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Fuck, he might as well bite the bullet before Gigi got the wrong idea. “G, this is Lucy de Costa. We work together. de Costa, this is Gigi.” He slid the older woman a wink. “My very favorite server in the city.”
Gigi tried to frown, but she couldn’t make it stick. “Don’t let Maybelle hear you say that. Or Tony. I know you tell them they’re your favorite, too.”
“You’re all my favorite,” Sam said, because it was true. He’d been coming here weekly for seven years, and he’d probably never stop.
“Mmmm. One day, that charm of yours is going to stop working on me, you know. You’re just lucky today isn’t that day,” Gigi said before turning her attention back to Lucy. “So, Miss Lucy. You’re a firefighter, too?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lucy said, andshehad decorum. But her smile was also genuine and kind. “I’ve got it on good authority that the pancakes here are the best in the city. May I please have a stack of blueberry pancakes and a side order of bacon, extra crispy?”
“You got it, sugar.” Turning her attention to Sam, she asked, “And what are you going to surprise me with today? A taco salad? A double cheeseburger?”
To be fair, those were both things he’d ordered for breakfast before. His brain made having a regular order a bit of an impossibility, often flicking to a new bright and shiny thing in any given moment. But he’d bragged about the pancakes, and he couldn’t exactly walk that back now. “Actually, I’d love some pancakes, too. Banana, please, and I’d like my bacon extraun-crispy.”
Gigi nodded, scribbling their order in some magical shorthand only she and the cook, Ramon, understood. “Holler when that coffee gets low. And nice to meet you, Miss Lucy,” she said over her shoulder as she headed toward the pass through leading behind the counter.
“A taco salad? For breakfast?” Lucy asked as soon as Gigi was out of earshot, but Sam just shrugged.
“The taco salad here is really good. Anyway, you know me well enough to know I change my mind a lot.”
A more accurate statement would be that hismindchanged his mind a lot, but that wasn’t exactly a hair Sam was going to split. Easier to blame it on impulse than the fact that he couldn’t focus long enough to form regular patterns much of the time.
“Right.” Lucy nodded, straightening her silverware before folding her hands around the coffee mug placed directly between her fork and knife. “Idoknow you. Which brings me back to my point. You’re not an asshole.”
“I’ve been called worse, you know,” he said, the heel of his cross-trainer bouncing ever so slightly beneath the table, giving his extra energy a place to go.
“That doesn’t mean it’s accurate,” Lucy countered.
“I thought you were mad at me.”
She shrugged, unzipping her jacket and sliding out of it to reveal—Lord help him—a snug dark gray compression top that molded to her body. “I was. But that doesn’t make you an asshole. Look”—she met his eyes with a stare so matter-of-fact, Sam had no choice but to hold onto it—“our job pretty much depends on us being able to communicate with each other, so I don’t see any point in bucking honesty. I was mad at you because your actions put me in a shitty situation. But I don’t think you’re an asshole, and I don’t think you’re a bad firefighter.”
“I’m not so sure everyone at Seventeen is in agreement with you on that last part right now,” Sam said, but Lucy surprised him by shaking her head.
“I’m calling bullshit on that. If anyone on squad thought you were a bad firefighter, they wouldn’t work with you. But that aside, you’ve got to admit, disobeying orders is a big deal. I’m not throwing shade,” she added quickly, “because I did it, too, and I’ve got to live with that. I also know you saw someone inside that warehouse, which none of us should take lightly. But just because Bridges said to stand down doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have come up with a plan to try and help get that person to safety. One thatdidn’tinvolve anyone impulsively barging into a burning building full of unknowns. The rules exist for a reason.”
Well, fuckity fuck fuck. She wasn’t wrong about that fire, at least. He’d been shocked at how fast those flames had spread, the fire patterns not behaving as he’d expected them to, to the point that it had been bugging him all week long. “Maybe,” he conceded.
But her expression hardened. “Not maybe.Definitely. They’re important, and tossing them out the window was a big deal. For both of us.”
Sam didn’t love it, but he nodded. “You’re right. It was a big deal. I won’t make that mistake again.” Partly because he’d get shit-canned if he did, but also because she really was right. If they couldn’t trust each other, they couldn’t do their jobs safely or well. “Truce?”
“We were never at battle,” Lucy said, then added, “but sure. Truce.”
They each spent a minute with their coffee, the quiet odd but not uncomfortable, until finally, he broke it. “So, I take it you were wide awake at five thirty this morning even though you had a perfectly good chance to sleep in?”
“You made it to five thirty?” she asked, a wry smile on her lips.
“Nope. Four forty-seven,” Sam said, not adding that on occasion, his brain had a very bad habit of pulling him out of a dead slumber to spin in all sorts of directions. “Occupational hazard. I think my circadian rhythms are permanently fucked up from all the weird sleep we get—or don’t get—when we’re on shift.”
Lucy nodded. “We only have two more weeks to go at the academy. I guess it’s smart not to get too far off schedule.” Tilting her head at him, she said, “Speaking of the academy, you’re taking it pretty seriously. The classes and drills and stuff, I mean. I expected you to blow it off.”
“Thanks for your vote of confidence,” he joked, toasting her with his coffee cup before taking a sip.
Lucy didn’t bat an eye. “Come on, Faurier. Are you really going to tell me you didn’t think you’d just coast through the next three weeks with the bare minimum of effort?”
Ah, shit. She knew him better than he’d thought. And hell if that wasn’t all the more reason to keep his shield firmly in place. “Look, I can’t help it that I’m excellent at what I do.”
“Oh, wait,” she said, sliding farther into her side of the booth. “Let me move over to make room for your titanic ego.”
