Rare (5 page)

I dropped my phone on the dashboard, put my head on the steering wheel, and closed my eyes. Movement from the back of the ambulance roused me sometime later. Mick opened the passenger door and slid into his seat. I ran my gaze over him. “Feel better?”

“Take more than a power nap to set me straight, but I’ll do.” He scrubbed his hands down his face and leaned back in his seat. “I’m sorry about earlier. It took me a while to get going tonight.”

It wasn’t my place to judge him. He’d carried my ass for months when things had been bad at home. In his own way, he’d done as much for me as Joe had. I was curious, though. Mick was pushing forty, and he’d been on the job since he was eighteen. I wondered why it was overwhelming him now. “No worries,” I said. “There’s a pretzel in the bag for you.”

Mick was silent while he ate his supper, only murmuring his thanks when I gave him my soda. He stretched his legs up on the dashboard when he was done. “I’m thinking of quitting.”

I started to roll my eyes. I’d heard that crap before, but something in his tone stopped me. “To do what?”

“Anything. Wade’s in sixth grade now, and Janie starts kindergarten soon. I’m missing their lives, man, and for what? Crappy pay and a pension that’s not worth shit?”

“I’ll miss you if you go,” I said. “They’d better not stick me with Ray. I couldn’t last a night shift with that bonehead.”

“Then maybe you should quit too. You’ve said before you want to spend more time with Ash. You’re young, you’ve been to college. You could do anything you wanted.”

I snorted. “I’ve got a paramedic-science degree, dumbass. It doesn’t mean much else.”

“What about nursing?” Mick said. “It wouldn’t take long to convert your training, and you could specialize in something that meant day shifts.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d nudged me to bridge the gap between my paramedic training and an RN license. I was starting to think he didn’t like me.

“You know they’re building that swanky diabetes center up at Lakeview,” he pushed. “You’d be good at that; you’ve got a feel for those patients.”

“I thought you wanted me to be a psych nurse?” I said dryly.

He’d always said I had a way with the crazies, but I’d nixed that particular idea a long time ago. I didn’t want to take shit like that home to Ash. The logical step to get off the streets would be to become an ER nurse, but in reality, that job was as crazy as being a medic. Considering it was still the same crappy hours and crazy patients, the schoolwork required to make it happen hardly seemed worth the effort.

T
HE
FOLLOWING
day, I found myself pondering the conversation. The quandary bugged the hell out of me. I had so much to consider. Changing my job would alter my whole life. I’d worked my crazy schedule for so long, I didn’t know if I was cut out for the nine-to-five life.

I was still ruminating over it when Ash came home that evening. I smiled when he appeared in the doorway, welcoming the distraction. “Hey.”

“Hey, yourself.”

He threw his bag on the coffee table and disappeared into the bathroom without another word. I eyed his retreating back. He had good days and bad days, and when I caught sight of an elastic band around his wrist, I knew he was having a bad day.

It had been a shock for both of us when Ash sat down with his therapist and figured out how long he’d been inflicting damage on his own body. His skin was riddled with scars from the abuse he’d suffered as a child, but every mark on his wrists had been caused by his own hand. And, worse, some of those marks were a decade old. These days, he wore a bright-red band to repress the horrifying urge he had to cut himself, but it didn’t make the catalogue of brutal disfigurement any easier for me to handle. He was beautiful to me, inside and out, but the thought of a child so frightened that their only release was to cut holes in themselves made me sick to my stomach. Did it get any worse than that?

It made me angry, really angry. Incandescent rage swept over me every time I saw him trying to fight off everything he’d been through with nothing but a crappy rubber band. I felt guilty too. Ash found it hard to quit the unwitting habit he’d developed, but I found it even harder to accept that I’d seen it happen and never acted on it. Would things have been different if I’d gotten him help the night I found him hunched up, bleeding and burned on the fire escape all those years ago?

Who the hell knew?

We’d fought about it, more than once. Dr. Gilbert told Ash that perhaps I needed to see her too. No chance. Her brand of therapy wasn’t for me.

