Page 28 of Faking the Heat

“I'm sorry,” I whisper, pushing the eggs around with a fork, the guilt finally catching up to the hunger. “I didn't even process it. I just... I said yes. I can call her back. I can tell her you have a departmental training or a very demanding cat to groom. I can get us out of it.”

Sterling leans over the counter, his face inches from mine. I can smell the cedar and the faint, lingering scent of coffee. He reaches out, his thumb catching a stray hair that's escaped my messy knot, and tucks it behind my ear. The contact is brief, barely skin against skin and because my brain decided to take a vacation to fantasy land for forty-five seconds I lose track of what I was about to say.

“Don't worry about it, Sparkles,” he says, his voice dropping into that low, steady register that makes me feel like the world isn't actually falling apart around my ears. “It's just another gig. We're good at this, remember? We have the history. We have the Jazz Bar Incident. We're pros.”

He says it like it's a mission briefing, but his hazel eyes stay on mine a second too long for mere professionalism. I want to ask him if he's still performing when the audience is gone. But I just nod and eat my eggs, the silence in the loft turning heavy and thick with the unspoken weight of the things we aren't saying.

Chapter thirteen

The Mandy Stare

Sterling

It’s a nine a.m. drill, which is too early for heroics and too late to fake a hangover. I’m forty feet up on the aerial, harnessed in and moving hand-over-hand up the last extension, boots tight on the rungs, every muscle remembering a thousand runs just like this. The city is a pinball machine from up here, light, metal, the occasional drift of fryer oil from the hot dog place two streets over. There’s a cold bite to the air, and the wind hits different when you’re above the power lines. The sky is hard blue, cloudless, and if you fall it’s a straight shot to the pavement. The training tower doesn’t make a big deal of it, but it’s the kind of view that’s supposed to make you feel small.

I don’t. I just feel off.

From the street, Jake’s voice filters up: “Drop your weight, Hayes. You’re babying the top bracket.”

I blink twice, mind catching up to my hands. I loosen the grip, swing my heel to the inside rail, and double, check the harness. The ladder creaks, just a little, and I register, with a half-second lag, that I missed a cue. Not a big one, but enough to earn a mention later.

I run the rest of the drill on autopilot. The climb, the pivot, the mock rescue down the chute, where I’m supposed to haul a 180-pound dummy back down three landings. I could do it with my eyes closed, and today, I almost do.

At the bottom, Jake is waiting by the cone, clipboard held against his chest like a shield. He says nothing. Just marks the page with a pencil, slow and surgical, then moves on to the next guy.

I unclip my harness, stretch my arms overhead, and roll my neck to the right until something pops. The world is a little brighter down here, but that doesn’t help.

The rest of the squad runs their drills. I sit on the curb, sucking down water and listening to Jake’s voice, a running color commentary on every error, every hesitation, every half-assed grip.

The shift is routine, but my brain refuses to click into gear. The morning is a blur. I put away tools, replace a gasket, wipe down the inside of the cab, but every action is haunted by the echo of her. Mandy’s face across the counter, the way she holds her coffee, the sound of her voice when she says my name. How she will sound when she screams it. Her soft skin and pink lips that I want to kiss more than anything else on the planet right now.

I’m still daydreaming, when the drills end and we’re called back into the station. The squad files in, shucking harnesses, dumping sweatshirts in the gear alcove, trading the kind of shit talk that doubles as endearment in a place like this.

“Hey” Jake nods his head and pulls me off to the side. “You wanna tell me what that was out there?”

I keep my eyes focused on the wall behind him. “You mean the drill I’ve done a hundred times?”

He cocks his head, slow, like a dog that’s just heard a can opener. “You were sleepwalking.”

“Didn’t fall. Didn’t drop the dummy. That’s all that matters.”

Jake snorts. “You’re not hearing me, man. You missed three cues and almost overshot the last landing. You’re lucky it wasn’t a live run.”

I finally focus on his face, ready to push back, but he’s not even mad. He’s… curious.

He crosses the room, sits on an empty storage crate, and plants his elbows on his knees. “Talk to me, Hayes. I’ve seen you do this hungover, sleep deprived, and even running a fever. I’ve never seen you like this.”

I want to deflect. I want to tell him it’s just a rough morning, or maybe a stomach bug, or the cosmic injustice of being stuck with a drill instructor who won’t retire. But Jake’s not buying it.

He waits.

So I say, “It’s nothing.”

He shakes his head, a slow grin blooming on his face. “You know who says ‘it’s nothing?’ People with a secret. Or people with a concussion. And you didn’t hit your head today.”

“Just let it go.” I say as I turn and make a beeline for the equipment bay, the one part of the house that never smells like anything but oil and steel.

I’m elbow-deep in the ladder truck’s engine bay, my hands slick with a thin sheen of grease. I keep telling myself a faulty gasket is the most interesting thing in my life right now. It isn’t working. Every time I close my eyes to focus on the torque of the wrench, I see her in that oversized shirt, her bare legs, her hair a beautiful mess I want to bury my face in.