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Originally Buzz had tried to play matchmaker and wanted her to go out with one of them, but it hadn’t worked. They all viewed each other more as siblings and well, that was that. Megan might not have her own blood family, but she had an oddball group of men acting as uncles and big brothers watching over her.
Now she wasn’t so sure.
Megan eyed the older man and remembered all of the times when they would ride together on errands. He would always be behind the wheel, singing along to a country music station on the radio, off-key but not missing a single word. When he sang the old classics, Megan couldn’t help but join in, especially when he sang “Jolene.”
Today he was in uniform, but normally he preferred casual clothes like his old Station Three sweatshirt under his tried-and-true Carhartt jacket. His skin was worn, and he looked every bit the seasoned firefighter that people would expect, unlike her.
She couldn’t look him in the eyes, so she studied his hands. Thick like baseball gloves, they had a smattering of thin white scars, and there was a faded tattoo that peeked out from under his plain golden wedding band. Both were a testament to a lifetime of hard work and a strong marriage to his wife Judy, who was a secretary at a local doctor’s office and was tough as old nails.
He looked gruff, a man worn by the harsh Montana winters and a hard life in the outdoors, but Megan knew from personal experience, he was a giant teddy bear who cared deeply for everyone at Station Three. She also knew he did not suffer fools.
“Am I b-being fired?” She cringed when the stutter came back and tried not to sniff, but figured it was better than a big ball of snot coming down. Pathetic. She was just pathetic.
“No. But you need to be honest with me. What in the hell is wrong?”
And that was when Megan burst into tears.
She held her head in her hands, but it did little to hide the gut-wrenching sobs. His arms came around her, smelling like a mix of stale coffee, Old Spice, and the occasional cigarette.
“Is it about your school applications…or that boy you were with that night?” Buzz’s voice had taken on a different tone. Somewhere between gentle to her but with the vague promise of a threat toward whoever may have hurt her.
Megan stopped and let out a rueful laugh. “You always were a great shot.”
He stepped back and looked her up and down. The look in his eye was disapproving and worried, but at least his ire wasn’t directed at her anymore.
“Let’s go in the office.”
Megan followed him into his space in the back. There was wood paneling from the eighties when the station was last renovated. The whole space smelled like stale coffee and printer ink, which wasn’t a surprise considering the paperwork that went through here.
“Now, pop a squat and cut the crap.”
Megan sunk into the old wooden chair opposite his desk and took a deep sigh and looked at the linoleum floor. It was outdated, but waxed and clean, a testament to how hard they all worked to keep this place up.
There was so much to say, and she didn’t know where to start.
When the fire had happened as a child, she was the only survivor. No one understood how. The local news referred to her as a miracle baby. Her mom, dad, and siblings had all died in a fire started by a Christmas tree. She had only been an infant at the time. All she had were the pictures, music box, and secondhand stories. She had always wanted to have a normal family, but never had gone without the love, support, and guidance that others might. Her grandma had been such a wonderful influence and raised her as her own without missing a beat. She had enrolled in music and dance lessons, tutoring, and scouts where she had gone on her first camping trip.
It was there Megan learned why she had survived.
A bunch of the girls sat around the campfire toasting marshmallows and making s’mores. Her grandma was off to the side talking with the other moms. Grandma had always insisted on chaperoning any overnight trips. Megan resented it during her teenage years, but always understood why. After so much loss, her grandma couldn’t take any risks.
On that day, Megan and a bunch of the other seven-year-olds took turns running their hands through the flames of the campfire, each daring the others to get closer and closer until the smell of burned arm hair mixed with the caramelized sugar of the marshmallows.
Aware of fire safety—it was priority one for her grandma—Megan had eyed her grandma when the time had come for her turn. She put her hand near the fire and felt nothing. The other girls giggled and cheered her on in hushed whispers with squeals of disbelief when she put her hand in the coals and grabbed a log. Another girl, Lila, the bully of the group, was not to be outdone. She tried to pull the same stunt, screaming in pain when the fire burned her straight through. Of course she blamed Megan. At the time, Megan was too stunned from her own experience to defend herself.
Her grandma had freaked out. Absolutely lost it. She got the lecture of a lifetime on the way home. It wasn’t more than a few months before Megan found an old birthday candle and smuggled it up to her room. Late at night with the window cracked so as to avoid setting off all of the smoke detectors—Grandma had one in every room—Megan practiced touching the flame over and over. When it was burned to the base and she could no longer light it, only then did she start to understand the impossible.
Fire didn’t burn her. Or rather, she couldn’t burn.
She had extinguished the flames with her thumb and forefinger so many times, but there was no evidence of pain or discoloration. The only sign she had touched it was the smear of black soot around her nail.
It was then she realized why she had been the only one who had survived the house fire. She didn’t know why she had this ability, and never had told another soul until last year when she had told Laura after seeing her friend’s ability for herself.
Laura had responded to Megan seeing her use her ability just like Megan would’ve if caught. She tried to leave in the dead of night, running away with her son, Holden, from everyone she had ever known because Megan had witnessed her ability to heal. As it was, revealing that secret had led to her now blissfully happy marriage.
Megan had shared her truth too as a show of understanding. She and Laura had been best of friends before, but the experience brought them closer than ever. Neither one knew how or why they had the powers they did, and both had chosen professions that allowed them to use their power to help others. Both of them also felt they could take more risks, but there was a darker side too.
During one of their talks at the tea shop, both Megan and Laura confided in each other the same sort of guilt and impostor syndrome. Their colleagues that did the same jobs without the same insurance were the real heroes. She was a fake with a secret up her sleeve.
