January Embers Page 4

  “You sure?”

  “We were there a few months ago.” Easy enough to remember an address like 4567 Colorado Street. Besides, Ari had been over there quite a bit when she was a kid. She always got a kick out of that address. “I wonder if she fell down.”

  “Well, they did say it was a female.”

  You mean like three fourths of this town? “Female” said nothing about who they could expect to see. Ari mentally prepared herself for seeing the feisty Abby Marcott down on her ass and struggling to remember who she was or where she was going. We were the ones who responded to her 911 call after she realized she was having a stroke. One of the major downsides of living in such a small town, let alone working in emergency services, was how many times she encountered people she grew up with, looked up to, and merely knew from passing by them on a daily basis. Seeing them with gaping wounds, frothing at the mouth, and turned upside down in their cars was not how she wanted to remember most of them. Except it was what she signed up for. It was what she had to face yet again.

  Colorado Street was clear for that time of day. Ari maneuvered the ambulance into the empty driveway of Abby Marcott’s house. She had completely forgotten about the existence of her ex-girlfriend – let alone the truck she had brought into town – until she leaped out of the driver’s seat and found Abby hobbling toward her with a rickety walker.

  Ari didn’t hear what she said. She was too busy staring at Mik passed out on the ground, a ladder downed beside her.

  You have got to be kidding me. Brendon jumped into action like the trained professional he was. Supposedly, Ari was also a train professional, but one would never guess from how she stood frozen a few feet away. For more than several seconds, she was the only one in the world who realized the irony of the situation. Everyone else, from Brendon the out of towner to Abby the grandmother who once fed Ari more than a few suppers, were too wrapped up in the emergency. If nothing else kicked Ari’s ass and put her back to work, it was the worried look on Abby’s face. Abigail Marcott did not look like that on a daily basis.

  “Did you stabilize her head?” Ari asked her partner, who was already checking Mik’s vitals while probably assuming that Ari prepared to move the patient away from the scene. “How’s her airways?”

  It took a few more seconds for her to address the old woman standing by her walker and the younger woman too shocked to speak.

  “When did this happen? Where did she fall from?”

  Brendon announced that Mikaiya was breathing and that her head was stabilized. While they prepared to move her to the ambulance, Mik’s eyes slowly fluttered open.

  “Oh, Jesus…” she muttered. “What happened?”

  “Mikkie!” Abby exclaimed, her hands death-gripping that walker as if she were about to fall down herself. “Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

  Brendon held up his hand to silence the audience. By now, half of Colorado Street was peering from their windows and on their lawns taking in the scene. While Ari was used to having an audience while she did her work, she wasn’t used to her ex-girlfriend being the patient in question. The fuck do I do? Her instincts wavered between the second nature that was her job, and the incessantly stewing anger she always felt in the pit of her stomach whenever she thought of Mikaiya Marcott. In a perfect world, I could leave her here to rot. Honestly, a fall from a ladder couldn’t have happened to a nicer person!

  Yet that wasn’t the kind of vibe Ariana needed to invite into her life. She chose to follow the path that had been set by her training so many years before. Someone is hurt or sick. I need to help them. That’s my job. It didn’t matter if that person was the sweetest of girls next door, or the high school bully who all but ran Ariana off a road one night. There had been times when she treated people who were so surly, so offensively rude that she hesitated to believe that these were the same people thanking her for saving their lives later. I’ll never forget the day I treated one of the candidates for district representative for heat stroke. The one who basically said he hated gay people and wouldn’t mind seeing us clear out of the area, although we make up a huge part of the economy here in Paradise Valley. Yet none of those people compared to Mikaiya Marcott, the one person in the world who would make Ari hesitate when treating them.

  She was better than that, though. She had taken an oath to treat every patient with the same amount of respect, dignity, and thorough care. Little Miss Heartbreaker shouldn’t be any different.

  Boy, this would be a riot later.

  “Can you tell me your name?” Ariana shined a light into Mik’s resistant eyes. Maybe she got a nice concussion that she totally deserves. Doesn’t mean I won’t treat it.

