Crash Lights and Sirens, Book 1 (16 page)

“Storm rolling in,” Lynette points out as they’re changing, nodding at the darkened windows. Sure enough, when Taryn peers into the gloom she can just make out a thick sheet of snowflakes.

“Ed’s picking me up,” Doc murmurs, opening her locker door to hide her and Taryn from the rest of the room. She’s been watching Taryn carefully all shift, bringing her coffee without asking. She’s a better friend than Taryn deserves. “I can make him drive you too,” she adds now, dropping a giant circle scarf over her head. “S’no problem.”

Taryn laughs bitterly, scrubbing at her eyes. “Sure,
you
say that.” Then, when she sees Emily’s stricken face, “Kidding. Sorry. I’m sure he would, I’m just in a mood.” She pulls up her jeans roughly, angry at herself. She feels bruised all over, but lashing out at Doc is like kicking a puppy. “I’ve got my car anyway. You go ahead.”

Emily wrinkles her nose, waving away the apology with a magnanimous flick of her wrist. She squeezes Taryn’s elbow as a goodbye. As soon as she’s gone it’s like a switch has flicked, the exhaustion descending full force. Taryn can barely even pull on her socks.

So.

The on-call room smells like dust and sour sleep. Taryn wakes up once to nothing and once to Nick sitting on the end of the tiny hospital-issue bed, the lights all blue and low and someone else snoring over by the door. For a minute she’s not sure whether or not he’s real, Clara spying Uncle Drosselmeyer on top of the grandfather clock.

“Hey,” Nick whispers, and it’s his voice that finally convinces her. He’s wearing his jacket, cold air hanging off him like maybe he’s been outside and came back. “You want me to drive you home?”

Taryn shakes her head silently. She’s off tomorrow, and Jesse needs the car.

“Okay.” Nick smooths the ratty blanket around her knee for a minute, his body a big, solid shape in the dark. “Don’t spook, okay?” he says finally. “I know it’s a lot at once, with Maddie and my sisters, but just—don’t spook.”

Taryn thinks about explaining about Jesse and the car, how Freud was wrong and sometimes a ride is just a ride. In the end, it feels like too much effort. “Okay,” she promises instead. Her mouth tastes like cotton. “I won’t.”

And she doesn’t. She drives home in the morning and sees the kids off to school, then takes the bus over to Nick’s for that minestrone soup, lets him lay her out across the four-poster and examine every inch of her body, scars and tattoo and all. She doesn’t spook the next day at work when he buys her lunch, or the day after that when they hold hands on a walk with Atlas, or that weekend when they go for a beer at Old Court after shift. They don’t talk about what they’re doing or mention anything else about their respective families, but on Sunday night they make dinner together and fall asleep without having sex.

And—miracle of miracles—Taryn doesn’t spook after that either.

Three weeks later, Jesse calls her at work: “Tare, we got another notice.” Taryn doesn’t have to ask what kind of notice he means. It’s March now, and they’ve missed three whole mortgage payments.

“Okay,” she says, tucking some hair that’s fallen loose from her ponytail back behind her ear. She and Nick are headed back from a transport to Fairview, a guy who slipped off a ladder chipping ice out of his gutters and broke both legs plus his collarbone. She glances at Nick’s profile out of the corner of her eye. “I’ll look at it when I get home, yeah?”

“Yeah. I don’t think they’re fucking around this time.” He sounds uncharacteristically worried in a way that reminds her of back when they were little. As a kid, Jesse was so scared of the dark that he slept on the floor of her bedroom until he was nine. “Did you send them the thing?”

Taryn keeps her gaze resolutely out the windshield. Jesse means the hardship letter, which she broke down and wrote a couple of weeks ago when it became super apparent that Rosemary had no intention of doing it herself. Taryn wasn’t sure how effective it would be, since
my mom doesn’t work ’cause she’s too busy boozing
isn’t exactly the kind of information that warms the cockles of a loan officer’s heart. She talked about the kids instead, plus working as a paramedic and a line about how long the house has been in their family. If they got another notice, she guesses there’s her answer as to how compelling it was—not very. “I sent it,” she says quietly. “What’s the new one say?”

