Page 99 of Tasting Fire
She balanced the journal on her lap and gazed down at it with equal measure of apprehension and intense curiosity. Slowly, she unthreaded the knot in the leather tie that secured the wraparound cover.
Cash’s handwriting wasn’t nearly neat as the careful print in her spiral, but it was immediately clear that this was where his dreams and goals were stored.
The book chronicled his time at the fire academy, his experiences as an EMT. Emmy flipped through the pages and found several mentions of his desire to do even more. To become a paramedic.
Then pages and pages were filled with the insanity of his paramedic training in Los Angeles. How he and his preceptors had talked a man with schizophrenia off the Colorado Street Bridge. The run-in with the guy who nail-gunned himself to the floor. The first cardiac call he’d managed on his own. A twelve-year-old banger who’d died while Cash was holding him.
Which meant he’d experienced exactly the kind of pain she’d felt when she had to pronounce TOD on little David Hernandez.
Cash returned from the kitchen and set a cup on the coffee table.
“You don’t have to show me this—”
“Yes, I do. Keep reading.” He stood there and sipped his coffee.
With him standing over her, nerves flipped and flopped in Emmy’s stomach. But she read on, wincing over the accounts of him screwing up, of the ass-chewings by his preceptors, of failing a skills assessment because he’d bandaged another student’s forehead too low and given the guy an eyebrow wax to end all eyebrow waxes.
Of the stillborn baby he’d brought into the world and wept over in private later.
“This is pretty personal.”
“Em, I’ve been inside your body. What can be more personal than that?”
He was right.
She fanned the pages until she came to the last few filled with writing. They spoke of his feelings—of his confusion and anger and desire—when he heard she was getting married. And the same when she turned up in Steele Ridge and stole the job he’d believed should be his.
Washis now.
She wanted to close her eyes and put her fingers in her ears. He was allowing her to see the rawest, most truthful part of him.
He was forcing her to see him for what he truly was—a paramedic and firefighter, yes. But as a man. He was laying it all on the line, exposing his vulnerability in a way that made her want to shrink away.
Not from him, but from the thought of being that vulnerable herself.
She flipped back to the very first page and found it dated a year after she turned down his proposal. She looked up at Cash and found him glaring at his coffee as if it had somehow wronged him. But she knew that disappointment was meant for her.
She’d rejected him, but worse, she’d underestimated him. “Do other people know how motivated and ambitious you are?”
“Does it really matter what other people know or believe?” He touched the left side of his chest with his cup. “If I’ve got it all in here, isn’t that what counts?”
“You’re right,” she said quietly as she flipped through his journal, absorbing that he was the kind of man who had a mission and purpose in his life, but who didn’t need the validation of others knowing it. “Because of my dad I’ve always believed you have to be serious to do your best.” She carefully tied the leather strap into a bow and placed Cash’s journal on the coffee table. She didn’t need to see more to know that she’d walked away from the one man who could have helped her be the best version of Emmy McKay she could be, a woman able to be a good doctor and have a life. “But I’m the one who made them into some kind of mantra. No, that’s not right. I made them into a damn manifesto.” Looking up at him, she confessed, “I may have lived my whole life for him.”
Cash’s face softened and he dropped down on the couch beside her. “I don’t think so. Hell, we’re all shaped by stuff that happened to us when we were kids. Your dad’s death, the sheer waste of it, was a huge blow. But even a tragedy can’t completely mold a person’s personality.”
“So you’re saying I was born to be a person who lives life a certain way even if that means giving up everything that makes life worthwhile.”
“No, I’m saying that you have the natural talents and drive that make you a helluva medical pro. Smart, decisive, compassionate, quick-thinking.”
“I like the power of it.”
“Of course you do. It takes a chunk of God complex to do what we do.” He took her hand and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “And the people we care for want that. They want us to be confident, cocky even. It reassures them.”
“My dad used to always say ‘Life is serious. Give it your very best.’”
“It’s not a bad life philosophy,” Cash agreed. “But it’s a guiding principle, not a commandment for every action you take. And to a Type-A person like you, it sounds like one. Give yourself some room, Em. To make mistakes, to lean on other people.”
Emmy heard what he left unsaid. He wanted to be the one she could lean on today and every day in the future. Maybe that was truly possible now that she was starting to see that she’d been living her life based on the advice of a ghost. Maybe if her dad had lived, he would’ve imparted other life lessons. Ones that encouraged her to enjoy and embrace life instead of marching through it. “I want to do that. To have room for you and all the wonderful things you bring into my life.”
Cash smiled and cradled her neck to press a kiss to her forehead. “Then make room for one day of rest. You need it. And with the scare you gave me—gave my heart—last night, I need it, too.”
He was right. They needed to regroup. Get their feet under them again. “Then show me the best napping spot in the house.”
