Page 37 of Full Moon Frenzy

“What kind of fireman are you? What if this was a burning building? Are you just leaving me to die?”

“I wouldn’t need to, because your big fucking mouth would put out the blaze with all of its bullshit. Who needs a hose when there’s a lawyer around?”

Rolling around on the neighbor’s lawn and becoming a different kind of spectacle hadn’t been what he’d expected from the night, but it was still better than the stares he would have earned at the Pig, and he was grateful for the momentary distraction from his life, once they were home. Now he had no choice but to be back in public, and wished he was still dragging Grayson home.

Why aren’t you at the field?!

The second text wasn’t any clearer than the first had been, and he’d been about to swipe it away when his phone vibrated again.

The game is THIS weekend Hemming

You haven’t been to a single practice!

Coach. Trapp rolled his eyes. The PE coach from the high school, the Chamber of Commerce charity game. He waited for another text to come through, and when it didn’t, Trapp muted the conversation, swiping it away into obscurity forever. He didn’t sit on the Chamber of Commerce, and there were more than enough employees at City Hall to populate a team.

Daronda eyed him warily as she rang him out, the entire interaction silent. Who was he, if not the Hemming everyone liked? Trapp had no idea. Contemplating it gave him a headache. He held his smartwatch to the credit card reader before the troll could say his total, turning away before his receipt had printed, negating speaking at all. His lips had never so much as quirked.

The silence followed him as he entered the station, keeping his eyes fixed on the bags he carried until he was in the kitchen, alone. If Vinlop and Margus noticed, they didn’t follow.

His day to cook at the station usually meant a recipe from his mother’s book.

The recipe book she had stolen when she had left her pack, taken from the shelf in her uncle’s office in the tavern he owned, the uncle with whom he shared a name. Trapp’s Place.

Lowell whined about being the invisible middle child, complained about Liam being the spoiled baby, but there was a salient fact that Lowell always overlooked whenever he groused about his position in the family. Trapp had been the baby, once. For six long years, he had been the beneficiary of being his mother’s youngest, an easy baby, she’d always said, especially after the nightmare that Grayson had been. A sweet baby, always happy. There were a million and one photos of the three eldest as children, and Trapp could attest — he had been an adorable child, always smiling, toothy grins, eyes always sparkling.

In those short, traumatic years that their grandfather had lived with them, his mother was often in the kitchen. Always making something from her book, to keep herself busy, to keep herself out of the way, to emphasize her value as a wife to Cambric Creek’s first son. Keep busy, keep moving, keep smiling. She was always in the kitchen, and Trapp had always been with her.

When he’d started the station, he’d painstakingly photocopied every page from his mother’s book, careful not to bend any of the pages, grateful for the easy spiral binding. The firehouse had benefited from those years spent in the kitchen at his mother’s side. Deep dish lasagna, chicken cacciatore, the best bolognese in Cambric Creek. The first time he had made the Trapp’s Place Clams Casino, the chief himself had come to dinner, and Magruh proclaimed it the best meal that had ever been prepared beneath the station’s roof.

He genuinely liked to cook, and had long ago internalized that feeding people was a way of showing the depth of his care. He never minded being on kitchen duty at the station, and there had been more than a few rotations behind the stove traded to him, which he gladly accepted.

“Hemming’s night in the kitchen” was always an event. Trapp knew they would be expecting pasta that night, something elaborate . . . but no one else ever made a special trip for organic garlic and fresh pasta. No one else had ever toiled over homemade garlic bread or perfect chicken cutlets in lemon caper sauce, and while he didn’t intend to shirk his duties or let his station mates go hungry, Trapp didn’t see why he had to do so either.

Several jars of store-brand pasta sauce and frozen meatballs would be good enough, he thought, boiling the water for the dried pasta and sliding the frozen garlic bread into the oven. And if they didn’t want it, they didn’t have to eat it.

When Rosh, the demonborn captain who’d suspended him, came into the dining area that evening, he stopped short in the doorway, nearly causing a pile-up behind him. His citrine eyes narrowed, squinting at the generic repast, then moving to Trapp, his brow furrowed.

“Food’s done,” Trapp announced casually, waiting until the rest of the house had shuffled into the room before exiting the way they’d come in.

“Hemming, aren’t you eating?”

Trapp stopped, turning slowly with a shake of his head. “I’m not hungry, Captain.”

“Hemming—”

“I’m just waiting for the tone to drop, Cap.”

He didn’t wait to hear more. They ate together. Being hungry or not wasn’t the point, and he and every other member of the fire station knew it, but he wasn’t about to let himself care. Trapp turned away, trudging up the steps and dropping into his bunk, closing his eyes.

The absence of a smile on his face was what seemed to shock people the most, as he’d gone about town. Walking unsmiling past the goblin who’d been struggling to pull a cart from the parking lot corral, ignoring the small fender bender that had happened in the community center parking lot once he noted that no one was hurt.

“Trapp, the community center pancake breakfast is coming up. I’ve got you down for the midnight griddle shift, but do you think you’d be able to run logistics on the set-up? You’re always so good at giving direction on where the tables need to go.”

He was good at giving direction on the set-up because he’d been doing it for the full decade since he’d returned to Cambric Creek. “I don’t think so, Marva. And I won’t be able to work the griddles this year. You’ll have to find someone else.”

The goblin had swayed, mouth open, her eyes huge behind her glasses. “But . . . but you always do the—”

“How many folks come out to the pancake breakfast?”