Page 45 of Fighting For You

"Simple stuff. Enough to keep six guys fed and standing for a twenty-four-hour shift. Eggs, burgers, chili. Nothing too fancy. It's bad luck."

"Bad luck? To serve something fancy?"

"Cooking something complicated invites bad calls. The more effort you put into a meal, the better the chance dispatch interrupts it." I pulled out a chair and sat on the edge of the table. "Travis put a steak on the grill once. Got one flip in before the tones dropped."

She stared at me. "For real?"

"For real."

She gave me the look. The one where her chin dropped and her eyes narrowed and I could already feel the argument coming.

"What?"

"So you believe in that, but you don't believe in astrology."

"I've seen the steak thing happen. I've seen the tones drop every time someone says the shift is too quiet. I have years of proof."

"That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard."

I shrugged. "Don't know what to tell you. That's just what happens."

She shook her head, but she was smiling.

We walked back to the bay. The gear rack was on the other side, away from the crowd.

"This is where we get dressed." I pointed at the row of turnout gear hanging on the rack along the wall. Coats on hooks, pants bunched over boots, helmets on the shelf above. Each set staged in the same position, the pants folded down over the boot tops with the opening facing outward so you could step straight in.

Nora stopped and looked at the line of them. "They're all set up exactly the same."

"They have to be. You've got about sixty seconds from the time the tones drop to the time you're on the truck. Everything is staged so you can get dressed without thinking." I pointed at the boots. "Pants are already over the boots. You step in, pull them up, grab your coat, and go."

I reached up to the shelf above my coat and took down my helmet. I turned it over in my hands and opened the liner.

"Every firefighter keeps something in here." I pulled out a photograph. Small, creased at the corners, the color fading at the edges. Two boys and a dog on a front porch. "That's me and my brother. And that's Beckett."

Nora looked at it in my palm. "How old were you?"

"I was five. Gage was ten. Beckett was a puppy."

"You carry it every shift?"

"Yeah."

She looked at the photograph, then at me. She reached out and closed my fingers around it.

"He'd be proud of you," she said.

Nora was the first person I'd ever been able to talk to about Gage. Nobody knew about the photograph. Not Travis, not Wyatt, not anyone on the crew. Now, standing in the bay with the photograph in my hands, the weight I'd carried for years felt lighter than it had in a long time.

I looked at her. The late afternoon light was coming through the bay windows and catching her bare shoulders, the line of her neck, the loose strands of hair falling around her face. She looked the way she did in my dreams. Except she was real, and she was standing in front of me in my station.

My eyes dropped to her lips.

"Knox!" Travis's voice carried across the bay. "Poker! Price says he can take anyone on this crew and I need you to shut him up!"

Nora looked toward the other end of the bay. "We should go back."

"Yeah."