Up In FLames (Eternal Flame Book 2) Page 2

  I sighed. A lot of people seem to think that having someone be slavishly devoted to you would feel good. Hell, some people do enjoy it, actually. But I didn’t, especially not so far into our relationship. Not only did it hurt to see him express any fear of me, it worried me. “What’s going on, Nicky?”

  He blinked at me innocently. “What do you mean?”

  He was a good liar, but he could never lie to me. I knew him way too well. “You seem nervous about something. You know I wouldn’t be mad at you for showing up to say hi to me at work.”

  “Well, I know, but—”

  “But you still freaked out and made enough food to feed a small country.”

  He smiled, but he looked a little guilty. The two of us sat down at the table, and Nicky started piling his plate high with food. The guy ate like a monster, but you’d never know it. I always wondered where it all went. I had a theory that he just fidgeted all the calories away throughout the day, and when he wasn’t doing that, he always seemed to be dancing to music that only he could hear. I spent my days working out and hauling around gear that was at least half my weight, but even I couldn’t throw food down like he did. It was both impressive and a little irritating.

  He started spooning food onto my plate, too, and I let him. I waited patiently until he cleared his throat and said, “I’ve just been nervous lately.”

  “Lately? What does that mean?” I frowned. I had been on shift for four days, and I hoped that me not realizing what was wrong had less to do with a failure on my part and more to do with not being around long enough to notice.

  “Well, okay, since yesterday,” Nicky clarified. “I…” He swallowed thickly. “I thought I saw… him. When I was out on a run.”

  I froze, and I felt a cold lump growing in my stomach. I didn’t need to ask who he meant.

  “It wasn’t,” he added quickly. “It wasn’t him. It just looked like him, and, you know, it’s kind of scary when I see someone like that.” He picked up his fork and started idly shredding the meat on his plate.

  “Why didn’t you text me?” I asked quietly. “I could have seen if someone was willing to cover for me.”

  He rolled his eyes, annoyed. It was a comforting gesture, in its own way; if he could express irritation with me, it meant that he was starting to calm down. When he was afraid, he had a tendency to go into hyper mode with his people-pleasing. “I don’t need you to come running home every time I get a little nervous. It’s my own shit to deal with.”

  “I know it is, but I would still like to help.”

  “It’s not a big deal.” He shook his head. “At least, I didn’t think it was. But I guess it’s been a while since something really freaked me out.” He gave me a small, bitter smirk. “I guess I was overdue for a meltdown.”

  “But you’re okay?”

  “Yeah, I think so. At any rate, I’ll be fine in a couple days. Just shook me up.” He shivered a little. “It gave me nightmares.”

  “I can imagine.” I put my hand over his and brushed my thumb over his wrist, slipping under the bracelets there. I could feel the tight skin of the scars there that encircled each of his wrists. “I’m sorry, babe.”

  “Not your fault.”

  “I said I was sorry. I didn’t say I was apologizing,” I said. Nicky snorted and rolled his eyes. It was something he’d said himself about a thousand times. It was hard for me to figure out at times if he was blaming himself for something or if he was just expressing sympathy, and he’d had to clarify the difference between “I’m sorry” and “I apologize” to me over and over throughout the years.

  “But things are okay now,” I said. I didn’t know which of us I was trying to reassure, but it felt good to say, and it felt even better when he gripped my hand and gave me a grateful grin. “We have three days all to ourselves, right? It’ll be fun.”

  He raised my hand to his lips and kissed my knuckles. “Right. It’ll be fine.”

  That night, I lay in bed, listening to Nicky’s sleepy snuffles and wondering if, in fact, everything would actually be fine.

  It wasn’t just Nicky’s stress seeping over into my own emotions that was the problem, it was also all of the food. I’d never met anyone else who would immediately get freaked out over a nice dinner, but I imagine nobody else I’d met had ever spent an entire day looking over receipts, documenting exactly how much every single item cost at every store. I knew perfectly well how expensive that dinner had been.

