Page 20 of Falling For You

Doug looked at me for a second before he walked up to Elliot and the detective. Three years of partnership meant Doug didn't need me to explain which rooms I could talk in and which ones I couldn't.

I could feel Elliot watching me from across the apartment. I looked away and my eyes landed on a mounted deer head on the wall above the couch. Its dark glass eyes stared back at me. Its antlers cast shadows across the plaster.

The room tilted.

For a second I was somewhere else. Headlights, the screech of tires, my mother's voice saying my name before the car left the road.

"Andy?"

Doug's voice pulled me back. He was standing in the doorway, watching me. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine." I looked away from the wall and wrote the last of my notes. "Let's go."

We handed the scene to the detective and walked out.

The next day, I went to the gym.

I couldn't stay home where the quiet got loud enough that it let grief in, and along with it, my memories of Elliot. They played out behind my eyes like scenes from someone else's life. Him showing up at my apartment with takeout after I had a bad day at work. Him checking both ends of the hallway before he kissed me at the precinct. Him picking me up off the couch and carrying me to the bedroom. Us in bed, his fingers laced through mine as he talked about the house he wanted to buy us someday.

I'd gone over it a hundred times and I still couldn't make sense of how the man who held my hand and talked about our future was the same man who let me cook him dinner while he had another woman's underwear in his closet.

I needed to get out of the house and do something, anything to help me forget the parts of him I still missed.

I pushed through the doors of The Citadel, the gym two blocks from my place that sounded like something out of a fantasy novel. I'd checked out three other gyms before I settled on this one. They had the cleanest locker rooms, best equipment, and it didn't smell like someone had died in the ventilation system. My standards weren't complicated. They were just non-negotiable.

I changed in the locker room and headed upstairs. Halfway up, I heard them. Someone arguing about form, someone else laughing too loud, metal clanging with more enthusiasm than technique.

I reached the top of the stairs and there they were.

"Really?" I dropped my bag by the treadmill. "You're off shift and you're still together?"

The firehouse crew had taken over the weight section. Travis was doing bicep curls with terrible form. Wyatt was spotting Knox on the bench press. Greene was on the lat pulldown, headphones in, ignoring all of them. Carl was at the squat rack, stretching in a way that suggested he'd pulled something and was pretending he hadn't.

"Maybe you're the one following us." Travis pointed a dumbbell at me. "Which one of us is it, Walsh? Just tell us so we can settle this."

"If I didn't know any better, Travis, you were all going out with each other."

The crew laughed. Knox shook his head. Greene almost spit out his water.

I left them to it and found an open space near the mats where I stretched and warmed up until my muscles loosened and the noise in my head quieted down.

When I headed back to the weight section, Wyatt was loading plates onto a barbell. The muscles in his arms tensed as he slid a plate into place. His shoulders were broad enough to fill my entire line of sight, and when he tilted his head, something tightened low in my stomach that had nothing to do with the warm-up.

He caught me looking.

"Do you want to spot me?"

"Only if you want to die."

He laughed. The whole crew laughed. I was 5'4". He was 6'1". Every person in that room knew exactly what would happen if two hundred pounds of barbell came down and I was the one standing behind him. I wasn't going to pretend I could save him, and I was letting him know I'd let him die for asking.

I walked over to the kettlebell rack and was choosing a weight when I saw Travis heading toward me. I knew that look.

"Don't even think about it."

"What? I didn't say anything!"

"You're going to ask me to match up on some ridiculous lifting competition and my answer is no."