Page 59 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

And worse, so much worse, the thing I can never say out loud: I understand her. I'd haunt him

Chapter seventeen

Cold

Owen

The problem isn't that the night was wrong.

That's the thing I can't say out loud. Not to Tater. Not to the ceiling at four in the morning. Not to the woman asleep three feet from me with her hair spread across my pillow like she's got a right to it.

The problem is that it was right. Righter than anything's been in two years. And joy feels exactly like betrayal when you've spent that long convinced you don't get to have any.

I lie there and count her breaths instead of sleeping.

By sunup I've already decided how this goes. I hate myself the whole time I'm deciding it.

***

She's at the stove when I make it to the kitchen. Boot on, crutches under one arm, moving slow so I don't fall on my face and ruin the performance. She's got two mugs out. She doesn't turn around.

"Coffee's not ready."

"I can wait."

She turns then. Looks at me the way she looks at a chart that doesn't add up.

"You slept fine." Not a question.

"Yeah."

"Good." She pours both cups. Slides one across the counter like it's just coffee. Like the whole kitchen isn't sitting there between us with the night still on it.

"Nellie—"

"Don't." Fast. Too fast. "Don't do the face. I know the face."

"I'm not doing a face."

"You're doing the face where you're fixin' to be responsible about something." She wraps both hands around her mug. "We're adults. It was one time. Nobody's writing it on the whiteboard."

I look at the whiteboard. ANGRY SUNSHINE, in her handwriting, big and smug, the letters she wrote while I was too doped to defend myself. Four weeks old. The ink's gone soft at the edges.

I look at it too long. She catches me looking.

"Right," I say. "One time."

"Right."

Neither of us believes it. I can see it sitting in her jaw, same place it's sitting in mine. But she says it like a closing argument, and I let her win.

I take a drink of coffee I don't want. Set the mug down. Pick it up again.

"Been thinking about what Osei said," I say. "About testing stairs."

Her spoon stops halfway through a stir.

"He said supervised. One or two, hand on the rail, somebody with you." She was standing right next to me when he said it. Took notes on her phone like it was rounds. "That's not the same as cleared."