Chapter Text
The phone starts ringing somewhere in the dark.
For several long seconds, Tommy doesn’t move. Sleep still has him by the throat, thick and disorienting, and the sound folds strangely into the half-formed static of dreams before his brain finally recognizes it for what it is: his cell phone vibrating across the nightstand.
Tommy opens his eyes to a darkened bedroom washed in pale strips of streetlight leaking through the blinds. The ceiling above him swims out of focus before slowly sharpening into something recognizable. There’s a body pressed against his side, warm and unfamiliar. A bare arm across his waist. The faint smell of sweat, soap, and stale whiskey hanging in the room.
Memory arrives slowly after that, not in clean images but in fragments that feel increasingly embarrassing the longer he lies there trying to reconstruct them.
A crowded bar in West Hollywood packed shoulder-to-shoulder with men too young to remember life before social media.
Too much bourbon.
Music loud enough to rattle his ribs.
A laugh Tommy vaguely recalls forcing out because silence would have required honesty.
Some kid with sun-flushed skin and bright blond curls touching Tommy’s wrist like he’d already decided he was going home with him.
Tommy had let him.
That part settles unpleasantly in his stomach now.
At forty-one years old, he should probably be past nights like that. Past standing at a bar pretending three fingers of bourbon can sand down the sharper edges of loneliness. Past going home with beautiful strangers because the alternative is returning to an empty house and sitting alone with thoughts he doesn’t particularly want to have.
But grief has a way of lowering standards.
Not just for other people.
For yourself.
He remembers the Lyft ride back to his place in pieces: streetlights sliding across the windows, the kid pressed against his side in the backseat, the smell of cologne and whiskey and summer sweat. He remembers fumbling with his keys at the front door while someone laughed softly against his neck. He remembers clothes dropped carelessly across the hallway and bedroom floor.
And afterward—
Sex that had felt less like desire and more like trying to outrun his own head long enough to fall asleep unconscious.
Now the room smells stale with it.
The bourbon.
The sweat.
The lingering evidence of a night Tommy already knows he would rather forget.
And now—
The phone keeps ringing.
Tommy drags a hand over his face and reaches blindly toward the nightstand, expecting spam, a dispatch error, maybe Harbor asking him to cover an early shift.
Instead, the screen lights up with a name he hasn’t seen calling him in almost a year.
Chimney.
That cuts through the fog instantly.
Tommy pushes himself upright, the sheets sliding down his waist as adrenaline clears the last residue of sleep from his system. The man beside him stirs again, curls smashed flat on one side from the pillow, but doesn’t wake.
Tommy swings his legs over the side of the bed and answers the call before the ringing can wake the whole damn house.
Not hello.
Not even Chim.
Just: “Chimney, what’s up?”
There’s breathing on the other end. Fast enough that Tommy notices it immediately.
“Tommy. Thank God.”
The words land awkwardly between them.
Not because they’re dramatic. Because they aren’t the kind of words people say after nearly a year of silence unless something has gone catastrophically wrong.
Tommy stands and walks out of the bedroom, pulling the door mostly shut behind him as he moves into the hallway. The hardwood floors are cool beneath his feet. The house feels enormous at one in the morning, every room carrying its own pocket of darkness.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
Chimney doesn’t answer immediately.
Tommy hears movement on the other end instead. Footsteps. A door shutting somewhere. Like Chimney is trying not to wake Maddie while simultaneously trying not to come apart.
Then: “They’re not answering.”
Tommy slows near the kitchen. “Who’s not answering?”
A pause stretches too long before Chimney says, “Buck and Eddie.”
Something in Tommy’s chest tightens hard enough to hurt.
Not panic. Not yet.
But something precise and immediate all the same.
He reaches the kitchen counter and braces one hand against it, staring out through the darkened windows into the backyard he can barely see. “How long?”
“Over twelve hours.” Chimney’s voice sounds thin now, stretched too tightly over something fraying underneath. “No calls. No texts. Their phones are both going straight to voicemail.”
Tommy says nothing.
Twelve hours could mean a dozen different things.
Dead battery.
Bad reception.
Car trouble somewhere rural.
But Chimney didn’t call him after twelve hours because of a dead battery.
“They were driving back from the Firefighting Games in Nashville,” Chimney continues. “Buck didn’t want to fly home, so he rented a car instead and talked Eddie into driving back to Los Angeles with him so they could take turns behind the wheel.”
That detail settles heavily.
A rental car means no familiar route. No expected stops. No one paying attention if they disappear somewhere between one state line and the next.
“We’ve been trying to track them down for hours,” Chimney says. “There haven’t been any accident reports matching anything they could be driving, and we don’t even know what kind of car they rented. Athena’s already working through every rental car kiosk at Nashville International Airport, Maddie’s talking to dispatch, but it’s like they just—”
He cuts himself off abruptly.
