Page 34 of Christmas with Three Firemen

I push off the counter and leave them to it.

Chapter nine

Chapter Nine: Noelle

The storm gets upgraded at two seventeen in the afternoon.

I’m standing in the common room when the alert comes through on every phone in the building simultaneously, a discordant chorus of emergency tones that makes me flinch.

Historic blizzard warning. Effective immediately. All non-essential travel discouraged. Road closures beginning at six PM.

I read it twice.

Then I look out the window.

The snow that has been falling in polite, manageable increments since this morning has shifted into something with genuine intention.

It comes down thick and sideways now, driven by a wind that rattles the station’s old windows in their frames.

The street below is already white. A snowplow moves slowly through the intersection at the end of the block, already losing ground to what’s coming down faster than it can clear.

The city is pulling inward.

Behind me, the station is doing the opposite.

Grant finds me in the hallway twenty minutes later.

He doesn’t waste time with preamble. That much I’ve learned about him.

“Storm’s been upgraded,” he says. “They’re calling it historic. The department’s pulling everyone off rotation until it passes, so nobody’s going anywhere for the next few days.”

“Including me?”

“Yes, including you.” A beat. “Roads are closing by six. Even if you wanted to leave, you wouldn’t get far.”

I already knew that. Morrison would have my head for abandoning the assignment over a snowstorm, and my apartment is forty blocks away through what is rapidly becoming a whiteout. The logic is airtight.

Still, hearing him say it out loud is different from knowing it.

“How long are we looking at?” I ask.

“Forecast has it running through Christmas Eve at minimum. Could be longer.”

Days. I have to be here for days, locked inside this building with three men I have absolutely no business thinking about the way I’ve been thinking about them, while a blizzard erases the city outside.

“Fine,” I say.

Grant holds my gaze for a beat longer than necessary. Then he nods once and walks away.

I turn back to the window.

Outside, the snow keeps falling.

The station transforms over the next few hours in a way I wouldn’t have predicted.

It gets louder, somehow, even as the world outside gets quieter.

Wes is in the equipment bay taking apart a valve assembly he took apart yesterday. Mateo has started a pot of something that will clearly feed thirty people despite there being no reason to cook for that many.