Chapter 8: Tate

My heart poundsas I lock Natasha’s bedroom door behind me and then I throw her on the bed like she’s a 25 lb sack of flour and not a grown, curvy, very sexy woman. My breathing is slow and heavy. I feel like a goddamn predator about to go in for the kill and I fucking love it. I’m not thinking clearly, because my plan to get the information out of her is a fucking crime. She can’t fight back, Tate. Once you give her what she wants, she’ll calm down. Just get her relaxed until then.

Once I throw her on the bed, Natasha launches herself at me like she has any chance of getting past a giant man who played football in high school. Shit, even if I slept my way through school, my size would have been enough to stop her. She slams into me like a wall and I hear the wind get sucked out of her lungs as she almost falls backward.

I stop her from falling but throw her onto her bed. It’s one of those standard issue apartment beds with four short posts I can easily tie her up to. I don’t know why the thought enters my head so quickly, but the intrusive thought seems like the best damn way to stop her fighting, so I let it take me. She grunts and fights me off with all her strength, but honestly she’s so fucking small in comparison to me that it’s easy for me to keep her pinned to the bed with one hand while I use various thongs from her pile of unfolded laundry to secure her four limbs to the bed.

Natasha throws the worst verbal jabs she can think of the entire time I get her limbs tied to the bed, but I don’t even give a shit anymore about what she calls me. I’m going to get the truth out of Natasha. I don’t care if she calls me a maniac… Which isn’t even the worst thing she calls me. My roommate is brutal. She’s lucky she doesn’t wake Terrorist up or we would have a huge mess on our hands.

Once I get Natasha secure, I have to wait a whole fifteen minutes before she calms the fuck down. She tires herself out screaming at me and just lies there on the bed huffing like an angry pig.

“You must be sober by now,” I tell her. “Which hopefully means you have the good sense to stop messing around with me and confess. I don’t like the idea of you running around with my secrets.”

“You are a psycho,” she responds tiredly before grunting again and giving one last fight against the binds. I like her tied to the bed. She’s getting more calm by the second from all the fighting she did. Natasha is so fucking cute.

And she really tuckered herself out with all that unnecessary fighting. I was just trying to get her nice and secure. She gasps for breath desperately and looks at me with pure rage like she wants to spit on me. I wish she would spit on my dick… That woman is so fucking hot.

“I’m not a psycho. It’s called being fair…”

Natasha wriggles like she’s going to escape again, pointing her ass in the air like that’s going to help her get free from bondage. It won’t work, but wiggling her ass like that makes me beyond tempted to smack the shit out of it and teach her another lesson. I step closer to the bed as she keeps wiggling and just when I’m close enough to smack the shit out of Natasha’s sweet butt, my firefighter pager buzzes out of control.

Natasha emits a knowing squeal.

“TATE!” she squeaks.

“Shit…”

Natasha screams again, but I don’t have time to respond to her. To get her free, I would have to get a knife out of the kitchen and cut her loose. I dulled all the knives last week practicing throwing them at a tree outside. No time to explain why. I have to get down to the station. Major snowstorm emergency. Fuck.

“You had better not leave me tied up, Tate!” Natasha screams.

What does she expect me to do? Hopefully, it will be a cat stuck in a tree and I’ll be back within the hour.

“Sorry, babe. I don’t have time. Gotta run.”

My instincts take over and I don’t think about Natasha for a second before I race out of our home. Our small town fire department relies on all of us working as a team and putting each other first, even when we have a sexy black roommate tied to the bed calling us fifteen different names we want to punish her for.

Natasha keeps screaming her head off in the background as I race to the truck and drive to the station. Once I get outside, I can’t hear her. Luckily, she has Terrorist for company, although I can’t remember if I left the door open for him to get into the room…

Our engine moves like a unit after a short period of time working together. We all just want to get the job done and it helps that we were rated the tallest small town fire department in the county at the last fair. I suit up and get into the passenger seat before I even find out exactly what the call is about. The chief lets me know once I get in.