“It’s like, titled ‘Breach Letter’? It says the terms of the mortgage have been violated, and we have thirty days to get current or they start foreclosure proceedings,” Jesse says flatly. She can hear the ancient TV squawking in the background, the chung-chung of a
Law & Order
rerun. “Foreclosure as in taking the house, Tare. And it says they’ll only accept the full amount now, late fees plus the three months’ worth. Fuck, what in the hell are we gonna do with the kids if—”

“I’ll take care of it,” she interrupts before he can finish the question—the anxiety’s already roiling up in her stomach, and she can’t think like that or she’ll panic completely right here in the front of the ambo. Already she’s counting the days until her next paycheck—the money Jesse came up with was gone to gas and groceries and the stupid furnace in what felt like thirty seconds. He’s passed her the odd fistful of crumpled bills since then, but never more than a hundred at a time. “Relax. I’m at work though. I gotta go.”
 

Nick doesn’t say anything for a long time once she hangs up her cell phone, just making the last turn toward the Barn in silence like maybe it never rang at all. Still, Taryn can feel his mind working, and eventually the axe falls. “Everything okay?” he asks her, his own gaze on the road and steady.

God, for one crazy second she almost just blurts it, just lays it all out there for him to have a good, long look at: her mom and the kids and their goddamn falling-down triple-decker prison, that she’s stumbling along with a hundred and four dollars in her bank account until payday and no real plan to speak of. For a second she almost thinks he’s the kind of person she could tell. But then Taryn remembers the look on Pete’s face when he found out the full-on, white-trash truth about her, the panic and the pity, and—yeah. She’s learned her lesson about that. Whatever this thing is with Nick, it’s a bright spot. She’s not going to fuck it up by letting the outside in. “Yup,” she says cheerfully, as they turn into the parking lot. “Everything’s good.”

Nick glances over at her, eyebrows drawn together. “Okay.” He doesn’t believe her at all, Taryn knows—she’s never known anyone she has so consistently failed to bluff—but she’s also equally confident he won’t follow up. It’s why they’ve worked so far.

“Okay,” she repeats firmly, pushing aside her dread for a minute and giving him a smile. It starts out forced and slips sideways into genuine, how much she plain likes looking at his face. After a beat, Nick shakes his head, smiling back.

It’s only half a lie, Taryn rationalizes to herself as they troop inside the steamy main station. Everything is good, at least when it comes to her and Nick. It’s been over a month since they started fooling around, late nights and early mornings back at his place, long walks with Atlas through the woods. Taryn has stopped feeling so directly freaked out by the fact of Maddie, although she still avoids looking at the fridge. She can’t compete with memories and she wouldn’t want to try, but she’s pretty sure she’s doing okay against all living competition—twice now Nick’s made her custom-order sandwiches at four in the morning, all this weird behavior that may or may not be doting. Last week she got her period, and instead of calling the night off he put her flat on her back across his ottoman, warm shoulders pressing her legs apart.

“Stop,” Taryn gasped, pushing at him with an urgent foot. “I’m gonna be, like—”

“You stop,” Nick told her, hot mouth fused to her thighs. “Taryn, come on.” He rubbed a thumb across the pleat of her hip, splaying his hand out big and dark over her pale belly. “Let me.”

So she did.

The sex is all the time and everywhere, enough that Taryn would be embarrassed if they were playing for keeps. Since they’re just hanging out though, she figures the normal dating rules can go fuck themselves. It’s not like Nick’s going to plan a candlelit dinner for their one-month anniversary and then refuse to peel her fancy dress off because they need to “get to know each other better”.

Pete did that. At the time Taryn found it charming, his eager face suspended above the tablecloth while she selected a few sitcom-appropriate stories from when she was growing up. It made it worse, somehow, what happened later.

Just before they split off to go into the locker rooms, Nick slips his fingers into her belt loop and tugs hard, pulling her back flush against him in the empty cinderblock hallway. Taryn laughs out loud.

Chapter Ten

On Sunday Ioanna makes a roast and leaves a message on Nick’s voicemail that’s not so much invitation as blatant demand. “The kids miss you,” she throws in at the end there, which isn’t even true since he just saw them at the diner the other day on their way home from school, but it works just the same. Nick picks up a bottle of wine and heads over around sundown, promises Atlas a doggy bag on his way out.