After dinner, Ash spent the evening spaced-out with his head in my lap. Perversely, I was relieved. Usually, if he was feeling low, it was his habit to hunch over his sketchbook and block the world out. I was comforted when he stayed with me, even when he ignored first a call from Ellie, and then from Joe.

It was a strange night. I watched TV and played with his hair while he stared at the ceiling and fiddled with that damn band. When my sleepless day caught up with me, it didn’t take much persuasion to get him to come to bed.

I
T
TOOK
two days before he told me what had spooked him into his dark mood. It seemed he’d intercepted a phone call from our aging landlord and learned our building was up for sale. He didn’t know much about real estate, but he knew enough to know that, even as dilapidated as it was, we couldn’t afford to buy our apartment. To cut a long story short, we had to move, and by the look on Ash’s face, it was a prospect he found terrifying.

“Ash, it’s okay. We’ll find a new place. It’s no big deal.”

Ash chewed on his lip. “But this is your home.”

I suppressed a sigh. Even after all this time, he still considered the apartment mine. Maybe it would be good for him to have his own space. “It’s just a building. Why don’t you take a look around? See what’s out there.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“Bullshit,” I countered. “Get a newspaper and make some calls. Ask Ellie if you get stuck.”

He glared at me, but it was superficial. He wasn’t mad, he was worried, and I understood that. The apartment was the first proper home he’d ever had. Leaving
was
a huge deal for him.

“Why don’t you look further north,” I said in a softer tone. “We don’t have to stay around here. We could get more for our money if we moved to, say, Edgewater or somewhere.”

“Nearer your mom?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And Joe’s place. We’d have to commute to work, so you’d have to get your lazy ass out of bed on time, but it would be worth it, right?”

I noogied his head, but he fended me off with a smirk of his own. “Ted has a shop in Andersonville. I’d probably work there.”

That shut me up. Andersonville was the LGBT heart of Chicago. After my caveman experience in the gay club, I wasn’t so sure how I felt about Ash working with a steady stream of shirtless gay men. “He has a shop in Lakeview too.”

Ash laughed, dispersing any lingering tension. “I’m sorry it took me so long to tell you,” he said. “I had a bad day and it threw me. I couldn’t get my head around leaving here.”

I put my finger to his lips and shushed him. I didn’t give a fuck that he’d freaked out over something that would seem so trivial to anyone else. I didn’t even mind that he’d woken me up in the dead of night to tell me. What mattered was he
had
told me and we’d figured it out. A new place could be the new start he needed, and if he could live with the bad days, so could I.

D
ESPITE
HIS
initial reluctance, it didn’t take Ash long to find a potential new place. He came home a few days later with the details for a converted old house up in Edgewater. I could tell he liked it, so without really looking at the paperwork, I set about trying to find the time to go and view it.

It took a while for us both to be free, but a week later, we found ourselves on the L heading to the northern part of the city. Ash had a habit of dozing off on the subway. I teased him for a bit while he fought his heavy eyelids, but it wasn’t long before he fell asleep. Amused, I shifted a little closer to him so I could feel his body heat and retrieved the property details from his bag. I flicked idly through them. The brochure he’d brought home was for the last remaining place on the upper floor of a large Victorian house. The apartment was huge. It had two bedrooms, high ceilings, and a big kitchen. It even had a tiny roof garden as well as the communal backyard. On paper, the place looked perfect—so perfect, if I didn’t know better, I’d have suspected Ellie’s hand.

I wasn’t all that surprised when Ash told me he’d gone to Ted for help. Ted owned the tattoo shop he worked in, but he was so much more than just Ash’s boss. He’d taken Ash on as a rookie artist, still fresh from an apprenticeship back in Philly, and had become his mentor. Ted was a giant of a man, all leathers and ink, but his appearance was deceptive. He cared about the young artists he employed, and he looked after them well. When Ash had broken down last year and been unable to work, he’d even become a sort of father figure, the closest Ash had ever had to a father, at least.

Life at the shop had changed for Ash in recent months. When he went back to work after a long absence, his workmates barely recognized him. He’d been so sick he was a shadow of his former self. And he was in a world of his own half the time. One day, he was particularly distracted when a coworker asked him if the hot guy who walked him home every day was his boyfriend. They meant Joe, not me, but the question confused Ash so much he felt the need to put them straight—so to speak.

