Buoyed by my friend’s support, I felt a surge of confidence. My jerky pulse slowed, and my breathing began to regulate. Less than five minutes later, I pulled into the ER ambulance bay, jumped out of the rig, and helped Mason deliver the burn victim to the doctors and nurses awaiting us there.
Walking back to our vehicle a few minutes later, Mason clapped a hand on my shoulder, then let it go. “You had me worried back there, man,” he said with a frown. “What’s going on?”
I shrugged, unsure how to articulate a proper response. What would my partner think of me if I told him the truth? That I was riddled with anxiety, and had some sort of PTSD flashback when I saw our burn victim?
“I’m fucked up,” I finally said, thinking that was as honest as any other statement I could make.
“All right,” Mason said as he climbed into the driver’s seat of our vehicle and I settled into the passenger’s. “So what’re we going to do about that?”
I managed a small smile at my partner’s use of the word “we.” “I’ll figure it out,” I said.
Mason gave me a wary look. “I won’t tell the captain that you lost it,” he finally said. “As long as you promise to find a way to deal with whatever caused it.” He paused. “You got me?”
I nodded.
“Seriously, bro. If I see even a hint of that kind of shit again, I’m reporting it.”
“Right. Absolutely.” While my partner had my back, I knew there was no way Mason would risk putting another victim we were treating in even further danger.
“I’ll get a handle on it,” I said, having every intention of doing just that. I’d go for more runs—I’d make them longer and more intense, every night before work, draining my body of the same excess adrenaline that, for whatever reason, had sent me over the edge today. If I was going to have the kind of life I wanted, I needed to wipe out the weakest parts of me. I needed to become the kind of man a woman like Amber deserved.
? ? ?
I woke up the next morning to the sound of pounding on my front door. My eyes creaked open, my lashes sticking together as I peered at the clock on the nightstand. It was just past noon, and I’d only been asleep for five hours. My shift—the rest of which, to my relief, was much less eventful than the rollover accident—had ended at three a.m. And while I’d been exhausted when I got home, I still had a hard time winding down, the residual stress hormones in my body serving up the worst kind of emotional hangover there is—my head pounded and my limbs trembled, my heart thumped a disturbing, discordant rhythm inside my chest. When I finally did drift off, it was into a restless slumber, filled with vivid images of bodies on fire—of flesh melting away from bone.
The person outside my apartment pounded again. “Coming!” I shouted as I pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and then stumbled into the living room. I yanked open the door, surprised to see my father standing in front of me, his right arm raised, hand in a fist. “Dad,” I said, keeping my hand on the doorknob, blinking fast in order to bring my eyes into better focus.
“We need to talk,” he said, barreling past me, not waiting for an invitation.
“Come on in,” I said, unable to keep the sarcasm from my voice as I shut the door behind him. The last time he had been to my apartment was when I first moved in, two years before, and I needed to borrow his truck, before I had bought my own. I hadn’t seen him since the brief, tense conversation we’d had at Amber’s graduation party three weeks ago. Now, I watched as he dropped onto my couch and crossed his arms over his broad chest.
“You got any coffee?” he barked. “None of that prissy latte-mochaccino shit, either. The real thing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hold on.” I headed into my small kitchen, grabbed a mug from the cupboard, and popped a French roast pod into my Keurig machine, gripping the edge of the counter while I waited for it to brew, wondering what the hell was so important that my dad needed to come over and wake me up on a Sunday morning. Despite my best intentions to remain calm, my heartbeat sped up, and I felt my face get hot. Once the first mug of coffee was done, I made another for myself and carried them both back into my living room, handing one to my father. He took a short sip and then set the mug on the small table in front of him. “I heard you worked the tanker accident last night.”
“I did.” I sat in the chair opposite him, and my first swallow of coffee burned the roof of my mouth, all the way down my throat to my belly. I coughed, sputtering a bit when I continued. “I think most units in the area were called, weren’t they? I figured you were helping put out the car fires.”
“You figured right.” He stared at me intently. “What you didn’t figure is that one of my boys delivered that burn victim to you and your partner. Or that he watched you stumble all over the goddamn place instead of doing your fucking job.”
I froze, my mug in midair, and forced myself to hold his gaze. “It wasn’t that bad,” I said, instantly set on the defensive, thinking this was the absolute last thing I needed right now—my father tearing me down. You’re not thirteen anymore, I told myself. You don’t have to put up with his shit.
He narrowed his eyes. “Not that bad, huh? You got the line in right away? You didn’t sit there doing nothing, leaving the victim to lie there writhing in pain? How do you think I felt, being told my son looked like a pussy?”
I dropped the mug I held to the table, not caring when the hot liquid sloshed over the side. “What the hell does it have to do with you?” I demanded.
“It has to do with me because what you do, however you fuck up, reflects right back on me.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, curling my hands into fists, trying to control the rising tide of my anger. I couldn’t believe he had the audacity to criticize me like this. Or maybe I could. It was what he’d always done. The stormy rage I’d felt toward him for years rose up and I wanted to call him out on every bullshit thing he had ever done or said. I wanted to make him pay. “It’s always about you! About you and what you want! Never me or Mom. No wonder she divorced you!”
“I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, Son, but that’s not what went down. I’m the one who divorced her. And now she can’t stand the fact that I don’t have to put up with her crap to get laid.” He gave me a look so full of pride, it took everything in me to not punch his smug face.
“You’re disgusting,” I said in a low voice. “You think it’s something I aspire to, sleeping with the skanky women you date? You think that makes me jealous?”
“I think you’d do just about anything to get into your sweet little Amber’s panties.”
I glared at him, my jaws clenched. “Don’t talk about her like that.”