Page 36 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"Exactly." Her breath hits my mouth when she says it. She's not moving back. Her thumb draws one slow line along my ribs like she's counting them. "I leave, Owen. That's the whole rule. That's the only rule I've got."

Her mouth is one inch from mine. Less. I can feel the shape of every word she's saying.

"Then we've got nine weeks," I say.

Her breath catches. Her fist tightens in my shirt. She tips her chin up that last half inch—

"NELLIE?" Debbie Sue's voice comes down the corridor like a freight train. "Girl, where'd you put the—"

We come apart so fast the shelving rattles. A box of gloves hits the floor.

My hand goes flat against my sternum. The ring, under the shirt. Old reflex, two years deep, and I don't catch it happening till it's done.

Her eyes flick to my hand. She doesn't ask. I watch her not ask.

Nellie's got the clipboard up like a shield and I'm three feet away studying a wall of saline bags like I'm fixin' to buy some.

Debbie rounds the corner in street clothes, looking like death warmed over, and stops dead.

She looks at Nellie. She looks at me. She looks at the gloves on the floor.

"I came in to cover the morning gap," she says slowly. "But I can leave."

"Debbie."

"I can turn around and drive right back home."

"Debbie."

"Restocking," I say, and pick up the gloves.

Nobody in that hallway believes me, including the gloves.

Dawn's coming up gray when I finally head for the doors. Shift change is trickling in. Somewhere behind me Debbie is talking sixty miles an hour and Nellie is saying "nothing happened" in a voice that would not convince a jury of the deaf.

I stop at the supply corridor on my way out.

My flannel's been riding my shoulders since midnight, the same one we knotted into a sling for Billie's arm on Main Street, the one Nellie's hands were all over while we worked. I take it off. I fold it once. I set it on the shelf next to the saline, deliberate as a man leaving his hat on a hook in a house he means to come back to.

Then I walk out into the parking lot like I didn't do a thing.

Ten steps. That's how far I make it before I turn around, because I'm thirty-four years old and I have the self-control of a teenager, apparently, and I look back through the glass doors.

She's standing in the corridor. She's found it already.

I watch her look up and down the hallway. I watch her check that Debbie's gone. I watch Nellie Greer, who has a rule, who leaves in nine weeks, who told me twice tonight this was a bad idea, pick up my flannel and put it on. Sleeves too long. She rolls them like she's done it before.

It's my shirt. Cut for my shoulders. On her it goes snug at the chest and the hips and hangs loose everywhere else, and the sight of it does something caveman-simple to me that I would deny under oath.

Then she does the thing that finishes me.

She pulls the collar up to her face. Closes her eyes. Breathes it in.

And opens her eyes straight into mine through the glass.

Neither of us moves. The sun's not up. The doors don't open. She doesn't take it off and I don't look away, and somewhere under my sternum, right where a ring on a chain has been sitting for two years, something goes loose that I thought was welded shut.

She raises one eyebrow. Well? it says. You saw. Now what?