Page 19 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

I last forty seconds.

My hand turns it warm again like it belongs to somebody else, and I stand there with the water hammering my shoulders and quit fighting.

She walks into my head the way she walks into a trauma bay. Like she owns it. Scrubs gone. That smart mouth gone soft for once, saying my name instead of a diagnosis. I brace a forearm on the tile and take myself in hand, and in my head it's her hand. Her steady stitching hands. Her hips. The full sweet weight of her, the shape those scrubs keep hinting at and never confess.

It doesn't take long. That's the embarrassing part. Thirty-four years old, coming apart in a station shower with a nurse's name behind my teeth, biting down so it can't get out.

After, I stand in the steam and wait for the guilt.

It comes. It always comes. But it comes in wrong. For two years my body's been a tool. A thing I feed and punish and put to work. Tonight, it wanted something. Wanted it hard enough to override the whole system.

I don't know where to put that.

I shut the water off, towel down, and don't look at the fog on the mirror.

I don't drive straight home, either. The truck takes the river road and pulls off at the overlook above the water without asking me first. I sit with the engine running. My hand finds the chain through my shirt and stays there.

I don't say anything. Not yet. Two minutes of dark water and cicadas, then I put it in reverse and go home.

***

Saturday morning, I come into the station kitchen for coffee and there's a piece of paper waiting at my spot at the table like a court summons.

Tater's across from me eating cereal out of a mixing bowl. He doesn't look up. That's how I know he did something.

I pick up the paper.

MEET BACHELOR #4: OWEN PETERSON, it says across the top, in a font that belongs on a rodeo poster.

I read the first line. Then I read it again, because my eyes reject it.

Owen is a gently used Willowbend original, recently returned from the big city. Runs good, some cosmetic damage. Six-foot-two of brood with a heart of gold buried in there somewhere, ladies. He can carry you out of a burning building OR carry all your groceries in one trip, and he will glare handsomely while doing either one.

"Tater."

"Mm." Still eating.

Enjoys: long silences, lifting heavy objects, visiting the elderly. Dislikes: fun, joy, being perceived.

"Tater, what is this."

"Your auction bio." He points his spoon at it. "Turned it in Wednesday. Rue said it was the best one she got. Said, and I'm quoting her here, that it had voice."

Bid with confidence: all sales final, no refunds, some assembly required.

"You wrote me up like a used truck."

"A gently used truck." He finally looks at me, and his face is pure sunshine, the face of a man who has never done anything wrong in his life. "I could've mentioned the tragic thing where you cried at my wedding. I showed restraint."

"I'm not going tonight."

"You're going. Chief's orders, department morale, new engine, all of it." He gets up, rinses his bowl, claps me on the shoulder on his way out. Same shoulder. Same hand as Tuesday, and we both feel that, and neither of us says it.

At the door he stops. Turns around. And there's a grin spreading across his face that I have known since tenth grade, and it has never once meant anything good for me.

"Oh, and Owen? Doors open at six."

"Fine."