  And I knew we couldn’t really afford it.

  But how was I supposed to tell Nicky that when it was something he’d done for me? He’d been trying to do something sweet and to be a good boyfriend, and on top of that, he had been doing it out of anxiety. How could I throw the money argument in his face when he had been trying so hard to do something good?

  Still, the thought nagged at me. It was easy, a part of me thought, for Nicky to go out and spend tons of money on groceries when he wasn’t the one making most of the money. His contribution to the household was selling weed, and that was hardly the lucrative career that Weeds and other TV shows had made it out to be. It had seemed a lot more profitable when I was in college and I could count on my student loans to beef up our bank account, but having a full-time job was starting to feel more expensive than getting deeper and deeper in student debt. The fact that marijuana was getting closer and closer to being legalized didn’t help things. Nobody wanted the potential trouble that came with buying from a dealer, especially when they could avoid it by going to the doctor a few times to complain about back pain and get a prescription instead. Nicky told me that what he sold—a few special blends created by his seedy salamander of a friend, Harris—was far better quality than what came out of a legal dispensary, but that didn’t matter to the average person. A lot of people would rather smoke more of an inferior product than take the risk of buying from a dealer. There were still customers to be had, especially with people like Louis who didn’t want to deal with the potential issues that came from getting a card, but there were fewer and fewer every day, and the ones that still existed usually didn’t have much to spend.

  Aside from all that, I didn’t exactly love the fact that my boyfriend was a weed dealer. Neither of us did drugs ourselves, and I had never hidden the fact that I didn’t want to be around people who did, and even though I didn’t think of marijuana as particularly damaging, the whole business still felt pretty sleazy. I had always thought of myself as a good guy, and I always wanted to do the right thing. It felt really tough to do that when I was living with somebody who sold illegal drugs to high schoolers. I was hardly living my dream life.

  I found it hard to really blame Nicky for any of that, though. I knew perfectly well going into our relationship that I would probably have to be the breadwinner for the rest of our lives. The people who acted as Nicky’s “parents”—a term I use here very, very lightly—didn’t care whether or not he went to school and even actively made it difficult at times. When his mom abandoned him at twelve, he was left with his stepdad, who was a part of a ring of human traffickers. Nicky was eventually sold off to the highest bidder as a servant and sex slave, and he stopped going to school entirely. I was impressed that he could read, for Christ’s sake; it wasn’t really reasonable to expect him to get an average job.

  And yet.

  There was always a little bit of resentment tickling at the back of my brain. Being a firefighter is hard work. It’s constant physical labor and emotional stress. The first few months I spent doing it, I was constantly sick to my stomach from the fear that came with running into the kind of situations your brain tells you to run away from. Even my days off didn’t feel like a respite; I still had to work out, I still had to keep up on my studies for when I went to grad school, and I was still always preparing myself for the next call. I busted my ass day in and day out, and the paycheck I had to show for it was only a little bit more than I’d make working at a retail job. I loved being able to help people, and I loved that my job
made a difference in the world, but that didn’t stop it from also being a giant pain.

  So, sure, I was frustrated that Nicky couldn’t help more. And I was doubly frustrated that he had the impulse control of a squirrel, which meant he didn’t always think about money when he went out shopping.

  I hadn’t grown up wealthy, but my family had been pretty firmly middle class. Nicky, however, had always been poor. In his mind, the meager paycheck I brought home was a fortune, and he treated it like one. It seemed like every time I turned around, he’d bought something new.

  The worst was all of his music equipment. Our basement was packed with recording equipment, guitars, a drum set, amps, and just about anything else you could generate sound with. He spent hours and hours downstairs tinkering with it and recording tracks to upload online. He was convinced that all of it was an investment; he really thought that one day, he’d be discovered and make it big, and then money wouldn’t ever be a concern again.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t have faith in his abilities. He was an extremely skilled musician; from what he told me, he was practically a prodigy. He just had a natural gift for it. But talent does not a career make, especially not in a field that had way more to do with luck than it did with ability. Even if he did make it, popularity was a fleeting thing, and he could always end up as a one-hit wonder with hardly anything to show for it.