Tommy closes his eyes briefly.
The discomfort between them is impossible to ignore now that the initial shock has passed. It sits in every pause, every sentence that feels half a step too careful. Before tonight, the last time Tommy heard Chimney’s voice had been at Bobby Nash’s funeral. Before that, things had already been strained. Not hostile. Never hostile.
Just… neglected.
The kind of silence that accumulates naturally after a breakup, and after people start making quiet, unspoken decisions about where they stand, who they keep close, and who they let drift without ever having to say it out loud. Chimney had stopped calling, and Tommy hadn’t exactly made any effort to close that distance either. Months had slipped by in that easy, unremarkable way avoidance does—each of them telling themselves it was temporary, something they’d circle back to when things weren’t so complicated, until it quietly stopped feeling temporary at all.
And now here they are.
Talking at one in the morning because Evan Buckley is missing.
“Maddie’s freaking out,” Chimney says suddenly, the words coming faster now. “I mean really freaking out, Tommy. And I know this is weird, okay? I know things are—” He stops himself. Starts over. “I just needed to ask if maybe you’d heard from him.”
Not Buck.
Him.
Tommy notices the shift in Chimney’s wording, but he doesn’t linger on it, doesn’t assign it meaning beyond urgency and stress bleeding through a late-night phone call. Still, something about it tightens the space in his chest anyway, a reflex he doesn’t quite have time to examine.
“Evan?” Tommy says quietly, almost before he realizes he’s said it at all.
There’s a brief exhale on the other end of the line, rough with exhaustion rather than irritation.
“Yeah,” Chimney says, correcting himself without force, like the name isn’t the point so much as the answer he’s trying to get to. “Have you heard from him?”
Tommy looks down at the dark granite counter beneath his hand, at the faint reflection of nothing useful in its surface.
The honest answer should be simple.
No.
But the truth attached to it feels uglier than that.
Because Chimney isn’t asking under the illusion that Tommy and Evan are secretly together again. He knows better. Everybody does. The breakup had burned too hot and too publicly for misunderstandings.
Still, desperation makes people reach toward old possibilities they would normally know better than to touch.
And Tommy understands exactly how desperate Chimney must be to call him at all.
“No,” Tommy says at last. “I haven’t.”
Silence presses hard against the line.
Then Chimney asks, quieter this time, “Nothing at all?”
Tommy swallows once. “Nothing.”
Another pause follows, thick with everything neither of them particularly wants to examine.
Tommy hasn’t heard from Evan since Bobby’s funeral.
Not a text.
Not a phone call.
Not even one of the awkward almost-conversations that happen after people break up but haven’t fully detached yet.
Nothing.
Because they had already tried twice to make whatever existed between them work, and Tommy hadn’t possessed the energy—or maybe the faith—to survive finding out whether a third attempt would fail too.
Chimney exhales shakily into the silence. “Okay,” he says quickly. “Okay, I shouldn’t have called. I know it’s late and this is probably insane and I just—” His voice catches unexpectedly.
Tommy straightens slightly.
“I just don’t know what to do,” Chimney admits in a rush, words beginning to trip over each other. “Maddie’s crying, Athena’s trying to keep everybody calm, nobody can find them and I thought maybe if Buck reached out to anybody maybe it would’ve been—”
He stops abruptly.
Tommy can practically hear him realizing what he almost said.
“I’m sorry,” Chimney says, sounding exhausted now. “I shouldn’t have dragged you into this.”
“Hey.” Tommy cuts across the apology before Chimney can bury himself any deeper inside it. The line goes quiet. Tommy rubs a hand against the back of his neck and stares toward the dark hallway leading deeper into the house. “I’m glad you called.”
There’s genuine confusion in Chimney’s silence after that. Then, carefully: “You are?”
“Yeah,” Tommy says softly. “I am.” The words settle between them with more honesty than comfort. “Whatever happened between me and Evan,” Tommy continues after a moment, “I still care about him.”
Chimney doesn’t respond immediately. When he finally speaks again, his voice has gone frighteningly small. “I don’t know what to do.”
Tommy shuts his eyes. That helplessness, at least, he recognizes instantly.
Then Chimney whispers, so quietly Tommy almost misses it: “What if something happened to them?”
The question hangs there like something alive.
Tommy inhales slowly before answering. “Don’t do that to yourself yet.”
“I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“I know.” Tommy’s voice lowers. “But right now all we know is they’re missing. That’s it. Don’t start turning missing into dead before we have a reason to.”
Chimney breathes unevenly on the other end of the line.
Tommy pushes away from the counter and walks slowly toward the back of the house, every nerve in his body suddenly awake now. “I’ll look into it,” he says.
“You will?”
