“Man,” he says, not unkind. “You are cooked.”
“Shut up and get the cones,” I say.
Training takes up our next hour as we hook and unhook, flake and charge, run evolutions until my shoulders complain. We coil hose. Stow. Wipe. Cole dismisses us and barks at Torres about something he broke in ’19. The guys scatter. I walk toward the door like I’m not counting the steps.
She meets me halfway, which is the cruelest, kindest thing.
“Your form’s better,” she says, dry.
“Yours always was.” I gesture at the clipboard. “Productive paperwork?”
“Absolutely none.”
“Thought so.”
She looks past me to the yard. “When I was nine, your mom braided garland with me and pretended it was important so I wouldn’t hear the adults whispering.”
“Yeah.”
“When I was sixteen,” she says, voice thinning a little, “you stole the keys and took me to the overlook so I could cry where no one had to see.”
I remember the weight of those keys in my palm. I remember the way she pressed her forehead to the cold window and said nothing for twenty minutes and then said everything in five. “We don’t talk about my record,” I say.
She huffs. “Statute of limitations.”
I lean one shoulder to the jamb opposite her, the space between us a magnetic field. “When we were eight, you smacked Brandon with a snow shovel because he called me poor.”
“He deserved worse.”
“I deserved the shovel.”
“You deserved pie.”
I swallow. Something opens behind my breastbone and I don’t have a name for it that doesn’t sound like begging.
“We were good,” she says, almost to herself.
“We were,” I say, and it lands like a promise.
Her eyes lift to mine, and for a heartbeat the sun, the snow, the entire town—everything—drops away. There’s just this. The fault line. The heat rising. The rock about to shift.
Footsteps scrape behind us. A civilian at the front desk asks for a burn permit. Reality shoves back between us like a body.
She clears her throat. “I have a restock request to file.”
“I have a pump panel to baby,” I say.
We don’t move.
I look at her mouth. She looks at my hands. The air lifts the hairs on my wrist. Light finds her throat. A memory steps between us and lays down a blueprint—how to close the distance, how to set my palm at her jaw, how to ask without words.
I drag my gaze up and make a different decision.
“Come by the overlook after shift,” I hear myself say. “Just to… see it. The snow globe.”
Her inhale catches. “Axel…”
“Or don’t,” I add, a line out, a shield up. “You don’t owe me a damn thing.”
