Page 34 of Rising Heat

“I won’t.”

“I know.”

“Love you too.”

Dad laughs in the background.

By the time I hang up, the apartment is dark outside the windows and significantly less chaotic inside. Another box disappears. Then another. I eat my leftover Thai at the built in breakfast nook I’ve been using as a makeshift desk all day. By the time the sky outside the windows turns black, the apartment feels a little less temporary.

Later that night, I step out of the glass shower after standing under it longer than I need to and letting the heat work the ache out of my shoulders. I’m at the bathroom sink surrounded by a cloud of steam, toothbrush halfway to my mouth, when I hear it.

At first I think it’s the pipes. Then someone laughs again. The sound carries through the old floorboards just enough to make me pause.

Low and easy, muffled by plaster and distance but familiar anyway.

Tyler—I’m already beginning to recognize the laugh after only a few days, which is either a testament to my hearing or a problem I’m not diagnosing tonight.

A second voice follows. Lower than his. Deeper. The kind you notice before you fully register it. A cabinet closes. Water runs. That has to be the brother, Mack.

Tyler mentioned that he owns the house with him, and that’s the full extent of my research, but my imagination continues to run on autopilot. If there is any genetic consistency happening in the MacAllister household, I’m going to need a chastity belt and possibly a different zip code.

The lower voice says something I can’t make out. Tyler answers, and a few seconds later the other voice comes back, the conversation drifting in and out through the floorboards in pieces too muffled to follow.

I stand there a moment longer than I need to, toothbrush forgotten in my hand.

Growing up, I got used to listening for things. The way a door closed. The way somebody said my name from another room. The difference between a good mood and a bad one before anybody had actually admitted to either.

Downstairs, the conversation rolls on without any of that weight attached to it, wandering wherever it wants because nobody seems particularly concerned with getting it right.

I find myself listening to it anyway. I let myself stand there for another few seconds before I rinse my mouth, switch off the light, and pad over to the air mattress.

It squeaks dramatically.

“You’re lucky you’re temporary.”

I pull the sage-green throw blanket up to my chin—the one that’s survived every dorm room and rough patch since I was nineteen—and settle in while the house shifts around me. Tyler’s laugh drifts up once more.

For the second night in a city I moved to alone, I don’t feel lonely.

CHAPTER SIX

mack

The shift had been what the job sometimes was

a lot of nothing punctuated by one call that wasn’t nothing.

Early afternoon, back of Roxbury. Gas leak in a triple-decker, elderly woman on the second floor who hadn’t been able to smell it for two days. Routine containment, no fire, no hospital. The kind of call that looks like nothing on the report and is everything in practice because of what it could have been if she’d lit the stove. We aired the building, got her to her daughter’s, and were back at the station by three.

The part Coop couldn’t let go of was the woman’s cat, which had apparently known something was wrong and spent the last forty-eight hours sitting in front of the front door refusing to let anyone past. Coop had spent the entire drive back treating this like a significant philosophical development.

“The cat knew,” he says, for the third time, dropping into a chair at the kitchen table.

“Animals have better instincts,” Marco says, not looking up from whatever he was reading.

“That’s not the point. The point is the cat stayed at the door. It didn’t hide. It⁠—”

“It held the line.”