Crash Lights and Sirens, Book 1 (19 page)

Nick feels his own heartbeat speed up. He’s not much for jealousy—he tried not to even let himself think about her last year after the fire, how it didn’t feel worth it to torture himself any more than was absolutely necessary—but.

But.

Taryn goes quiet and tense in a way that reminds Nick of the deer he sees in the woods when he’s out with Atlas, all sharp chin and that animal wariness. Then she recovers. “I’m working right now,” she says with a shrug, the brush-off ruthless in its clean, deadly efficiency. “Sorry.”

Pete frowns, crossing his arms against the frosty wind. “It’ll take five minutes.” He looks from Taryn to Nick. “Look, you don’t mind if she comes with me for five minutes, do you?”

“Don’t talk to him,” Taryn snaps, and Nick’s not sure which one of them he’s addressing—he does mind, actually, but fuck if he’d ever articulate that particular objection out loud. They’re not even dating, for Christ’s sake. “Don’t ask his permission. If I wanted to talk, we’d be talking.” She shakes her head, stubborn. “We’d have talked.”

“Seriously?” The kid sounds hurt, face falling. Even Nick’s taken aback by her brusqueness. And he knew that about her, he guesses, that she’s the kind of person who decides something’s done and then it’s finished, but it’s different to see it happening. “We were going to move in together, and now you won’t even—I’m sorry, Tare, okay? I fucked things up with your family, I get that, but I was just—” He holds up his hands. “I said I’m sorry.”

Which—huh. Nick takes a couple steps back then, wanting to give them some room and wanting to know what the hell happened in exactly equal amounts, but Taryn shakes her head again to stop him. “It’s fine,” she says, shrugging, all this uncomfortable body language. Nick feels like he’s got gravel in his throat. “We’re going.”

Pete curls into himself like a defeated teenager, hands shoved in his armpits and his tall, rangy frame compressing awkwardly. It makes him look about as young as Falvey. Just for a second, Nick recognizes something there—someone else who’s been on the end of one of Taryn’s cold, emotionless gazes. Whatever else Nick may feel about this guy, there’s that. “Okay,” Pete is saying now. “I get it, I just—Tare, I know there are programs, and—”

Christ, it’s like shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Falvey wheels, sharp, furious face and white teeth lined up in her mouth like something set to bite. “Do not,” she says, low and deadly. “You were in our lives for two seconds, Pete. You know nothing.” Then she closes her fingers around Nick’s wrist and tugs, dragging him toward the bus with the strength of a person twice her size. Nick’s so surprised he allows it, letting himself be manhandled like a child.

He’s been the one driving all day, but when they get to the door Taryn hauls herself up into the rig without a single look back, adjusting the seat to her height in two firm jerks. Nick catches the door just before she slams it. “Give me a sec, okay?” he murmurs. He heads around back to finish loading the stretcher properly, fully aware of Pete’s eyes on him the whole time. When he finally closes the passenger door behind him, the cab is pin-drop silent for the second time today.

This time, Taryn doesn’t break the tension with a laugh.

She doesn’t say anything for forty-five minutes, in fact, straight through a false-alarm call they catch almost as soon as they pull out of Fairview, chest pains that end up being nothing more serious than heartburn. “Eat less,” Taryn tells the patient, curt enough that Nick worries they might have a complaint on their hands. “Maybe quit smoking.”

He’s painfully curious, of course, but the shut-down look on Falvey’s face coupled with how close to the edge he felt this morning is more than enough to sew his mouth closed. It’s only when Taryn pulls the bus into a Dunkin’ Donuts, on idle in the parking lot so they can both pee, that Nick ventures something non-work-related. “You okay?”

Falvey shakes her head, white underneath her freckles.

Nick tries again. “You want to talk about it?”

Another shake.

So. That’s that, he guesses.

But when he comes back after taking a leak, instead of pulling out into traffic Falvey turns the engine off entirely. “Look,” she says, tucking her cold hands between her thighs. “About earlier.”

Nick inhales. He wants like all hell to touch her, to curl his fingers around her skinny wrist or pull her into his lap, but he doesn’t want her to spook and change her mind. He settles for reaching out and sliding one hand behind her knee like that day at the diner, tugging until she’s facing him. “Yeah,” he says.

