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Mateo scowled. “Bad luck.”
“Don’t believe in luck.”
“We do.” Liam pushed the plate closer to me. “Come on, bud. It’s tradition. Hasn’t steered us wrong yet. But if you tempt the Key Lime Pie gods, and something happens on our next call… I’d hate to have that hanging over me.”
Mateo gave a single, emphatic nod.
I sighed and took a bite. It was tradition. And the pie was damn good, too.
“Alyssa,” Mateo said once he was satisfied with my pie consumption. “Tell me about her.”
“I thought Liam already told you everything.”
“He told me little,” Mateo replied.
“With Alyssa Ford, a little goes a long way.”
“I told him what I remembered from my single year here as a foreign exchange student. You knew her much longer than that,” Liam said.
I took another bite of pie to give myself a few moments to think. How could I explain my history with this girl in a succinct way? It would be like boiling down all the works of Shakespeare into a single sentence.
“First we hated each other,” I finally said. “Then we kind of liked each other. Then we hated each other again.”
“This explains very little,” Mateo noted.
I nodded. “Exactly.”
“You don’t want to delve into your complicated history with this woman?” Liam prodded. “Bare your soul to your besties while we wait for the next call?”
“Nope,” I replied. “It’s all in the past.”
Liam narrowed his eyes skeptically. “You don’t still have feelings for her? Unresolved emotions that have been reignited like the fire that brought you two together again?”
“Nope, nope, and nope.”
“I only asked two questions.”
“I’m preemptively saying nope to whatever you were going to ask next,” I said.
“Don’t believe you,” Liam said.
“I also do not believe you,” Mateo added.
“Believe whatever you want. It’s the truth.”
“I know you, bud,” Liam insisted. “And I want you to swear, right here before Mateo and this sacred key lime pie, that you haven’t spent the past day thinking only about Alyssa Ford.”
Does my best friend really know me that well, or am I that obvious? But I was stubborn, so I held my hand over the pie like it was a bible, then raised my other palm. “I swear to the Key Lime Pie god that I haven’t been thinking about Alyssa Ford, nor do I have any unresolved feelings for her. If I’m lucky, I’ll never have to see or think about that woman again.”
Ellen, a Probationary firefighter—basically a new recruit—poked her head in the room. “Franco, Campbell, Vega. You were on that house fire call last night, right? Someone’s hear to see you.”
Mateo and Liam both turned to look at me.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I muttered.
“Should I send her in?”
“No,” I said.
