I nodded, my gut tightening. “Yeah?”
He handed me a cell phone and it took me a moment to actually reach for it. “Hello?”
“Heeeey, Jack.” Lilah. “Okay, buddy. You want the good news or the bad news?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “You’re obviously okay, so please tell me Emmy’s okay?”
“What? Oh! Yeah, sorry. We’re fine. Let me just rip the bandage off—you’re now living with us.”
I blinked, certain I’d misheard her. “What? Why?”
“Well, because you don’t have an apartment anymore.”
I groaned. “Fuuuuck me.”
“Now, don’t be too upset,” she quickly added. “Your apartment didn’t actually burn, but there was a lot of water and smoke damage. And we grabbed most of your stuff like your clothes, computer, and the things on your shelves. Your furniture’s a loss, and so’s your TV and stuff, but we got the important stuff out, I think.”
I leaned against the truck. “Shit. There were a couple of photo albums, and?—”
“Got ’em,” she said, no hint of mirth in her tone. “And their urns. They’re safe. No damage.”
The prickle hitting my eyes this time wasn’t from smoke, it was relief.
It was also what now choked me up. “Thank you, Lilah,” I managed. “Seriously, even if I lost everything else, those were the most important.”
“Well, you didn’t,” she said. “I heard the call-out on the radio and phoned Emmy. She was at home and she grabbed my truck and called a few people and dove in there. It started on the far end of the building but was mostly out by the time I arrived. They broke in through the back sliders to salvage stuff.”
“Jesus.” I wouldn’t be the first firefighter to lose everything while fighting to save someone else’s home, but damn, it could’ve been a lot worse. “Anyone hurt?”
“Not even any pets,” she assured me. “Everyone got out safe, and the Red Cross is already helping people.”
“Okay.” I sniffled back unexpected tears. “Thank you.”
“Hey, you don’t owe us anything. She’s putting everything in our garage except for the albums and urns. She said they’ll stay on the kitchen counter until you get home. We’ll figure out the rest later. Okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
I ended the call and returned the trooper’s cell. The captain looked at me. “How bad?”
“Not nearly as bad as it could’ve been.”
Emmy
The four of us took maybe twenty minutes to load our vehicles after getting the okay to go in.
I might have stretched the truth and said Jack was my boyfriend. Since I knew some of the firefighters, and I knew the deputy on the scene through Lilah, we got away with it.
We dumped clothes into garbage bags while I focused first on the albums and urns, which I knew from our previous visits were the only things he’d truly care about. Once I had carefully tucked them in the passenger seat of the truck, I helped empty as much as we could save, including using his clothes and towels to pad his collectibles so they wouldn’t get damaged.
Thankfully, he didn’t have a fraction of the stuff we did.
I’m glad I was the one taking point on his bedroom closet, though, because at the bottom of it, I found a duffle bag. It was heavy. When I unzipped it, I realized what was in it, quickly zipped it again, and personally carried it to the truck where I shoved it into the passenger-side footwell.
Two hours later, I sat on the floor of our spare bedroom with a cold beer in my hand and unzipped the smoky-smelling bag. Out came coils of rope in various colors, several books on bondage, and then…
My face heated as I fingered the soft leather flogger. I knew about them,duh, but aside from kinky videos and books, I had not actually handled one before.
I set it aside and removed a riding crop, rattan cane, a small wooden paddle, and a blue acrylic paddle. Laid out on the floor, the belated realization hit me that our philosophical conversations were absolutely rooted in reality, not just hypotheticals.