  Mikaiya was so out of it that she probably didn’t realize who hovered over her, anyway. “Mik… Mikai…”

  “Do you know what year it is?”

  “2018? No, wait…”

  “Close enough,” Brendon muttered. “I still think it’s last year, too.”

  “How many fingers am I holding up?” Ari made a peace sign in front of her ex’s face. For a single second, she remembered when they couldn’t take a single selfie without putting bunny ears behind each other’s heads. Typical teen stuff. How long ago it seemed.

  “Two?”

  “I don’t think she has a concussion,” Ariana said. “Or at least she didn’t hit her head that hard.”

  “Still gotta make sure she didn’t hurt her neck or spine.”

  “Yup.”

  After estimating the length of the fall and how Mik landed, Ariana figured that the proper precautions should be enough to ensure Mikaiya healed well enough. They were still taking her the hospital for more thorough examinations. Too bad that meant putting her hands on Mik for a few seconds to safely transport her into the back of the ambulance.

  “We’re taking her to county,” Brendon announced. “She’ll probably be fine, but if you want to meet us there, I’m sure she’ll appreciate it.”

  The out-of-towner, with her “ironic” T-shirt, high-waisted pants, and hair up in a bun, almost offered to ride with Mikaiya. Yet she suddenly remembered Abby’s presence and announced she would drive them both to the hospital… could anyone tell her where it was?

  “You ride with her,” Ariana said to her partner. “I’ll drive.”

  “Naturally,” Brendon said with a shrug. Ari was already driving that day. Her getting behind the wheel again probably didn’t seem out of the ordinary. Yet I would be driving, whether he liked it or not. The thought of riding in the back of the ambulance with her ex-girlfriend was more horrifying than giving her mouth to mouth. Mikaiya was coming more and more into consciousness. The last thing they needed was another conversation in forced proximity.

  Abby gave Ari a critical look as they parted ways. Once Ariana was behind the wheel and buckled up, she turned on the siren and got them the hell out of there. Although Mik was technically only a few feet away, hitting that gas pedal made Ariana feel like she put considerable distance between herself and the feelings gnawing away at her bones and sinew.

  It still wasn’t far enough.

  Chapter 7

  MIKAIYA

  Staying in the county hospital, where she had been born and suffered the brunt of her softball injuries, was not how Mikaiya planned to spend her weekend. Nor did she think she’d be seeing the inside of the hospital that first month back in Pleasant Valley. Not unless her grandmother became sick again.

  Instead of sitting by her grandmother’s beside, however, it was Abby sitting next to Mik’s.

  “Hasn’t the food quality gone absolutely down in the past twenty years?” Abby asked, as if Mik could remember what hospital food tasted like when she was eight. “I felt like I was eating ass instead of oatmeal when I stayed here. It’s tragic! What are they charging us for?”

  Mikaiya shrugged. Feels pretty nice to no longer wear a neck brace. That had been her first day of hell, when she struggled to stay conscious, no matter how often the doctors and nurses asked her in
ane question and snapped their fingers to get her attention. She was assured that sleepiness was normal, but that didn’t mean she should always “give into temptation,” as they put it. They were on the fence about whether she had a concussion, but by the end of that first day, hands were thrown into the air and “fuck its” shared among the hospital staff.

  Still, they wanted to keep her overnight for observation. By noon on Friday, Mikaiya was unceremoniously sent home in her grandmother’s truck, which she was not allowed to drive. Neither was Abby, who still had motor troubles from her stroke. It was left to Skylar to take a crash course in stick shifts. Again. Because she had somehow managed to get her and Abby to the hospital and back on Thursday, but she acted like she had never done it before by the time Mikaiya was back in the passenger seat.

  “I swear to God, Sky,” Mikaiya mumbled as they started and stopped their way out of the hospital parking lot. “If you kill me on the way home from the hospital, you’re going to a special kind of hell.”

  “Sorry, Mik! They didn’t teach us this in driving school! Everything is automatic there!”