“Bring whoever you want,” is the other thing she said in the message, right before love you, see you later. “I’m saying. If there’s anyone in particular you want to bring.”

Ioanna’s house is comfortably lived in, the kids’ drawings papering the kitchen cabinets and a mess of pint-sized coats and boots piled up in the foyer. Erica, who’s nine, answers the door. “Stevie is making me insane,” she announces, all dark hair and drama. Just since last week it looks like her face has changed again, more grown up every single time he sees her. Nick swings her upside down over his shoulder, carries her inside.

Alexandra’s at the stove boiling potatoes to mash, her husband Bill watching CNN in the family room. Through the kitchen window he can see Stevie and Io’s husband Joe playing catch under the floodlight out in the yard—running off whatever energy Erica was finding so offensive, most likely. “Taryn didn’t come?” Alexandra asks when she sees him. “Io said you were bringing Taryn.”

“I said he might bring Taryn!” Io protests, up on her tiptoes with her head buried in a cabinet. She pops back down and hands Erica a stack of dinner plates, sends her out into the dining room to set the table. “Not that you definitely were.”

Nick snorts. “Io’s full of it,” he says. Taryn and Alexandra have run into each other once more since the day at the restaurant, one afternoon when his sister stopped by with a lasagna like she continues to harbor grave and lingering concerns about his ability to feed himself in any sort of meaningful way. Five minutes earlier, she would have caught them in the shower. Nick’s pretty sure their wet hair and guilty schoolkid faces gave them away regardless.

Now Alexandra lifts the pot off the stove and drains the potatoes in a colander, a cloud of steam rising around her face. “I don’t see why you wouldn’t bring her,” she says in a voice like she’d certainly be willing to guess. “You’d think you’d want the person you’re seeing to get to know your family, wouldn’t you? Unless there was some reason—”

“Hey!” Ioanna says brightly. “We don’t need to do this in my kitchen right this second, do we? Niko, you want a beer?”

Nick scrubs a hand through the hair at the back of his neck. “Sure,” he says after a moment, wishing for all the world that he’d begged off and stayed home. He gets that his sisters are trying to look out for him. And maybe if Taryn were somebody different, the book club woman or anyone else they’ve set him up with, he would have invited her along tonight—it does feel serious to him, fuck, her smile and her bossiness and the way she tucks herself up underneath his arm when they’re walking the dog—even if all indications point to the fact that it’s probably not going to last. And if he can feel himself starting to care about her in a specific sort of way, an unfamiliar ache back behind his rib cage, well. That’s…what it is.

He escapes to the family room with one of Joe’s prized craft beers, sinking into the ancient armchair with relief. Alexandra’s husband Bill gives him a sympathetic look over top of his wire-frame glasses, turning the volume down on CNN a couple bumps. Bill and Alexandra got married in their early twenties, dating for a long while first, so Nick’s known the guy since before he hit puberty. Bill was the one pulling Nick out of bars during the final stages of the Huntington’s, unexpected strength in his soft, professorial frame. “After,” he told Nick at the time, cupping his cheek. “Okay, kid? You can fall apart after.”

“It’s just because she’s so different from Maddie,” Bill’s saying now, quietly. On screen, a smiling family of four is trying to sell them a Mazda. “That’s why Alexandra is being so…Alexandra.”

Nick sighs, taking a pull off his beer. “Would it be better if I were dating a carbon copy?” he asks, leaning back and putting an ankle up on his knee. He’s thinking not—not a single one of the women Io’s selected for him so far have even come close, all noticeably fair haired, all noticeably not Greek. Alexandra loved Maddie like her own heart, and Nick bets she’d have a shit fit if he ever came home with a doppelganger. “Because somehow I doubt it.”

Bill nods slowly. “All right,” he says, muting a Swiffer jingle as Stevie and Joe troop in from the backyard. “Then it’s because she’s not Maddie, maybe. I’m not saying it’s fair. But just cut her a break, okay?”

Nick doesn’t have time to answer before Stevie launches himself in for a hug, baseball glove and all. Nick picks him up so he doesn’t track slush across the carpet. “Hey, kiddo,” he says, heaving them both out of the armchair and nodding a hello at Joe. “Your sister says you’re being a pill.”