Backdraft…

“Dude, are you even listening to me?” Golden demanded, and I held up a hand. He shut up, and I diverted the rest of my attention fully to the couple at the table nearby.

The dude held her hands in the middle of the table and was talking to her in low and earnest tones but her eyes were too wide, glassy with shock, and I knew the look. I'd felt it myself only a few weeks ago, as one of the guys at the firehouse had told me the same thing that I would bet my last paycheck that this guy was telling her.

Cheater.

“Look, I’m sorry, I… I never expected things to go this far, but being with you… I’m sorry, Lillian; it just showed me how much I love her. Reminded me why I fell in love with her in the first place.”

The woman abruptly pulled her hands from his and put them in her lap, those wide, storm-chased blue eyes of hers finally letting loose, twin crystalline tears slipping over the careful makeup she’d put on before their date, tracking mascara down her cheeks.

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” she uttered, her voice hollow, and I knew that feeling, too. I put things together with lightning speed.

This guy was breaking up with his side chick and the side chick had absolutely no idea there even was a main.

Holy shit.

That was a new kind of low, even for me.

“Did I just hear that dude say what I think I did?” Golden demanded, and I held up a hand and waved him off. Aly’s face was set in surprise as I abruptly walked away from the table. Yale held his girl practically in his lap, protectively, and I was struck by how this piece of shit should be doing the same to the petite little thing across from him. Instead, he was smashing her heart with a ball-peen hammer, and in one of the most humiliating ways possible, to boot.

The motion of my stalking away from our table caught those devastated blue eyes of hers and she made eye contact with me. I got the full brunt of the pain she was desperately trying to mask and god, wasn’t that a familiar ache?

My heart went out to her, and I read clearly the pleading in her eyes for me not to intercede, but chose to misinterpret it. I couldn’t ignore what was going on right in front of me. I wouldn’t. Some pains were indeed private, but she needed to get the hell away from this guy, like yesterday.

“I’ll be back later,” I muttered at Golden who’d kept pace with me, and with a shrug, he broke off and went back to his beer. He didn’t say a word; neither did Blaze, who I caught out of the corner of my eye, leaning back on his stool. They both knew better.

I stopped next to the woman and eyed the sleazebag. She was pointedly not looking at me, but I had to give her big ups. She wasn’t looking at the table, either. She was looking the douche right in his eyes, and I could see the high spots of color on her cheeks, even beneath her muddy makeup. She was angry, and she had every fucking right to be.

Who the fuck did somebody like that?

The guy was trying like hell to remain friends or some shit – I wasn’t really paying attention. I was all about the woman. She was staring up at me now, a spark of defiance in her eyes as the man tried to wave me off saying, “We’re fine right now; can’t you see we’re talking?”

“One, I’m not your waiter,” I said. “And two, are you all right, ma’am?”

“No,” she said, calmly and strongly.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked.

“I would very much like to go home,” she said, evenly and politely.

“I think I can help you with that,” I said and held down a hand. She stared at it with only a moment’s hesitation, then took it, and I helped her to her feet. She dragged her little purse up after her and hung it off her shoulder and the dude’s hand flashed out, circling around her slender wrist.

Instant rage flared deep in my chest, just like my damn namesake, even though it wasn’t precisely what I was named for. A backdraft is when a fire starts in a sealed room and it damn-near burns itself out, right? Because it’s used up all the oxygen as fuel. Then someone, like a firefighter, like me, goes and opens the door. Suddenly, the fire is introduced to all of this oxygen ‒ its main food source‒ and it flares back to life, explodes, is meaner than it ever was and larger than life.

I felt that. All that pent-up anger and pissed-off at Torrid and what she’d done to me – to us, flared hot and dangerous and threatened to chew through this motherfucker alive.

I did what I did best. I fought the fire, poured reason on it like water, and went very still and controlled.

“Let her go,” I said, and I think he picked up on my tone because the cage of his fingers released and I drew her away from him, put her behind me, and squared off, facing the guy, looking down on him from all six-foot-four-inches of my height.

He shrank back in his seat and it was a good call. I raked a hand back through my own light brown hair and said, “You fucked up, tossed her aside, now you’ve got to live with that,” I told him. I heard her suck in a breath behind me and turned. “Come on. I’ll get you home.”

“Yes, please; thank you.”

She turned, back straight and marched for the door in front of me.

“Yo, Backdraft, seriously?” Golden called, and I barked back over my shoulder at him, “Later!”

