Page 45 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"Write your congressman."

The whiteboard on my kitchen wall has grown since he moved in. It started as MEDS / DO NOT LET HIM NEGOTIATE. Now there's a column for PT exercises, a column for what he's allowed to lift, which is nothing, and a tally in the corner labeled TIMES HE CHEATED.

I add a fourth mark.

"That one doesn't count."

"Tell it to the board."

***

The pain meds are their own show.

He fights taking them, every dose, like swallowing a pill is admitting something. Then twenty minutes later the man who communicates in grunts and radio codes turns into somebody I've never met.

Tuesday night he watches me dry dishes for a full minute before he says it.

"Your hair."

"What about it?"

"It's like angry sunshine."

I stop with a plate in my hand. "Excuse me?"

"Sunshine that's mad about it." He nods, real serious, eyes at half-mast. "That's the whole thing. That's you."

I set the plate down. I walk to the whiteboard. I uncap the marker.

"Nellie."

I write it big, top corner, where he'll see it from the couch every day for the rest of his sentence: ANGRY SUNSHINE.

"Nellie, no."

"Owen, yes."

"I'm on drugs. There's rules about this. Testimony under the influence—"

"Sustained. It stays."

He drops his head back against the couch and groans at my ceiling, and I stand there grinning at a whiteboard like a lunatic, and neither of us says the true thing, which is that this is the most fun I've had in any town, ever, and I have lived in a lot of towns.

***

Thursday, the home health aide cancels again. Which means the sponge bath falls to me.

It's a clinical task. I have done it hundreds of times. Stroke patients, hip replacements, a man in Tulsa who sang Conway Twitty through the whole thing. Warm water, washcloth, efficiency. Nothing to it.

I fill the basin and my hands are steady and I decide that means something.

Then I walk into my bedroom and there is a problem, and the problem is that Owen Peterson has already taken his shirt off.

He's sitting on the edge of my bed in athletic shorts, bad leg propped, waiting on me. I have seen this man's chart. I have seen his X-rays. I have not seen this.

Firefighter is a job title. It is also, it turns out, a body type. Shoulders built for hauling grown men down ladders. Arms roped with the kind of muscle you earn, not buy, one vein running down the forearm I stitched in another life. All of it tapering to where those shorts sit low on his hips, and I complete my assessment in under two seconds, because I am a professional.

"You're staring, Greer."