Taryn rolls her eyes at the gesture, but she doesn’t move. Nick keeps his hand right where it is. “I guess…” She trails off and tries again, sighing. “I guess I thought being with Pete was, like, a solution to something,” she says, looking hard at a spot in the neighborhood of his left shoulder. “But it wasn’t.”

Nick watches her, gauging. The bend of her knee is very warm. “A solution to what, exactly?” he asks.

Taryn shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she says, like no arguments. “That’s not the point.”

It’s exactly the point, how obsessive she is about not owing him anything, the way she still always waits for him outside her house.
There are programs
, Pete said. A picture is starting to firm up in Nick’s mind, but he’s not sure enough about it to push. “You love him?” he asks instead.

“Pete?” Taryn shrugs. “I thought I did, maybe. Or that, like, eventually I could.” She pulls one booted foot up onto the seat, rests her sharp chin on her knee. “You think I’m terrible,” she says. “Look at you. You think I’m the worst person in the world.”

Nick shakes his head. “No, I don’t,” he says. “You don’t know what I think.”

“No?” Taryn sits back, raising her eyebrows. Out the window a woman holds the door to the coffee shop open, two little kids with pink-frosted doughnuts and big, sugary smiles darting underneath her arm. It’s staying lighter later into the afternoon these last few days. “What’s that?”

Nick hesitates.
I care about you
, he wants to tell her.
I think about you, you scare the shit out of me, you make me lighter than I’ve been since I can remember and I am always and perpetually waiting for the sound of the other shoe hitting the floor.

“I want to take you out,” is what he says.

For a second Falvey doesn’t say anything, like of all the responses she’d anticipated, that wasn’t one of them. Then she looks him in the eye for the first time since this morning. “Like—”

“For a burger, Falvey, I don’t know.” Nick huffs out a nervous laugh. He’s been thinking about it on and off for weeks, is the truth, an actual sit-down meal that doesn’t take place at his kitchen island. What he’d like is to take her out out—somewhere with a wine list, maybe, somewhere nice—but he gets the feeling she’d do a runner if he so much as suggested it. “First moves,” he supplies instead, like a challenge. He’s done playing it cool.

Taryn blinks. “Huh.” She flexes her knee, the muscles tightening around his crooked fingers in a move that may or may not be deliberate. “So like, I tell you what a horrible long-term girlfriend I am and your first impulse is to ask me on a date?”

“Pretty much,” he says eventually, shrugging. “Why, you don’t wanna go?”

Falvey frowns. “I didn’t say that,” she mutters, huffing like a teenager, and right then Nick knows he’s going to get his way. He forces himself not to react. They sit in silence for a moment longer, watching each other.

Falvey breaks first. “Okay,” she announces, rolling her eyes and turning the key in the ignition. “When?”

Chapter Twelve

Caitlin has had her head buried in a book for the better part of the evening, but when Taryn dumps the entire contents of their shared underwear drawer on the bed, she earmarks the page with a sigh. “Right,” she declares, rolling onto her stomach with purpose. “What are you looking for?”

Taryn almost runs a hand through her hair in frustration before remembering said hair is nicely styled, and also has about a gallon of product in it. “I don’t even know,” she admits. “Nylons? Are nylons a thing?”

Caitlin knocks her bare feet against the bottom of the Justin Bieber poster, making it rattle. “I dunno,” she says, chewing on her bottom lip. She had a shower right before Taryn did, and she’s still wrapped up in Rosemary’s old chenille bathrobe. “Why don’t you just go in tights?”

Taryn thinks about that for a second. “I could,” she allows. At the moment she’s tricked out in a full face of makeup and a ratty towel, her convertible bra nowhere to be found. Nick is due to arrive in thirty minutes. “Hang on, do either of us even own tights?”

“Probably not without holes in them,” Caitlin concedes. She peers at the pile of underwear on Taryn’s bed, sucking the water from a damp strand of her strawberry-blonde hair. “Maybe wear pants.”

Taryn nods. “Right.” In the end she settles for a pair of tight black jeans and a long, silky tank top, this little jacket she got on super sale at H&M the first time she met Pete’s parents. She looks in the sticker-covered mirror on the back of the door and frowns.

