Page 47 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

I make the error of looking up.

He's already looking down. And the look on his face isn't want. Want is too small a word for it. It's the look of a man deciding whether to be good.

"Nellie."

His hand closes around my wrist, careful, thumb settling over my pulse, which is sprinting, which he can feel, which means the jig is up. He draws me up by that wrist, slow, giving me the whole climb to stop him, and I don't stop him, and I land with one hand braced on his thigh, higher than balance strictly needed, and his breath goes ragged.

His other hand comes up. Knuckles graze my jaw. Trace down my throat, over my racing pulse, and my eyes close before I vote on it.

"Tell me to knock it off," he says, rough, against my temple. His mouth an inch from my skin. Not touching. Burning anyway.

I can't. I turn my head instead, and now his mouth is a breath from mine, close enough that we're trading air, close enough I can feel the shape of my own name when he says it again. His thumb presses the corner of my jaw. One more inch. One.

"Your bandage needs changing," I say, against his lips, almost onto them.

It does not need changing.

I'm up and off the floor with the basin in my hands before either of us can do the thing we're both dying to do, and I walk to my kitchen and grip the counter with both hands like the floor's tilting. I run cold water over my wrists. It doesn't help. There's a shirtless man twenty feet away with water drying on his chest and my name still in his mouth, and cold water was never going to help.

From the bedroom, wrecked and quiet: "Coward."

"Heard that."

"Meant you to."

***

He's been dodging the question for four days.

Who's Claire. I asked it the first night, with his hand crushing mine and the nightmare still wet on him, and he said, "Somebody I knew," and rolled toward the wall. I didn't push. You don't dig at a wound with the patient awake.

Tonight he brings it to me.

We're on the couch, his leg propped on the ottoman, some baseball game on mute. He picks up the remote and turns the TV all the way off, and the room goes different.

"Claire was my wife."

I don't move. I don't make a sound. Airway clear, I think, stupidly. Let the patient talk.

"We were married four years. She taught second grade. Hit my parked engine with her Corolla the day we met and argued it was the engine's fault." A breath that wants to be a laugh. "She kept a laminated list on the fridge. Things Owen Was Wrong About. Updated it weekly."

"I'd have liked her."

"You'd have been co-authors."

The chain is in his fist now. He doesn't seem to know he's holding it.

"Two years ago there was a fire. Apartment building on the north side." He stops. Starts again. "My company was toned out across the city that night. Warehouse job. We're pulling lines and the next call drops and the address comes over the radio."

He looks at the dark TV.

"It was mine. My building. My address, out loud, on every radio in the district."

"Owen."

"Everybody on the rig went quiet. Nobody would look at me. We ran it with lights and I did the math the whole way, response times, travel time, and the math didn't work, I knew it didn't work, and I got there and the third floor was gone. Fully involved. My floor."

His voice doesn't break. That's the worst part. It goes flat, report-flat, a man reading an incident number.