  “Yet you somehow managed to get to the hospital!”

  “It took me two hours.”

  “It’s a twenty-seven mile drive!”

  Skylar chuckled as she finally found her stride on the road leading out of the hospital’s property. “I see the fall didn’t hurt your sense of righteous indignation.”

  Mik scoffed. “Did you hear that I’m not supposed to drive for a whole week? I’m supposed to get a checkup in town that day, so I guess you better get used to driving stick.”

  “I’m sure there’s a straight girl joke in there somewhere.”

  Although she wanted to laugh, the best Mikaiya could do was lean her head back and close her eyes before the jerking scenery made her nauseas. She couldn’t bring herself to make the obvious jokes about heterosexual Skylar failing to “drive stick” and that it probably meant she was destined to become a full-time citizen of Paradise Valley for all the wrong reasons.

  “By the way,” Mik said, changing the subject. “Do you remember what EMTs came to help me? I barely remember anything from that moment.”

  Skylar shrugged. “Beats me. I don’t know the townspeople like you do. Seemed like they did a great job making sure you were stable before hauling you off.”

  Groaning, Mikaiya continued, “Was one of them a woman?”

  “Guess so. At least one of them was a guy.”

  “You’re so helpful.”

  “What do you want from me? I was freaking out a bit yesterday. Didn’t really take any time to see what the EMTs were packing in their shirts and pants. Why do you care, anyway? You got some bad blood with one of the EMTs in town and think they were going to half-ass it on you?”

  Mikaiya blushed. “You might say that.”

  “Geez. I’m sure glad I’m not from around here. Sounds like drama lasts for decades.”

  “It does if you really fucked up.”

  Skylar was silent for a moment. Instead of struggling to change gears, however, she glanced in her friend’s direction and asked, “Did you really fuck up, Mik?”

  “Yup.”

  Silence filled the cab of the old, rusty truck for more than a few seconds. “You gonna tell me how you fucked up?”

  “Do I have to? You’re the one person in town who doesn’t hate my guts, probably.”

  “Jesus, what did you do? Run over the mayor’s dog?”

  “Not quite. Remember when my grandmother told you that I broke my ex’s heart when I moved to Portland?” She didn’t offer any further explanation than that.

  “Uh huh.” Skylar could hardly keep her eyes on the road. Good thing there wasn’t anyone else around that time of day. “What about it?”

  A sigh broke the next ensuing silence. Mikaiya might as well get this off her chest. Skylar was going to hear it around town sooner rather than later, and she should hear it straight from one of the original sources. Otherwise, she’d get the Anem Singer special when buying her tampons and canned green beans. “Yeah, so, turns out that my ex is now one of the full-time EMTs in this town. She was actually the gal who talked to us that first night, when we found that wreck blocking the road.”

  Skylar was reverently quiet while she digested that information. “That was a woman?”

  “C’mon, Sky.”

  “I kid, I kid. A little.” Skylar cleared her throat. “Well, that’s awkward.”

  “No kidding. I haven’t been in town for two weeks, and not only do I fall on my freakin’ head, but Ari was probably called to come knock some sense back into me.”

  “Ari?”

  “Her full name is Ariana, but everyone calls her Ari.” Especially now. Mik couldn’t imagine that fantastic example of all things gloriously butch going by Ariana.

  “Like the singer?”

  “Yeah. Like the singer.” Another reason Ari probably wasn’t going by Ariana anymore. “She wasn’t always butch, though. We actually had a pretty traditional butch-femme relationship back in high school.” She stole a look in Skylar’s direction. “I was the butch, in case there’s any confusion.”

  “I’m not gonna pretend to know what that all entails. Didn’t exactly see that kind of stuff in my high school.”