“Yeah.”
A pause.
“Tommy… what exactly does that mean?”
Tommy stops in the middle of the hallway. Not because he’s hiding something. Not because he’s some deeply buried mystery waiting to be uncovered. He’s a Harbor pilot. A regular guy with a three-bedroom house, an ex he hasn’t spoken to in nearly a year, and a stranger cooling the other side of his bed.
But he also knows there’s no point saying anything else until he knows whether he can actually help. Right now, explanations would only waste time.
“I’ll call you back,” he says.
And before Chimney can ask another question, Tommy ends the call.
#
Silence rushes in, immediate and heavy.
The house feels different in it. Too still. Too large. A space that is normally just a quiet, ordinary house now feels cavernous, as if the walls have moved farther apart without asking permission.
The house is dark, lit only by faint spill from streetlights outside and the muted glow of a clock somewhere he doesn’t look at. Three bedrooms line the hall—empty now except for one.
The bedroom door is slightly ajar. He pushes it open.
The man in his bed is awake, propped on one elbow, blinking slowly into the low light as he tries to orient himself. Sleep hasn’t fully left his face yet, but awareness is catching up in pieces, drifting in unevenly like something he can’t quite decide how to step into.
Tommy stands there for a second, taking him in without really meaning to. Young, he registers distantly. Younger than him, anyway. Blond hair flattened on one side from the pillow, the rest pushed into careless angles. There’s a familiarity to the scene that should feel easy, almost routine, but it doesn’t land that way now.
He doesn’t remember asking his name.
That thought arrives belatedly, with a faint, uncomfortable lag, as if it belongs to a different version of the night entirely. It doesn’t matter much in the moment—didn’t matter then, either, apparently—but it settles anyway, an absent detail that makes the edges of everything feel slightly less anchored than they should.
He looks at Tommy first, not the room, not the situation.
Just him.
Tommy doesn’t linger on it. “I need you to go,” he says simply. There’s no sharpness in it, no apology either. Just clarity.
The man studies him for a beat longer, reading tone more than words. Whatever he sees there is enough. He exhales softly, swings his legs out of bed, and stands. He doesn’t ask questions. Doesn’t try to fill in gaps. He just starts getting dressed, moving with an unhurried efficiency that suggests this isn’t unfamiliar territory for him. Shirt first. Then jeans. Then the small, practiced reassembly of someone returning to the outside world after a night that won’t mean much in daylight.
Tommy stays where he is, leaning lightly against the doorframe, watching only as much as he needs to confirm the moment is done.
When the man is fully dressed, he pauses near the doorway.
Looks at Tommy, briefly, like he’s checking whether this is personal or just procedural.
Tommy meets his gaze without softening it.
After a beat, the man nods once, small and understanding in a way that doesn’t require explanation, and walks out.
Tommy hears the front door open, then close.
And then the house settles again.
Not into peace—just into absence.
He stands in the hallway for a few seconds longer than necessary, letting the quiet reassert itself, letting the shift complete.
Then he moves.
Not toward the front door.
Toward the back of the house.
The garage door opens with a low mechanical groan, the sound breaking the silence like something carefully sealed being unsealed. Cold air meets him immediately. The space is orderly in a way that feels almost deliberate. Tools lined along the walls. Storage bins stacked with care. A vehicle he rarely uses sitting under stillness, everything in its place like nothing here has ever needed to be rushed.
In the far corner sits a safe.
Tommy crosses the space and drops to one knee in front of it.
He doesn’t rush. Doesn’t hesitate either. He just looks at it for a moment, like confirming something only he can see.
Then he opens it.
Inside is less than it should feel like it is, and more than it needs to be.
A burner phone rests there, dark and inert until he lifts it out. It feels colder than it should in his hand, or maybe that’s just him noticing temperature more than usual. He turns it over once, as if confirming it’s still real, still functional, still something that belongs to a life he doesn’t usually let overlap with the one he lives in Los Angeles.
He powers it on.
The screen wakes almost immediately, too bright in the dimness of the garage, a small rectangle of artificial light cutting through everything else. No contacts. No messages. Just a clean interface that looks almost indifferent to the weight of what it’s being asked to do.
Tommy doesn’t move for a moment.
Then he dials.
The number goes in without hesitation, muscle memory he doesn’t examine closely enough to name.
He lifts the phone to his ear. It rings.
Once.
Twice.
A third time, stretching the silence in the garage into something that feels longer than it should.
Tommy watches nothing while he waits, eyes unfocused somewhere in front of him, aware only of the sound and the way it fills the space around him without asking permission.
On the fourth ring, someone answers.
A man’s voice. Awake. Controlled. No greeting. Just presence on the line.
Tommy doesn’t offer one either.
Instead, he says, “You told me that if I ever needed help…”