Page 17 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

My eyes still work. That's the hell of it.

Light smoke, lazy, no heat pushing back. A door that opened easy under a cool hand. Grease and a ruined pan. I could knock this fire down with a wet towel and I know it. Every trained inch of me knows it.

My boots don't care what I know.

One second. Two.

Cooper's voice behind me, unsure. "Peterson?"

Three. Four. The alarm keeps screaming. My hands are sweating inside my gloves and my heart is trying to climb out through my collarbones.

Five.

A hand lands on my shoulder. Big. Familiar.

Six.

"I got the nozzle," Tater says, loud and normal, like this is a thing we planned. "You get the window, get that smoke moving."

He steps past me. Takes the line out of my hands smooth as a card trick and walks down the hall like it's his own kitchen.

I go break a window. Because my legs will do that.

The whole fire takes four minutes. Charred cabinet, dead stove, one very crispy skillet of chicken that Mrs. Delgado wants to sue. Cooper does overhaul with his chest puffed out like we took a high-rise.

I stand in the yard coiling hose and I don't look at anybody.

***

Tater finds me behind the engine while the others load up. He's got his helmet off, hair mashed flat, and he leans against the rig next to me and doesn't say a word for a while. That's a Tater tactic. I've watched him use it on scared kids and drunk drivers. Silence with a friendly face on it. People fill it themselves.

I'm not people.

"Say it," I tell him.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you rehearsed on the way over here."

He scratches his jaw. "Six seconds."

"You counted."

"I count everything. I count my kids at the pool. I counted." He looks out at the street instead of at me, which is a mercy. "You gonna tell me how bad it actually is?"

"It's not bad."

"Owen."

"It was a smoke alarm. It caught me off guard. That's all."

"When's the last time you made entry on a working fire? A real one. Not a stove."

The question sits there between us like a live wire on wet pavement.

Because he already knows the answer. It's in my file, the one Chicago sent down, the one I know Chief Weyland read with his glasses down his nose.

Two years of small stuff. Car fires. Dumpsters. Medical runs. Every structure assignment, some officer found a reason to put me on the pump or the ladder or outside ventilation, because nobody wanted to find out on a fireground what everybody already suspected.