She reached the front door of the Ten-Thirteen before I did and dragged it open, stepping out fluidly and stopping at the curb. She put her hands on her knees and dragged in breath after breath, as if she was trying very hard not to throw up. I went up to her, stood beside her, and told her, “He’s not worth it.”

“I know that!” she snapped, and I didn’t take it personal. I knew. It was a different sort of thing when you knew.

“I’ll get you a cab,” I grated and went out to the street, raising a hand, and bellowed “Taxi!” The one I called to rolled right on by, ignoring me completely, and I cursed.

“Lillian!”

“Just leave me alone, Mark!” she barked and I cursed again, under my breath, and went back between the cars to the curb and stepped back up on it.

“Please, just listen to me; don’t be like this!” he was saying.

Oh, hell no… like she did something wrong?

“Just. Leave. Me. Alone, Mark.” She was shaking but he was going to be persistent, and I finally stepped up, gently took her elbow and said, “Come on, I’ll give you a ride myself.”

“Thank you,” she said over Mark’s indignant scoff and she let me tow her to the alley where my bike was waiting, third in line. I went to it, and held out my helmet to her. She took it and put it on without batting an eye.

Okay, we are doing this.

I flung a leg over the front of my Harley and stuck the key in it, giving it a twist and hitting the switch with my thumb to start her up. She chugged to life and Mark, who had followed us, opened his mouth to protest. I had something for his ass, twisting the throttle to make my baby roar.

The woman, Lillian, jumped slightly and I pulled my bike up off her kickstand and heeled it back up into place. I dropped down onto the seat and held out a hand to help Lil up behind me. She got on without hesitation, but wobbled slightly on her heels. She found the footrests and settled in, putting her arms around me.

Mark took a halfhearted step towards us, in his suit that was probably worth more than I made last month, and I didn’t let him get any further or in our way. I switched on the headlamp to combat the dark, put my baby in gear, and took us down the alley and to the street, pausing for a break in between the cages rolling by.

Traffic was light this time of night, so I took us out and into the flow of traffic away from the douchebag pretty quickly. As soon as we hit the next stoplight, I turned enough to call out, “Where am I taking you?”

“The Echelon building!”

“What, that big black tower?”

“Yes, the big black tower,” she said dispassionately and I gave a shrug. I couldn’t tell where her bitterness was coming from; what it was about the building. If I had to guess, maybe it was where they’d met or something. She’d been polite-but-stiff with me to this point, but I got the impression the ‘stiff’ had to do more with her utter humiliation at the hands of that ass than anything else.

“You’re the boss!” I called back to her, and checked between buildings at the skyline to orient myself and figure out what side streets to take in the direction of the obsidian monstrosity that’d been built.

I hated it for a few reasons. One: that they’d built it pretty much solely to cater to the rich and famous. Two: that the city had contracted with the developers that in any kind of emergency, the Indigo City Fire department, which included my ladder, was to go door-to-door checking on residents.

Yeah, at seventy-six floors, anywhere from four to twelve apartments per floor, you do the math. Still, if the woman on the back of my motorcycle lived in the Echelon, I wanted to know, just who was she? That place was reserved for the crème de la crème. Just about everyone and everything the working man could possibly hate about the rich was embodied by that building and those who lived in it. So who the hell was she?

I pulled up under the overhang in front of the place to a shocked look from the doorman and some disgusted looks from some of the tower-goers, and got my cheap thrill for the night. The woman, Lillian, got down off the back of my bike and undid the chinstrap on my helmet. She held it out to me and said, “Thank you.” She didn’t look like a ‘Lillian’ to me. The name was so stiff and formal, when she didn’t give off that entitled sort of vibe.

“Don’t mention it,” I told her, and before I could ask if she was gonna be okay, she turned and flashed a card on a lanyard at the doorman, who nodded and dragged open the big glass door for her. She clipped across the black marble lobby to the glowing line of fancy optic turnstiles barring the banks of elevators and scanned the card against the black box for it. The LED-lit arrows switched directions, allowing her access, and she walked up to the elevators and pressed her card against the RFID reader below the touchscreen panel. The doors on the nearest car slid open.

She looked back at me over her shoulder, inclined her head, hesitated a moment, but finally stepped into the car, the doors gliding shut, the rectangle of light disappearing, along with her elongated shadow on the expensive, black marble floor. I found myself wondering if our paths would ever cross again.

It wasn’t likely. She was guaranteed to be too rich for my blood, clearly, living in a place like this. I shook my head and put on my helmet that was resting forgotten in my hands. I resisted the urge to ask the doorman what her last name was, and took off back into the flow of traffic. I couldn’t blame her for just wanting to go home. Suddenly, all I wanted to do was the same.