Page 65 of Dreams and Reptiles

Saucy Boyfriend: Hot Pants Boyfriend kinda works. You’re a fire boy, you look hot in fire boy pants… Hmm. I’ll keep workshopping it. Perhaps the romance writers can help me.

“Kendall, are you feeling all right?”

“I… yeah. Hey, Mercy? What does Ophelia have in her phone for your contact?”

“‘Hose Ho.’ Why?”

I coughed out a laugh and felt my face get hot. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked at the fire station.

“What do you call her?”

“‘Hot Slice.’ She was ‘Active Yeast,’ but she said that was just gross.”

This was going downhill fast.

“What’s gross?” Arnie came in carrying more dirty pans from outside.

“No, don’t ask⁠—”

“Kendall was asking what Ophelia has as my contact in her phone.”

“I still think ‘Hose Ho’ is hilarious.”

“What does Rog have down for you?” Mercy asked him.

“‘Wet Spot.’ What?”

“As in, you make it or you sleep in it?” Mercy asked him, laughing so hard she held her stomach.

Arnie grinned. “Depends.”

“Oh God, no more.” I so regretted asking.

“And Rog is ‘Pole Hole’—”

The bell rang, which I rarely thought of as saving me, but from this conversation? I’d take it.

We suited up, and, as was my habit, I prayed for the safe return of my team. We climbed on the rig, and Mercy pulled out of the driveway, lights and sirens going.

“Medical Emergency at the inn. Female, seventy-two, potential heat stroke or cardiac event.”

We were there within minutes, and the staff medics had her in a wheelchair out front waiting for us. She was a petite woman in a tennis skirt who looked really pissed her game had been interrupted.

Roger and Arnie got to work taking her vitals, and I got her information from the medics. The ambulance pulled up, and I said hello to Shannon the EMT as he went to help Rog and Arnie load the woman onto the gurney. The whole time she was saying, “I’m fine, I’m fine,” but her daughter insisted we take her in.

“Mom, last time you were ‘fine,’ it required two stents!”

Just as they got her into the ambulance, we got another call, and Mercy hollered for us to load back up. The hits kept coming from there.

The first was a couple of guys who’d stuck bottle rockets into watermelons and blew them up. Only one guy got hit in the face pretty hard with melon carcass, likely breaking his nose and potentially damaging his eye.

But the worst was a little girl who’d bumped into her daddy’s charcoal BBQ grill, and some briquettes tumbled onto her. She ended up with second-degree burns. They were lucky it wasn’t so much worse.

We finished up with the little girl after eleven, and I thought for sure the Fourth would release us from its clutches.

But then we got the call that reminded me of what I’d forgotten to do before reporting in for my shift.

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