One Hot Summer (42 page)

“Chet, am I clear to go? Can Micah or my parents drive me to the hospital?”

Chet shook his head. “I'm not comfortable with that. I want to keep you on oxygen and an IV.”

“Let her go if she wants to go. That's what I've had to learn the hard way,” Micah bit out.

Tears dripped down her eyes. “I love you with all my heart,” she said.

He couldn't listen to that anymore. He couldn't listen to anything else except his instinct, and right now his instinct was telling him to let her go and leave good enough alone. “I've got to get out of here.”

“Hey!” Chet called to him. Micah turned around. “You're a fucking idiot,” Chet said.

He blinked at Chet, trying to think of something biting to say, something that would wound, but his brain had gone numb. Turning on his boot heel, he stalked to his truck.

Time to make his way to the hospital to check on June, instead of brooding about a relationship that was doomed from the get-go.

A hand pulled on his shoulder. Micah whirled, his fist up, ready to strike. “Not in the mood, Chet.”

It wasn't Chet but Xavier who faced him, his fists at the ready. “You can hit me if it makes you feel better, but you know I'd hit you back.”

All the steam leached out of Micah. Of all the people who could've shown up in that moment, Xavier was the only one with the power to talk him down off the ledge. He let Xavier pull him into a tight hug. “How'd you know to come here?”

“Alex called,” Xavier said, backing up to clasp both of Micah's shoulders. “In his first call he nearly gave me a heart attack when he told me you'd run into a burning building that hadn't been contained yet. I was already on my way when he called again to tell me that not only were you safe, but you'd saved Remedy and June.”

Micah huffed. “Then I'm guessing you watched that fight. She's leaving, you know. She got a job offer in L.A. It was the offer she'd been waiting for. She's outta here.”

“Sounded to me like you practically guaranteed that.”

Micah rolled his neck. “I don't need you to rag on me right now.”

“She's the best thing that ever happened to you.”

Like hell she was. “She brings out the worst in me.”

“Are you sure about that?”

Yes, he was sure. “She drives me to distraction; she compromises my professional integrity. Because of her, Ty threatened my job, my crew hates me, and I'm responsible for two major fires at the resort in the past month. Not a bunch of rich, entitled punks, but me, Xavier. It's like everything I worked for all these years was a lie. I thought if I could control it, if I could just get the resort to comply with the law, that I could keep everyone safe. And God's trying to tell me over and over again that it's not true. That he didn't give me that gift after all. It was only foolish pride.”

Xavier shook Micah's shoulders and drilled him with a piercing stare. “I want you to listen to me, man. And listen good. Your mom would've left your family anyway.”

“What the hell are you talking about her for? This has nothing to do with her.”

But Xavier didn't seem to hear him. He shook Micah's shoulders again. “Shut up and listen. She would've left your family and she would've left your father with or without the fire happening. Maybe not as soon as she did because of the fire, but leaving was in her bones. It was never your fault. It wasn't the fire's fault or your dad's fault. Some people are just the leaving kind.”

Exactly. Some people had it in their blood to leave.

In a flash of memory, he was twelve, waking up in the morning and finding that note on the kitchen table. She'd had to know Micah would be the one who found it. She'd had to. He was always the first person up in the morning. He'd taken that as a sign that it was his job to go bring her home, maybe even before anyone else in the family realized she'd left, to spare everyone else the heartache that he felt.

He would never forget the panic of not being able to get his dad's truck started. It took him nearly ten minutes to figure out he had to put the clutch in for the engine to turn over. He would never forget the hair-raising grind of gears with every awkward gearshift. He would never forget his determination to save his family from this new horror. Even back then, he'd fancied himself a hero.

Tears pricked his eyes. It had all been a lie, all that hope and optimism. What a waste. He'd driven that truck in circles around the town, then the county. He'd driven until he'd run out of gas and been forced to trudge to the nearest gas station to beg a quarter for a phone call.

He tore away from Xavier's hold and smacked his palms against his eyes to rid them of the unwanted tears. “You know who else is the leaving kind? Remedy.”

Her name crushed his heart, splintering it into a million shards that would never be put back together again. He turned his back to Xavier and braced his hands on his truck while he fought to neutralize his expression.

Behind him, Xavier gave a hard laugh. “So in that big, stupid, redneck brain of yours you figured you'd push her away before she could leave you?”

She was leaving regardless of anything he did or said. So he'd beat her to the punch, big deal. Didn't change the facts. “Stop drawing connections where there aren't any. This is about Remedy not belonging in Texas. It's about her not belonging with me.”

“No. This is about you being afraid to take a chance on losing another person that you love from your life.”

“I said stop it with the psychobabble bullshit.”

But Xavier persisted. “The chapel fire is only going to take Remedy away if you use it to push her away. Not like the fire that took your mom away, and that took me and my family away from you.”

Micah had a protest on the tip of his tongue, then stopped, considering Xavier's point. He'd never thought about the Knolls Canyon Fire from that angle. That single event had stripped so many fundamental parts of his life away from him. His home, his mother, his best friend. “But we're still friends; the fire didn't take you from me.”

“It took me far enough away that you and I were never the same,” Xavier answered in a quieter voice. “We had to reinvent what it meant to be friends and that took a long time. It took until we were adults to really figure it out.”

“But we did.”

“Yes, because that's what people who love each other do. They figure out a way.”

Micah dropped his chin to his chest.
That's what people who love each other do.
Why did that statement hurt so much? After all these years, how did his mother's lack of love still carry with it such a crippling bite? If she'd loved him, if she'd loved her family, she would have found a way to stay.

“You are not the leaving kind, Micah. But right now, the way it stands with Remedy, that's exactly what you're doing. You're the one leaving her. Where's the man who sacrifices everything—even at the risk of his own heartache—to be there for the people he loves? Where's my friend?”