  “It was different at our school.” Clark High was far from the bastion of progressive values Skylar may now associate it with, but when over half the students at least came from a LGBT-dominant high school, it wasn’t unusual for queer kids to feel more comfortable coming out and emulating the relationships they saw at home. Abby had called her granddaughter’s relationship with Ariana “quaint,” because they reminded Mrs. Marcott of what the local bar scene had looked like when she first moved to Paradise Valley. That had also changed a lot in the past decade. Mik had witnessed it in Portland as well. While it didn’t affect her perception as much, it became most jarring when she saw someone like Ariana walking around town. Was that really the same girl who once put her hair in a big, frizzy braid and did cartwheels on the farm for Mik’s amusement? I used to get such a kick from seeing her underwear under her skirts. Was it really only ten years ago? That amount of time meant nothing to the average adult, but ten years ago had still been Mikaiya’s teenaged years. Time was slower back then. Everything was big, major, the worst and best thing to ever happen. Mik didn’t doubt that the night she stood Ariana up was etched in their brains, forever.

  God knew Mik had been thinking about it more since coming back to town.

  “So your ex-girlfriend, whom you dumped like a real champ, now has one of the most important jobs in your small town. It’s probably safe to say that most of the townsfolk are more sympathetic toward her than, say, the girl who ran out and didn’t come back until she really had to?”

  Mikaiya grimaced.

  “Uh huh. Good luck with that, Mik. Hope I’m also not guilty by association.”

  “You’re guiltier of being an outsider. At least I have native clout around these parts.” In a small town, that was the most important thing, hands down.

  “Yeah, well, that ‘native clout’ might not mean much if everyone is pissed at you, Mik. No wonder you never want to leave the house. I thought you hated the lack of anonymity around here. Now I know you get extra doses of judgment every time you pick up milk from the grocery store.”

  At least I’m not getting it from Anem. God, would Anem Singer be the extent of Mikaiya’s dating pool if she decided to get back into the local game? Some people would always look up to her and admire her, even if they should have known better. All the good it did Mik. Anem wasn’t really her type. Maybe back in high school, when Mikaiya had a heart that beat for soft curves and pretty smiles beneath a cloud of fuzzy hair. But growing up had taught Mik a few things about her tastes. Perhaps she wasn’t afraid of facing Ariana again because she assumed her ex would be as demure as ever.

  Nope! Someone had undergone a radical transformation. Yet did Ariana know that she had grown into t
he exact kind of woman Mikaiya now fancied?

  “I’ve gotta talk to her,” she mumbled, hoping that Skylar hadn’t heard her. I need to at least explain what happened. After I’m done thanking her for saving my life, I guess. Who knew if Mikaiya’s life was actually in any danger after that fall? Not like she had plummeted more than ten feet. Still, it could’ve gone much differently had she landed a different way. In that case, she was more than grateful that Ariana set aside any animosity between them in the name of helping someone in need.

  Apparently, however, Skylar had heard her. “Not like it’s hard to find people in a small town, Mik. I’ve had more of the same people saying hello to me every day than I ever did back in Portland, and you know me, I always ran the same route. You’d think that old guy who always sat on the corner of Division and Sixteenth would have at least said hi once in a while…”

  “You have a point.” Mikaiya wouldn’t have to go out of her way to find Ariana. Odds were high that she’d step out of her childhood home and encounter the intimidating EMT on her way to the farmer’s market. I wonder what she does when she’s not working… Where did she live? Did she have a significant other? She probably assumed that Skylar was Mik’s girlfriend, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. They were equal parts single, just looking for different kinds of people to love.

  I haven’t really loved anyone since you, Ari. Everyone knew how heartbroken Ariana had been when they broke up. But did they know how much Mikaiya cried, and how she almost sabotaged her first semester of college by refusing to get out of bed and doing her damn homework? Ariana wasn’t the only one dealing with raw, open wounds. Although Mik wouldn’t argue that her ex definitely had the shock value on top of everything else.

  Mikaiya was old enough and a little bit wiser now to realize how she fucked up that long-ago night. The way she handled it? Immaturity at its finest. Eighteen-year-old Mikaiya thought she was doing the right thing by taking off in the middle of the night with no word to anyone, least of all the girl who thought she was going with her. Getting out of town was of the utmost importance, however. The more distance she put between herself and her girlfriend? The less likely the shit was about to hit the fan.