“No, that’s Joe. I live with Pete,” he’d said.

And that was that; he was out and nobody cared. No one in the shop batted an eye, and of course, Ted had known all along, the wily old fucker.

It pissed me off for a while, though I wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like I wanted things to be hard for Ash, and it was for me that he’d kept us a secret in the first place. Deep down, I supposed I was jealous. It was never going to happen like that for me. If I wanted to be out at work, I needed to get another job, which brought me back full circle to the shit I’d had on my mind for days.

Ash stirred beside me. He raised his head and smiled sleepily, but the smile faded into a frown. “Every time I see you, you’re somewhere else.”

It didn’t make any sense, but none of his sleep-thick mumbles ever did. He was a fucker for talking in his sleep. I nudged him with my elbow. “About time you woke up. You’d be screwed if I fell asleep too. We’d wake up in Wisconsin.”

That earned me a scowl.

Ten minutes later, we got off the L in Edgewater. My mom lived in the western sector, but the house Ash had found was just north of Andersonville. He seemed to know where he was going, so I followed him a few blocks until we came to the right street. I looked around as he trailed to a stop. The tree-lined sidewalks and grand old buildings were a world away from the bustling district we lived in now. If I closed my eyes, it was easy to forget we were in a city at all. Even when I opened them, all I could see was the clear blue sky.

Ash lifted my hand to peer at the brochure I still held. “I think this is
it.”

I followed his gaze to the house and raised an appreciative eyebrow. The pictures hadn’t done it justice. It was bigger than I’d first thought, with massive bay windows and ornate brickwork. Though the apartment was only a quarter of it, I could see it was twice the size of where we lived now.

It looked
awesome
, but one thing confused me. “Where’s the roof garden?”

“At the back,” Ash said. “The guy on the phone said the house was extended in the sixties.”

My eyebrow went up again. “You called someone?”

He was shitty at using the phone to communicate. He only ever called me, Ellie, or Joe. He’d rather go out in the rain than order a pizza. With that in mind, it hadn’t occurred to me that he’d set the viewing for the house up himself. Perhaps unfairly, I’d assumed Ted had done it for him. It was a telling indicator of how much he liked the house, but the Realtor appeared before I could investigate.

I’d heard bad things about Realtors, but this one was nice and she knew her stuff. After showing us around, she flashed me a quick wink and told us to let ourselves out when we were done.

When she’d gone, I walked over to the big bay window. Ash was staring through the glass. I nudged his arm. “Do you like it?”

He nodded without looking my way. “I think so. It’s really big, huh?”

I grinned. It really
was
huge. The building was old and battered in places, but I didn’t mind that. We could fix the broken bits and the rest was part of its charm. Modern places were too sterile for me. They never felt like home.

“We’ll have to buy some new stuff to fill up the space,” I said. “So you might have to spend some of that cash you keep under the mattress.”

Ash turned and glared but it was halfhearted. His habit of letting his money stack up in the bank was a long-running joke between us. Most of the time, he seemed to forget it was there. He chewed on his bottom lip. “It’s a long way from home.”

“Not really,” I countered. “Besides, what makes that place our home? The tiny boiler? Or the noisy dog downstairs? Ash, we can make a home anywhere; we just need us and the right people. This place is closer to them.”

“How will you get to work?”

“Same way I do now, just in a different direction.”

Silence. Ash turned his gaze back to the window, stalling for reasons only he understood.

I took a step closer to him. “My first firehouse was in Forest Park. Trust me, I’ve traveled further. Now, are you going to show me this roof garden?”

Ash could be stubborn when it came to things he didn’t want to do, but after a long, mutinous moment, he seemed to rouse himself from whatever funk he was in. He grabbed my hand and pulled me to the tiny staircase that led up and out onto the extended part of the house. A previous occupant had transformed the flat section of the roof into a decked patio. It was small, not much bigger than a bedroom, but it was clean and private, and in the summer an obvious sun-trap. Ash loved it. The fresh air, the sun, and the wind in his face made it his kind of place.