Natasha is definitely going to kill me once she finds out why her ass will be tied up in bed all night with no chance of escape until I return. I want to harbor the delusional belief that I can keep the secret, but another fire breaking out during another record-breaking snowstorm is definitely going to make local news. Nothing really happens around here, so I am definitely fucked.

When it’s time to spring into action, I put everything out of my head except for doing the right thing. I’m one of the biggest guys around, so it’s my job to throw burning 2x4’s aside. This is going to be insane when it hits the press. I’m one of the first guys to enter the burning building and I rescue the first two people I can get my hands on.

Both the teenagers I find can both breathe, even if they can’t walk on their own, which makes me more confident that we’ll get all the survivors out of there before the mansion experiences major structural collapse. Once I get the victims of the fire out on the lawn, I realize the rumors are true.

Our state senator’s kid is definitely involved too. Holy shit. I thought the guys on the truck were bluffing and being goddamn perverts, but apparently, I was wrong.

Apparently, all the teenagers in town believed that the snowstorms coinciding with the eclipse created some magical astrological event and the eighteen and nineteen year olds at the local high school signed a pregnancy pact which they were acting out in some big orgy gone wrong in the state senator’s basement. Shit went wrong, a joint caught a linen curtain on fire and everything was fucked up beyond recognition. We might not even be able to salvage the basement.

The state senator’s daughter, an eighteen year old prom queen who looks like she belongs in a knitting circle, not a sex circle, was apparently the ring leader. I hate the thought of someone that young having sex. I know it’s technically legal, but it’s gross now that I’m this close to thirty. The poor girl is half naked in an angel costume with a blanket around her back while she coughs on the lawn. This shit is grim.

Holy fuck, some people are going to be in big trouble.

The cops are already on the scene by the time I get two more people out and the chief demands I take a break from smoke inhalation and get a headcount of the reckless teenagers we have out on the lawn. The state senator’s daughter stands in tears before Zedekiah and Kane Strangeway, who are both the last people a new adult would want to confess her dirty secrets to. I feel bad for the poor kids, even if they’re clearly freaks.

I can’t imagine having to hear that gross shit about a teenager. Maybe that’s more of a job for Fletcher Sweeney. I heard there was quite the age difference between him and his wife. Fletcher, unfortunately, is occupied with the more important task of commanding all the officers around and likely preparing for all hell to break loose when the senator gets back from… wherever he is.

By the time we get the fire put out, there has to be more than two feet of snow on the ground. The basement and half the first floor are fucked, but nobody died. A few kids are in bad condition, but not critical. I can’t feel my fingers or anything on my face. I briefly wonder what Natasha might be up to, but I get distracted again by Fletcher Sweeney demanding I walk over and explain exactly what compromising materials I saw when I first walked into the blazing mansion.

Everyone knows this shit is gonna be a big scandal and they want to get ahead of it. I can’t say I blame them, but I wasn’t worried about a scandal when I was out there saving lives.

When I honestly respond that I was focused on moving bodies, not evidence, he mutters something rude about firefighters being “more dimwitted” than the police force. I get it, he’s stressed out about how he’s going to explain a teen sex cult to the most powerful man in our small town after the mayor…

Just when I think it couldn’t get worse, a lifted Ford F-150 with our local newspaper’s logo printed on the side skids through the snow and stops in front of the charred mansion. The teenagers impulsively huddle together behind the cops for protection. Bright LED lights sweep across the snowy embankment before the truck comes to a dead stop.

I hate the goddamn press. Three reporters jump out of the truck, suited up in ridiculous winter costumes like they’re going skiing and not possibly stumbling upon someone’s personal tragedy. Luckily, no one seems to have died from the activities in the basement, but a lot of kids might not make it through the night once their parents find out they were involved…

The cops attempt to form a barricade around the teenagers, but one of them inexplicably breaks free, completely naked romping through the snow and says, “It’s a free country! It’s a free country!”

Well. That answers the unspoken question about whether drugs were involved or not…

Why do I feel like we’re going to be here all damn night? Natasha is going to kill me when I finally set her free.

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