Page 6 of Tangled Up with the Firefighter

4

DEAN

Saturday morning, I’m running a ladder drill in the bay with the overhead doors up and cold air rolling in off the ridge.

It’s just me. The rest of the crew is on a training run at Station 2 for the day. Holt offered to leave me behind when he saw the ladder already set up against the engine. He knows I’d rather drill alone than ride along for someone else’s walkthrough. The ladder is a thirty-five-footer, solid aluminum, and it requires a specific kind of attention that empties everything else out. Base angle. Fly section. Extension rope. Lock the dogs, check the rungs, test the hold. Every step has an order, and the order doesn’t change, and there’s something about that I’ve never gotten tired of.

I’m three rungs up checking the halyard cable when I hear footsteps on the bay floor.

I know it’s her before I look. I don’t know how. Something about the rhythm, maybe. Lighter than boots. Deliberate, but unhurried.

I look.

Laurelle is standing at the edge of the bay with a small glass vase in her hands. Wildflowers. Purple and white, a few stems of greenery trailing over the rim. She’s in jeans and a sweater, no apron, hair pulled back, and she’s looking up at me on the ladder with an expression that stops me mid-rung.

I come down. One rung at a time, because I don’t trust what my body might do if I rush, and because the ladder deserves a clean descent even if the woman standing ten feet away is holding flowers she brought here for no reason I asked for.

My boots hit the bay floor. I’m in turnout pants and a station tee, gloves tucked into my waistband, sweat on the back of my neck from the drills. I probably look like I’ve been working for two hours…because I have.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey.”

She lifts the vase a few inches, a small offering. “For the kitchen table. I thought the station could use something that isn’t a coffee stain or a clipboard.”

I take it from her. The glass is cool, and her fingertips brush mine on the transfer. I hold the vase carefully because something she made with her hands deserves better than the way I hold everything else.

“You didn’t have to do this,” I say.

“I know.”

Two words. She knows. She knows she didn’t have to, and she did it anyway, and she’s standing in my bay surrounded by hose beds and turnout gear and a thirty-five-foot ladder leaning against the engine, looking at me like this is exactly where she planned to be on a Saturday morning.

Nobody does this for me. That’s the thought that comes through clean and undeniable while I’m standing here with wildflowers in my hands and soot still under my fingernails from Thursday’s call. People call me when they need something handled. People lean on me when the weight gets heavy. People count on me the way they count on gravity—constant and invisible and never the thing you think about until it’s gone. Nobody walks into my space with something they grew and says I thought you could use this.

She’s looking at the ladder behind me, then at the engine, then at my hands wrapped around the vase. Her eyes track the way my forearms tense holding the glass, and I watch her notice. I watch her decide to keep noticing, and the bay feels smaller than it did five minutes ago.

“You were drilling,” she says.

“Ladder work.”

“Alone?”

“I like it alone.” I set the vase on the tool bench against the wall because I need my hands free but I’m not ready to walk away from her to put it in the kitchen. “The repetition is the point. Same steps every time. You check everything twice and nothing gets missed.”

“That sounds like you.”

“It is me.”

She smiles. It arrives slowly, building from the corners, and it’s the first full smile I’ve seen from her. At the shop she gives me half-smiles, almost-smiles, smiles that start and stall like she catches herself before they finish. This one completes.

“I saw you after that fire,” she says. “On Prospect Street. You walked out of that building with soot on your hands, and your breathing wasn’t even elevated. You just came down that ladder the same way. One rung at a time, no rushing, like the only thing that matters is the next step being right.”

“It is the only thing that matters.”

She takes a step closer. “That’s what I keep thinking about.”

The bay is quiet. The overhead doors are open, and the morning light is coming in at a low angle, catching the chrome on the engine and the aluminum of the ladder and the color in the flowers she brought me. The station is quiet behind me. Just the hum of the building doing what it does every day regardless of what’s happening out here.