Page 123 of Burn

Staging

A sector of incident command where responding resources arrive for assignment to another sector.

“It’s for the better,” I tell myself. Begged is more like it.

Do I believe that?

What do you think?

A week. That was all. It was a week of nightmares she can’t take away and a week of feeling guilty. On my four days off from the station, I drank. Seemed logical to me.

There are four empty bottles of whiskey on my nightstand, a hole in the wall of my room, and a broken television on my dresser with another bottle of whiskey sticking out of it.

If you ask me, I’m pissed. And I had every right to be after what happened at the hotel.

But I’m a stupid son of a bitch if I believe that. So I don’t, mostly.

I don’t blame her, really, how could I? She has a job to think about and if I was in her position, how would I have reacted?

I pushed her toward reacting like that. I’m the reason she’s in this mess.

Drinking seemed like the answer. So that’s what I did. All day, and now all night, for four days.

It was working too, until I had to go back to work and couldn’t sleep because I was sober again.

“Just man up and tell her how you feel and that she pissed you off,” Owen tells me, knowing what’s going on with me. I may have been so drunk one night I told him everything that happened at the hotel with her father.

I don’t like talking at three in the morning, let alone on the way to a two-alarm fire. “Who says I feel anything for her?”

I think about her face when I walked away, and regret fills my chest when I recall the hurt in her eyes. I think about the way her eyes held mine, searching for answers she wouldn’t get from me.

I didn’t mean the things I said to her, but I said them anyway because the less time I’m around her, the less time she’ll need to heal from being with someone like me.

“You know, that’s funny.” Owen laughs, our shoulders knocking into one another as the truck rocks back and forth. “You’re seriously expecting me to fuckin’ believe that shit?”

“Yep.”

His eyes hold mine. “You’ve been seeing this chick for well over a month.”

“Correction, I’ve been fucking her for a month. There’s no dating involved. I haven’t taken her anywhere.”

“I don’t believe you. If you weren’t into her, you wouldn’t be spending so much time with her. The Caleb Ryan I know doesn’t waste his time on anything.”

“Shut the fuck up, I don’t want to be having this conversation right now.”

Despite my hostility, Owen’s absolutely right. I don’t, but that still doesn’t mean I’ve fallen for her. Sure, I care for her, and it sucks what happened the other morning at the hotel. But I also knew eventually it was going to happen. She was falling for me. I could see that.

I don’t want her to love me because it translates into I’m in love with you and always, for me, leads to me failing them, or me not being able to give the pieces of myself they think I should.

I can’t love her.

To me, love is like a fire, a chemical reaction between compounds with energy. Some fires come on like a flash fire, quick to burn, but die down quickly, too.

Then you have the slower-moving fires, the ones that burn steadily, hot but maintaining their heat and destruction. No matter which way you come at it, the flames rage on until you cut off its fuel and heat, and eventually it’ll burn out. That’s exactly what I did by walking away. I cut off the fuel source, and all that’s left now are volatile gases that make smoke.

I don’t want to admit it but Mila’s like a spark inside of me, catching wind, and creating a fire inside my heart I’m having trouble ignoring now. She’s an instant fuel mixture that hit hard. A backdraft. The kind I never saw coming until she burned through me.

FIRELIGHT SPILLS OVER the street, flashing lights captivating the onlookers who cluster nearby. When we reach the building, it’s a ten-story apartment complex with the fire raging in the upper floors.

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