Page 88 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

NELLIE

The pin is sent. I can't unsend it. Believe me, I checked.

Room 6 of the Lakeview Motor Lodge is eleven steps long if you take small steps, and I am wearing a trench in the carpet. Ugly carpet. Brown roses. Whoever chose brown roses for a motel floor has seen some things.

I sent that pin before my brain got a vote. Thumb moved, blue dot flew, done. Now he's coming, and I have maybe forty minutes to build a case, and I build cases for a living. Airway, breathing, circulation. Facts in order. Feelings in the drawer.

Fact one. This changes nothing.

Fact two. He's not ready. I have the evidence. A porch at dawn. A ring wound through his fist. Shoulders shaking in the gray light while I stood in the doorway of my own house feeling like a trespasser.

Fact three. I am fine alone. I have always been fine alone. Alone is my native language, and I speak it without an accent.

I say the facts out loud to the brown roses. They sound thinner every lap.

I brush my teeth for something to do. I put on the flannel because it's cold, that's all, the room is cold. I take it off. I put it back on.

Headlights sweep the curtains.

A truck door. Boots on gravel, uneven, that hitch in the right leg I'd know in a crowd of a thousand men.

The knock is one knuckle. Soft. Like he's afraid I'll spook.

He's not wrong.

I open the door and every prepared sentence in my body dies on the spot.

Owen Peterson is standing under the buzzing porch light with soot still in his hairline and a raw scrape across one cheekbone. He hasn't slept. He hasn't showered. He drove straight from a fire that could have killed him to a woman who ran from him, and in his right hand, held careful as a live coal, is my baby's picture.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi," I say, like an idiot, like we're meeting at the nurses' station.

Neither of us moves.

"You gonna let me in, Greer? Or do we do this in the parking lot with the ice machine listening?"

I step back. He comes in slow, filling the room the way he fills every room, and shuts the door behind him with a click that sounds like a verdict.

Start strong. Start now.

"Owen, before you say anything, I need you to understand—"

"No."

"Excuse me?"

"You've had your turn deciding things." His voice is quiet and it is not gentle. "You decided what I could handle. You decided what I could survive. You packed up my whole future in cardboard boxes and drove it out of town at four in the morning without asking me one question. So no, Nellie. You don't go first."

"That's not—"

"You don't get to decide what I can survive." He steps closer. "You're not my nurse. You're the woman I love."

The words hit like a defib. My whole body jumps with them.

"Don't," I whisper.

"Too late."