van and saved us the trip.

I hit the sirens as Felix threw the vehicle in reverse and backed from the parking spot. Reaching for my clipboard, I silently prayed that this time we would arrive and only need to swab a few scratches or ice a jogger's ankle.

As with every other prayer I had made since I turned seventeen, God wasn't listening.

Dare
-- a few hours earlier

I opened my eyes to a tight ass hugged by yoga pants as Laurie Quade bent to tie her running shoes. Reaching out, I slid my hand between the gap in her thighs. She tensed in a way that made me think she had expected my touch, was in fact posed there with the hope that I would wake before she left on her morning run.

We were on our fourth day in Tucson, with three days remaining before we returned to Hagersburg. In between her running and our fucking, we had visited one gallery, a mall, several boutiques and eaten twice our fill of the local southwestern cuisine.

A couple's spa was scheduled for the afternoon. I hoped a blowjob would follow, or maybe I would get really lucky and blowjobs would bookend the spa trip.

She smiled at me over her shoulder. "Morning, sleepy head."

Lifting my brows, I forced a matching smile onto my face. When she had her back to me or her mouth around my cock, I could pretend she was someone else -- a specific someone else. The curve at the small of her back, the arch of her shoulders, and the strong thighs could have made her a twin to Eden.

But, as beautiful as she was, Laurie's face would never fool me for one second into thinking it was Eden by my side.

"Morning, Angel," I answered after realizing I had remained silent. My response came too late. The blue eyes darkened, the sudden shine in their depths undoubtedly the threat of tears.

I rubbed at her leg in apology. "You want me to come with?"

As in shape as she was, her runs were more like my power walks and I only offered to go with her when I wanted to make up for being an asshole. In my defense, she had gladly put up with me being an asshole for the last three years, ever since the day I gave up on Eden coming back into my life and asked Laurie out on our first date.

She shook her head.

"Are you sure?" I didn't really want to convince her to change her mind, but the gesture was expected. Same as I expected her to sweep aside my offer with a reason that it was perfectly acceptable for me to stay in bed and let her run alone.

"The shuttle is leaving in a few minutes." She reached for the room's keycard and tucked it into what passed for a pocket in women's yoga pants. "A bunch of us are going up to what they call Sky Island Highway...or maybe it's Sky Island Byway."

She laughed, her generous nature making it impossible for her to remain upset for very long. "Anyway, it's supposed to be all blue sky dotted by the occasional tree or rocky pinnacle that look like they are floating on the ocean. Sky Island -- get it?"

Pausing, she blushed then licked at her full lips. The gloss created by her tongue reminded me of my plans for our afternoon. Wrapping both hands around her hips, I tugged her onto the bed and kissed along the side of her stomach. "You could skip the run."

"You're incorrigible," she squealed and pushed at my shoulder. "And one of the guests is expecting me to run with her since her husband canceled in favor of an early tee time on the golf course."

Her tongue stuck on "husband." The way the word tangled in her mouth provoked Laurie into poking one tailored fingernail at the flesh of my arm. I saw a flash of light from the diamond engagement ring I had put on her hand less than six months before, my proposal coming at the end of a very romantic New Year's Eve dinner in New York City.

She leaned forward, planted a firm kiss on my lips then bounced up and toward the door of our hotel room. "I'll be gone about ninety minutes because of the shuttle's schedule and the time to drive there and back. We start higher up and run down, or else I would be ruined for the rest of the day."

"I'll be here," I assured her. "Waiting for my angel to fly home."

She blew a kiss in my direction as the door swung shut. I drew the sheet up to cover my face but the gauzy white material didn't stand a chance of blocking the light entering through the room's balcony window. A few minutes passed with me trying and failing to fall back asleep despite the overdose of sunshine and then I kicked the sheet away.

Looking at the clock, I measured off when my ninety minutes of freedom would end before heading into the bathroom for a quick piss. With my bladder drained and a swish of mouthwash making my lips tingle, I returned to the bedroom, reached into my backpack and pulled out my laptop. The log-in popped up and I entered my password. The first thing I checked online was my email.

Three messages from Cam Stevens waited at the top of my inbox. Each contained the word "venue" in their title. Venue 1, Venue 2, Venue 3. The man was consistent, not creative.

My phone vibrated on the nightstand next to me before I could open the first email. I looked at the screen to see I had an incoming text from my mother. With a shake of my head, I ignored the phone and opened the first of Cam's emails -- Venue 1. A very large pair of breasts appeared onscreen. I deleted the email and went to the next one.

Same tits, same sarcastic co-worker.

I hit the delete key again and then again for his final email without even opening it. With my twenty-eighth birthday little more than a week away, I had tasked Cam with securing dinner reservations for a gathering of family and friends. That it was my birthday was a cover for the real reason I wanted everyone together.

Laurie and I were going to set a date for our wedding.

At least that had been my plan when we left Hagersburg for Tucson. The week away from everyone wondering when we were going to tie the knot was intended to solidify our engagement. Not that Laurie had any lingering doubt that she was ready for the big commit.

With the air conditioning unit in the room on at full blast, I had been cold when I turned on the computer. Thinking about marriage made me sweat.

My fingers tapped indecisively along the keyboard without actually pressing a key. Using the touchpad, I moved the cursor to the lower right corner of the screen. The background was black -- so was the icon hiding in plain site. I double clicked and a screen prompted me for a password. I stabbed a string of keys in response.

K/55M3G0N3

Three years worth of files began opening. The secure folder contained everything I knew about Eden Abbey, every last lead I had tried running down until I stopped a little after Halloween and promised myself I would never look again. For six months, I kept my word. I flew Laurie to New York City, got down on one knee, and did everything right on the surface.

My index finger surfed along the touchpad, up to the folder's left corner. I clicked "select all" then hesitated. One more click and I could delete Eden from my life. I could try to be the husband Laurie deserved. I could work on giving my mother the grandchildren she'd been whining for the last two years.

One click and it was over.

Hitting escape, I left the files intact for the moment and opened my web browser. Before I clicked delete on the folder, I would do one last search, the attempt an open question to the universe.

Laurie or Eden? The woman whose heart I held in my hands versus the woman who had broken my heart.

Three and a half years had passed since I had arrived home after an all hands call to find Eden gone. It had taken half an hour to locate her note and five seconds to read it. She left it in the canister with the grocery money, not so much as a penny missing despite my expectations otherwise.

Forget me, even though I will never forget you.

Eden

Sitting on the hotel bed in Tucson, I sucked in a ragged, acid-filled breath and then began typing search term after search term. When words produced no results, I dragged the few photos I had of Eden into the query field just as I had done in the years before Eden's brief return to Hagersburg. Like every search before it, nothing to do with my Eden appeared.

I had my answer. It was time to move forward. Time to forget as she had instructed me to do three and a half years before.

With thirty minutes to spare before Laurie's return, I deleted the secret folder on my computer and cleared my web history twice. I tucked the laptop back into the bag and answered my mother's text as I headed into the bathroom to grab a quick shower.

For weeks, I had kept Laurie in the dark, but my nagging mother knew what the trip to Tucson was meant to accomplish. Now she wanted to know if I was done fence sitting.

I mashed my thumb against the screen, sending a reply.

Re-proposing tonight. We'll announce date at my birthday dinner. Love u.

Yep -- I was about to "make an honest woman" of Laurie Quade.

And a thoroughly dishonest man out of myself.