Page 18 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

Nobody's tested it. Including me.

"You want my card pulled," I say. "Fine. Pull it."

"That's not what I—"

"Then what, Tater? You want me to sit in a circle and talk about my feelings? I came down here to run calls and clear my head. Today I ran a call. The fire went out. Everybody's breathing."

It comes out harder than he deserves. Way harder. He recruited me. He covered for me twenty minutes ago without blinking, without making Cooper any the wiser, and I'm snapping at him like he's the problem.

He takes it. That's the worst part. He takes it, nods slow, pushes off the rig.

"Everybody's breathing," he agrees. "Today."

He walks around to his seat. Doesn't say the rest of it. Doesn't have to.

Today was a stove. Someday it's going to be a building with people in it, and six seconds is a lifetime, and we both know which lifetime I'm thinking of.

I climb in the back. Cooper's still grinning about his overhaul. Kid smells like victory and burnt chicken.

I stare out the window the whole ride back.

***

That night I can't sit still in the farmhouse, so I go to the station gym. It's a converted bay with a bench, a rack of mismatched dumbbells, and a radio that only gets two stations, both of them sad.

I load the bar heavier than I should and get under it.

The plan is simple. Lift until my arms shake, go home, sleep like the dead. It's the only therapy that's ever put points on the board.

It works for about twenty minutes.

Then, somewhere between sets, my brain slides off the leash and goes exactly where I've been dragging it back from all week.

The nurses' station. Monday. Her taking my discharge plan apart one piece at a time, wearing that look. Chin up, eyebrow cocked, mouth doing that thing where it fights a smile because smiling would be losing.

Her mouth.

I rack the bar hard enough that the plates ring.

No. Absolutely not. I am not standing in a fire station at nine at night thinking about the mouth on a woman whose entire purpose in this town appears to be embarrassing me in front of medical professionals.

I add ten pounds.

She called me a Labrador. To my face. In front of Amos Kessler, who laughed so hard his monitor beeped.

Another ten.

She's got a countdown clock on her whole life. Couple months and she's gone, off to some other town, some other hospital, some other firefighter with stitches in his arm. That's not a person you think about. That's weather. Weather passes through.

I press the set. My shoulders burn. Good.

Except here's the thing my body knows that my head keeps voting down. When she was stitching me up that first night, hands steady, close enough that I could see the freckle at the corner of her jaw, something in my chest went loose. First time in two years. Like a knot I'd stopped noticing because it had been pulled tight so long.

I didn't ask for that.

I rack the bar. Sit up. Put my head in my hands and breathe.

Then I go stand under the shower in the station washroom and turn the handle all the way to cold.