Hate me harder

The fire

Something was burning. Mara was sure she'd not had any flammables left carelessly, or was it in her dream? But the smoke felt too real to be a dream. If it wasn't a dream that means something was burning — she sprung out of her bed and then could hear the sirens in the street. There was a fire and it was in her very building and she was stuck.

Alarm bells were going off and she was trying hard not to panic despite the fumes filling her lungs.

She dropped to the floor the way she'd been told to do as a child — get low, stay below the smoke — and crawled toward her bedroom door. She pressed her palm flat against it before opening it. Hot. Not scalding but warm enough to make her pull her hand back and rethink.

The window then.

She grabbed her phone from the nightstand and her feet found the floor and she moved, crouching low, eyes burning, the smoke thicker in the hallway than she'd expected. She could hear the fire now — not just smell it. A low hungry sound beneath the wailing of the alarms, coming from below, from the flat underneath hers.

Her window stuck the way it always stuck — swollen frame, Lagos humidity, the same complaint she'd lodged with building management twice and been ignored twice — and she shoved it with both palms until it gave and the night air rushed in, cool and sharp against her smoke-stung face.

She leaned out.

Two floors down. The street below was already chaos — fire engines, blue and red light strobing across the faces of neighbours gathered on the pavement in their nightclothes. Someone looked up and saw her and shouted something she couldn't hear over the noise.

"There's someone on the second floor!" A voice carried up to her — one of the fire crew, moving fast. "Get the ladder — second floor window, now!"

She held onto the frame and breathed the outside air in desperate pulls and tried to stay calm. She was not calm. She was very specifically not calm but she was holding herself together with both hands and that would have to be enough.

The ladder came up fast. A firefighter climbed it with a steadiness that made her want to cry with relief and talked her through every step — hand here, foot here, don't look down, keep moving — and she descended in the strobing light with her phone in her pocket and nothing else and her legs shaking so badly she could feel it in her teeth.

Her feet hit the pavement.

Someone wrapped a foil blanket around her shoulders. Someone else was asking her questions she could barely process — was anyone else in the flat, did she have somewhere to go, was she hurt. She answered on autopilot. No. She didn't know. She didn't think so.

She stood on the pavement and looked up at her building.

Her window was still open. The curtains she'd chosen on a slow Saturday two years ago were visible from here, catching the heat from below, the edges beginning to curl. The mug she'd left on her windowsill — her favourite one, chipped handle, a gift from her team on her third year anniversary — was just sitting there. Like it was waiting for her to come back.

Her chest felt hollowed out.

She didn't cry. She thought about crying. Instead she stood in her foil blanket on the pavement and breathed smoke-tainted air and felt the specific numb disbelief of someone whose life had just rearranged itself without asking permission.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket.

She assumed it was Priya. She looked at the screen.

Ethan Black.

She stared at his name for a full three seconds before answering.

"I saw it on the news," he said before she could speak. His voice was different — still low, still even, but stripped of its usual corporate distance. Just direct. Human. "Are you out of the building?"

"I'm on the pavement," she said. Her voice came out rougher than expected. Smoke.

A brief pause. "Are you hurt?"

"No."

"Good." Another pause, shorter. "Don't move. I'm two minutes away."

He hung up before she could respond.

She lowered the phone slowly and looked at it and then looked at the street around her and wondered what version of her life she was currently living because Ethan Black had seen her building on the news and gotten in a car and none of that was behaviour she had a category for.

The black sedan appeared at the end of the street in less than two minutes. He'd clearly already been moving when he called. He stepped out before the car fully stopped — no jacket, dark sweater, the most undone she'd ever seen him — and crossed the pavement toward her with a directness that parted the small crowd without him having to ask.

He stopped in front of her and looked at her face. Really looked, the way he had a habit of doing, and whatever he saw there made something in his expression shift quietly.

He didn't say anything immediately. He just took in the foil blanket, the smoke-reddened eyes, the phone she was gripping too hard, and the way she was holding herself very still in the particular manner of someone keeping it together through sheer will.

"Come on," he said quietly.

"I don't need —"

"Mara." Just her name. Gentle in a way she wasn't prepared for.

She stopped arguing.

He put her in the back of the car and got in beside her and said nothing for the first few minutes of the drive, which was exactly right because she didn't have words yet and would have resented being asked for them. The city moved past the windows and the further they got from the smoke and the sirens the more the shaking in her legs began to ease.

"The photograph," she said eventually. Her voice was still rough. "On my bedside table. My mother."

"I know," he said quietly. "We'll get it back."

She turned to look at him in the dark of the car. The city lights moved across his face in slow intervals. He was looking forward, jaw set, and she thought about the fact that he'd seen her building burning on a television screen at whatever hour this was and gotten in a car without hesitating and she didn't know what to do with that information except feel it sitting there, inconvenient and warm, in the middle of her chest.

She looked back out the window.

His house was warm when they arrived. He showed her to the guest room — simple, clean, a proper bed — and paused in the doorway the way he did when he was deciding whether to say something.

"There's a spare toothbrush in the bathroom cabinet," he said. "And a shirt in the top drawer if you need something to sleep in. Help yourself to anything in the kitchen."

She nodded.

He reached for the door.

"Ethan."

He looked back at her.

"Thank you," she said. Quietly. Meaning it fully.

He looked at her for a moment in the soft light of the hallway. Then he nodded once — not dismissive, not casual, the kind of nod that acknowledged something real — and pulled the door gently closed.

She sat on the edge of the bed in her foil blanket and her smoke-scented clothes and let the quiet of the house settle around her like something she hadn't known she was desperate for.

She was asleep before she could think about what any of it meant.