Well, shit.
Xavier was right. Micah wasn't the leaving kind. He was the go-for-broke idiot with the hero complex who gave his everything to the people he loved. Why would he change who he was now, after everything?

He whirled around. “I screwed things up with Remedy.”

“Yeah.”

Panic rattled through him like an earthquake. “How do I make this right? What do I say to her?”

“You don't need anybody to tell you that because nobody else knows her like you do.”

True enough.

He tried to pour into his hug to Xavier everything he didn't know how to say, how relieved he was that the two of them had found their way back to their friendship after the fire, how much it meant to him to be the godfather of Xavier's children, how much he couldn't bear to live without him. “I really do love you, man.”

Xavier clasped Micah's shoulders and shook him. “You're telling the wrong person that tonight. Go get her before she's gone. You don't want to have to chase her all the way out to California.”

That he did not.

Chet was standing at the rear of an empty ambulance.

“Where is she?” Micah said.

“She pulled her IV out and took off when I wasn't looking. The sheriff's department and her parents are out looking for her now.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. I'm waiting for their call to come get her again so she can get the treatment she needs.”

Micah tore through the streets of Dulcet in a blur, his siren and lights on, fielding phone call after phone call from worried townsfolk as he drove, every last one of those calls telling him exactly where Remedy had fled to.

When he got to Petey's Diner, he saw Remedy through the window right away, alone at a table in the far corner of the room. Barbara was behind the counter, absentmindedly wiping a glass and watching Remedy eat a burger with downcast eyes.

Micah had seen enough. He pulled the door open and went to her.

At the sight of him, she set down the partially eaten burger on her plate and swallowed hard. Her eyes were filled with pain and he hated himself in that moment, knowing he was the cause.

“You were right,” she said, her voice cracking. “This is a terrible cheeseburger. No offense to Petey.”

His relief was a living, breathing force that swept through him faster than a wildfire. He pulled out a chair. “Now you know for sure that Hog Heaven's burgers are the best in Texas.”

Her gaze slid into the distance. “How did you know where to find me?”

She rubbed her arms. It was all he could do not to wrench her hands away and hold them in his own.

“Dusty saw you and called me. And then Delinda, and Tabby, and then Petey himself.”

“Like I've said. Everybody is in everybody's business in this town,” Remedy said.

“And thank goodness for that, because then I knew where to find you so I could say what I have to say.”

She rolled her focus to him. Those red-rimmed eyes killed him. He would never, ever forget the hurt he'd caused her. “You already said it,” she said.

No, he most certainly did not. “I was wrong. About what I said to you earlier, and about a lot of things. It turns out that being afraid of having people taken from you because of forces beyond your control is something that sticks with you, even when you don't know that it has.”

He swallowed hard. “My mother…” How could he explain it to her? “It's a funny thing about loss; you think it teaches you what's really important. That's what they tell you. You're supposed to learn that a house isn't a home; family's your home. Or that material possessions are meaningless, and all that talk, but you know what? That house was my home. And I lost it, forever. And Xavier was my next-door neighbor and my blood brother, but I lost him for a long time, too. My mother was my family, and I lost her.

“None of that was my fault—and I know that now—and I think I even knew that then, but I guess it didn't register all the way into my DNA, because it didn't stop me from growing up to believe I had the power to stop more loss, more fires. That if I just tried hard enough and fought tirelessly I would never again have to worry—no,
to fear
—losing what mattered to me. Stupid, right?”

She took his hand in hers. “Not stupid.”

“A little stupid. Because the maddening thing about fire and about loss is that there's no way to control it one hundred percent. There's no way to guarantee it won't happen.”

Her eyes turned pained again. “No.”

“As Xavier helped me see tonight, the only thing I can control is my fear. And that's a stubborn son of a bitch.”

“I've found that to be true, too, with my life and my fears.”

He brought her hand up to his lips to kiss. “You saved Granny June.”

Her exhalation was almost a quiet chuckle. “You and I have been over that already. You saved her, not me. I'm the one who nearly got her killed. I'm the one responsible for the fires at the resort. The reason I don't fit in anywhere is because I create destruction everywhere I go. The ballroom, your brother's injury, now this. I am chaos incarnate.”

The description evoked from him a sad smile. “I know you are.”

Tears slid down her cheeks. “There is no place for me in this world. I keep waiting for all the pieces of my life to click into place, but nothing ever clicks.”

“You and I clicked. Instantly.”

“Why? Because I set the fires and you put them out? Is that our yin and yang?” Her voice was bitter and weary, so far away from the Remedy he knew and loved.

“You once said to me, ‘What's a town hero without a little trouble to keep him in business?'”

“And you told me that I wrecked your life.”

Goddamn, it destroyed him to watch her hurt sweep over her face. “I was wrong. And I was scared.”

“You're right to be scared of me, because I'm a mess.”

“No. I meant I was scared of losing you, scared that you would leave me.” Such foreign words. They lurched out of his mouth and sounded distant to his ears. Him, the badass firefighter, the kid who beat up bullies and could kill and skin a buck by the time he was twelve, was frightened beyond measure of being left by someone he loved.

A breathtaking, ancient sadness welled up from the depth of his soul, one he hadn't known he'd been dragging around, as heavy as a weight. He'd forgiven his mother years ago, so how could it be? But it was. He rotated his jaw and decided that he might be weak and he might be afraid, but he'd never stopped being brave—and tonight he needed to be brave enough to let Remedy see his true heart, brave enough to risk her leaving and know that he would survive it. She was worth this leap of faith.
They
were worth it together.

He let it all wash through him. He let it take hold of him and rock him where he sat. The better to get the worst of it out of his system before he begged Remedy to give him another chance.