Page 48 of Where We Found Our Home
Ciara: Impossible man. Stay safe, okay?
Me: Yes ma’am
Ciara: Told you about that ma’am shit
I send her a gif of Beyoncé in full queen attire right as the alarm goes off. Time to get to work. I have to push Ciara aside for now.
My unit arrives to the scene of an apartment fire, and I take command. The crew gets the pipe hooked up to the apparatus and gets to work. I’m giving an order to a probie when a tiny voice yells in my direction.
“Excuse me!” A girl who looks to be no older than twelve calls out to me. I wave my hand to keep her from coming any closer and jog to see what she needs.
“There was a man over there. He said he saw someone run inside the building!” She’s winded from running over to me, so I’m piecing together her words.
“Woah, slow down. Sorry, did you say someone ran inside the building?”
“Yeah! I overheard a man say he saw a guy run in there after you guys came out because his daughter was crying about her cat still being inside. I turned around to tell him to tell you guys but he was gone.”
“Okay, okay. Did he say where he saw the man run in?”
“He pointed over there.” She points to the north side of the building.
“Okay, thank you. We got it. Stay here, okay?” She nods, and I run off to my crew.
While my crew and I have contained the flames enough that we aren’t concerned about it spreading to other buildings, the blaze is still going strong. We were told the entire building was evacuated, and we did a primary search and found no one, but if a man ran in after we came out, we could’ve missed him. It seems odd to me that he would do that instead of just telling us about the cat, but I can’t risk shrugging it off. I’d never forgive myself if someone died in a fire and I could’ve prevented it.
I make the decision to be the one to go inside the building with two other guys from the crew to look for the man while the rest of the crew focuses on getting the fire under control. We need to be quick and efficient.
“First floor clear!”
“Second floor clear!”
We continue to radio to each other through the five floors of the building and have turned up no signs of other life in the building. I start to head back down to meet my guys when I hear a deep voice call for help. I rush into the room where I heard the voice, but before I can radio to the guys that I located our target on the fifth floor, something slams me in the back. The wind is knocked out of me momentarily, but I scramble to turn over on my back just in time to see a figure dressed in all black throw a two by four on the floor and then throw a burning rag on top of a pile of clothes and curtains that are drenched in what I assume to be gasoline. I can’t see his face at all, but his stature tells me it’s a man. The only part of his body showing is the hand he used to toss the rag. I can see he’s got scars covering it. I commit that to memory as he runs out of the room and slams the door behind him. The flames from the pile of clothes spread quickly. I run over to the door, but the man somehow locked it from the outside.What the fuck is going on?
“This is Lieutenant Cole. I’m trapped in a room on the fifth floor on the north side of the building. The fire is spreading quickly, and the door is locked from the outside. Need RIC ASAP.”
“We need RIC to the north side of the building now. Fifth floor.” I hear my command echoed through the radio, and I take a minute to observe my situation. The flames are spreading fast, but they aren’t blocking the window yet, so I should be able to get out when my crew arrives.
Who the fuck was that man and why did he do this? Was he targeting me? Was the man lying about what he saw? Was the girl who came to me lying? So many questions are swirling around in my head.
“Lieutenant!” Peters, a member of the Rapid Intervention Crew sent to retrieve me, calls for me. I grab his hand, and he pulls me onto the ladder back to safety.
“PAR!” I call over the radio. I need to make sure my other crew members made it out of the building and there were no other run-ins with the man.
“Engine 1 has PAR,” they call back. We’re all accounted for. Time to get some answers.
The fire is under control now, and a secondary search was completed, but no one saw the man I mentioned run in or out. I’ve given the Austin Police Department my statement about what happened so they can investigate, and I’ve been cleared by the medical team to leave the scene, so we head back to the station.
Ciara.
Images of Ciara pop into my head, and I realize how badly I just want to be with her right now. Will she be okay if I tell her what happened today? Memories of Erica begging me to quit my job threaten to drown me, but Ciara’s words pull me back.“It takes a special person to accept that.”Could she be that special person for me? She said that being loved and cherished by someone like me would be an honor. She also said it’d be cruel to ask me to step away from what I’ve dedicated my life to. She said all the right things.My head wants to dismiss what she said as impossible to believe, but my heart is telling me to trust her. To lean into her. To stop letting the past hold me back.
“Make a choice, Lincoln. Between your past and your future.”I choose my future as I make my way to Ciara’s apartment.
She answers the door wearing shorts and a tank top that I want to rip off of her. “Hey, you. You’re early,” she says. I lean in to kiss her. It starts soft, but when she wraps her arms around my neck, I deepen the kiss. I kick the door closed behind me and flip both locks without ever taking my lips off hers. She moans into my mouth but then pulls away.
“Hey. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” I rest my forehead against hers.