  I tossed and turned on my mattress, then looked over to see Nicky’s sleeping face. I watched the way his eyelids twitched and his lips moved silently, apparently just as lively and aware as he was when he was awake. He’d never said it, but I knew that to him, music and drugs were his only options. I knew he thought he could never make anything more of himself than that.

  And I had to admit, even though just looking at his beautiful face was enough to make my heart burst out of my chest, I wasn’t sure he was wrong.

  How could I ever be angry at him? How could I be so evil as to resent a man who had been through so much and only wanted to make other people happy?

  I shuffled closer to him and reached out an arm, trying to scoop him up and pull him in close to me, but he flinched away. His breathing started growing rapid, and even though I couldn’t distinguish what he was trying to say, nervous little wisps of sound started to escape his lips.

  Shit. “Nicky?” I whispered. I put a hand on his shoulder. He tried to shrink away, but I tightened my grip on him, shaking him gently. “Nicky, wake up, babe.”

  “No,” he whimpered, turning his face away from me, burying it in his pillow. “No, no, no, noooo…”

  “Nicky—”

  “Please, I don’t—I—” He had started shaking. His breathing grew so hard and fast that he was soon hyperventilating. In his sleep, he fought weakly against my hold on him, and he bit at his lip until I saw little spots of blood.

  Night terrors. It wasn’t uncommon for him, but it had been months since the last one. Anger flooded my chest, and I wanted more than anything to go back in time and kill the son of a bitch who had done this to him.

  But I couldn’t. All I could do was try to remind him that the real nightmare had ended.

  “Nicky!” I shook him harder, my grip tight. “Nicky, wake up!”

  His eyes shot open, and he breathed in a gulp of air. He looked around wildly for a moment, still trying to pull away from me, befuddled by the darkness and the familiar surroundings of our small bedroom. “Babe,” I breathed, still holding on, “take a deep breath. It was just a dream, okay? I’m here. You’re safe.”

  His flailing stopped. He blinked a few times, looking over at me and letting out a long, slow breath. “Tim,” he murmured.

  “Yes, babe. It’s me. I’m here.”

  His lower lip, still dotted with little droplets of blood, quivered. “Is this real?” he whispered.

  My heart ached as if someone had grabbed it and squeezed. “Yes, Nicky. This is real. I’m real. You’re okay.”

  The tenseness of his fight-or-flight response drained away, and he melted into me, squirming into my arms and burying his face in my neck. I held onto him tightly. It was what he needed; he needed to feel the reality of it, the physical sensation of warmth and love and care. He shivered, and even though he was silent, I could feel the hot drip of tears on my skin. I rubbed his back, feeling the bumps and raised lines of the tattoo that spanned the length of his torso, a bouquet of flowers that spilled from the back of his shoulder, ran down his side, and ended in the dip of his hip. I traced over the petals of each flower with my fingers, trying to distract myself from the pain that came with seeing him break down. I had to be strong for him.

  I closed my eyes and tried to remember where each flower was as I touched them. Sunflower. Daisy. Lily of the valley. Buttercup. Coreopsis. Two yellow crocuses, one white. A bundle of snowdrops. Hawthorn flower. White dogwood. Dog rose. And at the end, a large white rose. Reciting them in my head calmed me, picturing the way they tumbled across his body, his breathing making them come alive. He sighed softly and snuggled closer to me, and I restarted my count at his shoulder. Before I’d reached his hip again, he’d fallen back asleep.

  I was glad. He deserved the rest, and he especially deserved to have it in the arms of someone who cared enough to give him some shelter from the nightmares.

  And for all my own tossing and turning and anxiety, I was thrilled to be the one to be there with him.