“You look pretty,” Caitlin promises, getting up and pulling her pajamas out of the bureau. When her back’s turned to change, Taryn can see each individual vertebra, the very last of her baby fat melting away. Caitlin will be twelve at the end of next month. “You really like this new guy, huh?” she continues once she’s back on the bed—moons and stars on her flannel pajama top, and just like that she’s a kid again. “Like. You never got this nervous when you were going out with Pete.”

“I’m not nervous,” Taryn says. Then she sits. “I do like him though.” It feels absurd to say, like letting it slip that she believes in Santa Claus. “Like. A lot.”

“Yeah?” Caitlin raises her eyebrows, all mischief. “Is he hot?”

Taryn snorts, throwing her pillow across the room. Feels herself blush. “Pretty much.”

Five minutes before he’s supposed to turn up she slides a pair of heels on and zips herself into her parka, kissing both little boys goodbye on the tops of their gingery heads before she heads outside to wait. Jesse’s working tonight, but Rosemary’s been on her best behavior for close to six weeks now, and even though Taryn knows that could change at any moment, she feels okay enough about the odds of it not happening tonight to leave them alone for a while. “My cell’s on,” she calls over her shoulder, Rosemary waving her out with her eyes on the Food Network. “Call if you need me for anything.”

The hot water heater crapped out earlier in the week, which basically guarantees they’re not going to be able to pay the full mortgage amount by the time thirty days runs out, but Taryn’s going to figure that out tomorrow. Even if she misses the deadline, it’s not like she and the kids are going to be marched out of the house at the stroke of midnight.

At least, she doesn’t think so.

Nick’s right on time, pulling up to the curb as she’s getting down there. “Hey, Falvey,” he says just like always, and she smiles. “You clean up nice.”

“Yeah, well.” He does too, is a fact: black V-neck sweater and a bulky brushed-silver watch on one wrist, the faint smell of some woodsy cologne. She wants to skip dinner altogether, to go back to his place so she can investigate more thoroughly. “You look like shit, so.”

Nick snorts. “Smartass.”

He takes her to the pub downstairs at the inn in Stockbridge, overstuffed couches and a chessboard set up in the lobby, fire crackling cheerfully down the far end of the room. Nick holds her hand all the way in from the car.

They hang up their coats and sit down, near enough to the fire that Taryn can feel the heat against her legs. There’s a band setting up on the tiny stage, something with a fiddle, and Taryn crosses her fingers that they’ll start into a set right away. A loud set.

“Nice choice,” she tells Nick, aiming for a smile that doesn’t feel horribly fixed.

The way he raises his eyebrows suggests she doesn’t succeed. “Yeah, okay,” he says, knocking his knee against hers under the booth. “Let’s get some alcohol in you.” Taryn kicks back.

It’s not that she isn’t glad to be here—it’s lovely, casual as she dared to hope for, cozy atmosphere and the low tin ceilings painted a dark red—it’s just that she’s petrified they’ll run out of conversation topics after five minutes. They haven’t exactly done a lot of date-worthy chitchat so far, her and Nick.

The drafts are listed on a chalkboard on the wall, but Taryn orders the cheapest wine off the menu instead, figuring it’ll calm her nerves faster. Nick orders a Guinness and some herbed cheese and crackers to start, and then they are officially
on a date
. Taryn wipes her clammy hands off against the plush bench seat, swallowing.

“So, is this gonna become a regular thing?” she asks, figuring she might as well bite the bullet. Half of her wine is gone, plus most of the crackers, and so far all they’ve talked about is work.

Nick raises his eyebrows. “Dunno, Falvey. Do you want it to become a regular thing?” Taryn’s about to chew him out for constantly turning questions back on her, when he continues, “Because we’ve been doing this for a while, and it still feels like you’re holding me at arm’s length.”

“What?” Taryn frowns, on the defensive right away. “That’s not fair. Come on, I told you I wasn’t, like—”

Nick shakes his head. “I’m not trying to marry you, Falvey,” he interrupts in a tone that stings, as if the notion is completely absurd to him. God, not that she wants—or that she even thought—ugh, she knew this dinner was a bad idea in the first place. Nick spreads some cheese on a cracker, nudging the last one in her direction. “I’m talking about trying to get one shred of information out of you that isn’t food or sex-related.”