Page 10 of Spellbound By the Firefighter

I look.

“I’m still here.”

The gray light’s full on his face. He fills the doorway I’m holding open for him and makes no move to walk out of it.

“Please.” It’s barely a word left in my mouth. “Go.”

He doesn’t go.

6

TANNER

She’s holding the door open for me to leave, shaking so hard I can see it move the lace at her throat, and I’ve never in my life been more certain of staying.

“Please,” she says again. “Go.”

I look at her hand, white-knuckled on the door. I look at the gray coming up hard on Prospect behind her, the town taking its normal back after a night it spent scared. Then I do the last thing she’s braced for.

I reach past her and push the door shut.

The cold cuts off. The deadbolt’s still open where she left it hours ago, and I don’t touch it. I don’t need it locked. I need her to understand I’m not walking through it, and a shut door says that plainer than words.

“Tanner—”

“I heard you.” I step back to give her the room she’s fighting for, both hands open at my sides. “Every word. You want me gone before full light, no hard feelings, one Halloween, doesn’t have to be a whole thing. I heard all of it.” I hold her eyes. “Now you hear me, and then if you still want me gone, I’ll walk through that door without argument. Deal?”

Her jaw works. She doesn’t say yes. She doesn’t say no. She stands there sealed to the chin in black with the whole morning shaking through her, and she doesn’t tell me to stop. I’ll take it.

“Four years ago, a woman named Daisy packed a life out from under me over a long fire season,” I say. “I told you a piece of that already. Here’s the piece I left out. When she was gone, the thing I felt worst about was how little I felt. I stood in a half-empty apartment waiting for it to gut me, and it just…didn’t. Because I’d never once been all the way in it. I kept one boot on the mountain the whole time so she could never hurt me. And that was the tell. That’s not a thing to be proud of. That’s a man who arranged his whole life so no one could get too close.”

She’s watching me now. Not the window. Me.

“I’ve done that since I was old enough to pick a career built on leaving before anybody could leave me. Run at the fire. Stay on the edge of the crew where nobody misses you, nobody needs you there in the morning.” My voice catches on the word morning, and I let it. “You know that word too. Watched it take you apart an hour ago, the second it slipped out of you.”

“Don’t.” It comes out cracked.

“Somebody cleared out on you once in the night,” I say, gentle as I can. “Went to bed a person you loved, woke up a hole in the house. And you were a kid, and nobody warned you, and you decided right then that the only safe fear is the kind with a cover you can slam. I’m not guessing. You told me without telling me all night long.”

Her eyes fill with tears. But she still hasn’t reached for the bolt.

“So here’s mine, and I’m only going to lay it out once.” I take one step in. “I’ve never wanted the quiet life. Not the kitchen, not the person still there in the morning, not any of it—because wanting it meant it could walk, and I’d sooner face a burnover than stand in a doorway and find out if somebody stays.” I watch that sink in, because it’s the exact door we’re standing in. “And then I climbed off a mountain twelve days empty and walked into a bookstore for the sound of a story, and a woman looked up from a podium, and every drill I have fell straight out of my mind. First time in my life, the wanting showed up bigger than the fear of it. First time I’ve ever looked at the morning-after and thought let it come.”

“You don’t know me.” Her old line, thinner now, the last brick she’s got.

“I know you took over the scary section at nineteen. I know you run this shop like it belongs to you, and you’ve never brought a man back through those shelves. I know you dressed up in Victorian mourning clothes tonight and sealed yourself to the throat in buttons that don’t open, and I know why.” I let that sit. “I know you climbed into a chair by that window and couldn’t read a word, and watched a truck go by you couldn’t pick me out of, and hated every second of not knowing. Because I did the same thing coming down that mountain—drove the whole grade with one thought, and it wasn’t the fire. It was the lit window. It was getting back to you.”

A sound breaks out of her—half a sob—and her hand finally comes off the door. Not to open it. Just off it.

“You want to throw me out at dawn so nothing throws you out first. I get it, because it’s my move in a different coat. But look what you’d be doing.” I close the last of the space carefully, giving her every second to stop me. “You’d be the one who clears out in the night. You’d do to us the exact thing that got done to you, just to beat it to the punch. And I’m not going to let a scared seven-year-old at a cold breakfast table decide this for the both of us. Not when I’m standing right here, wide awake, choosing the morning.”

I lift my hands to her face. She lets me. The soot’s still ground into my palms, and I frame that pale sealed collar between them and tip her teary face up to mine.

“I’m not him,” I say. “I’m not going to be gone when you wake up. You want a real scare, Audriana? Here’s the worst one I’ve got. I’m going to be there at dawn. Every dawn you’ll have me. That’s the fear you don’t get to put back on the bookshelf.”

“You can’t promise that.” Her voice is so low, I can barely hear her. “Nobody warned me last time. That’s the whole—people don’t warn you.”

“I’m warning you.” I hold her eyes. “Right now, in advance, in the doorway, stone sober. I’m telling you before it starts, so it can never be the thing that happened to you in the dark. I want the quiet life. I want it with you. I want to be the person still here in the morning, and I’m telling you out loud so you can watch me not leave.” I drag my thumb down her cheek, through the tears, leaving the last clean line in the soot. “There. Now you’ve been warned. There’s no version of this where I sneak out.”