  Chapter Two

  Friends of mine were always surprised when I told them that I met Nicky at college, which was a fair thing to be surprised about, considering Nicky had never taken a single college course. But nobody questioned it when I told them that we met at a party.

  My junior year of college, Remy—who was my roommate and one of my only friends during my five and a half years as an undergrad—walked into my room, closed the book I was reading, and said, “We’re going to a party.”

  I glared at him. “We’re not doing anything. I have a chem exam tomorrow, dude.”

  “It’s almost charming how you think I care when you say dumb shit like that,” he said with a grin. “But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re going.”

  I sighed. “Is this another frat thing?”

  “I don’t see how that’s relevant, but—”

  “Dammit, Remy! I hate all that Greek life stuff. You know that.”

  Remy sniffed, annoyed. “Phi Kappa Tau is a great group of guys. You’d know that if you just spent some time with them.”

  “I did spend some time with them,” I reminded him. “They dumped a trash can out over my head and started barking at me. I think I’ll pass.”

  “Dude, that was freshman year. That’s different.” I went to reopen my book, and he snapped it shut again. “I know what you’ve been hiding from me, you know,” he continued, eyebrows raised at me. “And I’m not going to let you get away with it.”

  I frowned. “Hiding from you?” I asked, confused. Even if I’d tried to hide something from Remy, I was a terrible liar. He would have known immediately.

  “Your birthday!” he cried, flinging his arms open wide. “You’ve been twenty-one for a week and a half, and you didn’t say anything about it!”

  I cringed. I should have known it would have something to do with drinking; that was pretty much all Remy did during college. “I didn’t say anything because I knew you would overreact,” I told him. “You know, like you’re doing right now?”

  “It’s not an overreaction. I’m your best friend—”

  “That’s going a little far,” I said, but he just talked over me.

  “ —and that means it’s my sacred duty to make sure that you have a kick-ass introduction into the world of adulthood. And that means a party.”

  “Remy…”

  He crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow at me. “Either you come with me tonight, or I throw you a birthday party here. And it will be way wilder and way more crowded than anything Phi Kappa Tau could dream of coming up with.”

  He’d finally hit on s
omething that would actually convince me. I believed him; I’d seen him throw parties for his other friends, and I knew that he would make one for me as massive and rowdy as he could out of pure spite. I let my book stay closed and looked up at him miserably. “Fine. When do we leave?”

  “As soon as possible.” Remy grinned and thumped me on the shoulder. “You might want to wear something you don’t mind getting covered in vomit.”

  I shuddered. “If anyone pukes on me, I’ll kill them and you.”

  “I’m talking about you, dummy.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m not planning on getting drunk.”

  “There are a lot of people who don’t plan on getting drunk. Where do you think all the drunk drivers come from? That doesn’t mean they don’t do it.”

  “No,” I said, knowing I was digging my own grave. “I mean I’m not getting drunk because I’m not going to be drinking.”

  Remy’s jaw dropped and he let out the kind of gasp that I would expect someone to give me if I murdered their parents in front of them. “But—but you’re twenty-one!”

  “I’m aware.”

  “It’s legal now!”

  “I’m aware of that, too.”

  “But you can’t just not drink on your twenty-first birthday.”

  I rubbed my eyes. “Actually, you can. I’ve been twenty-one for a week and a half, remember? And yet I haven’t been drinking this entire time.”

  He shook his head. He looked ashamed. “I don’t get it. Are you doing this to punish me? Do you really want to deny me the joy of helping you through your first blackout?”

  “Jesus, dude. I don’t want to blackout at all, especially not if you’re the one who’s going to be taking care of me.” I stood up. He started stammering at me, but I held up a hand to stop him. “I already said I’ll go to the stupid party, alright? Can we not push it?”

  Remy, for possibly the first time in his life, realized that he was treading on dangerous ground and decided to shut up. “Okay,” he said. “I’m not happy about this, though. I just want you to know that.”