The way she'd laughed at something I'd said in the car, surprised by her own amusement, and for just a second her whole face had transformed into something that made my chest tight.
She had the kind of beauty that sneaks up on you. The kind you miss at first glance because she's not demanding you see it. Not performing it. But once you notice, you can't stop noticing.
I couldn't stop wondering what she'd look like if she wasn't so tired. She was a woman I'd met two weeks ago. But she kept slipping into my thoughts.
And it wasn't just the way she looked.
It was the way she'd treated me. In the hospital, waiting for the CT results, she hadn't asked for a selfie. Hadn't mentioned the calendar or the viral video or any of it. She'd just talked to me. Asked me questions like she actually cared about the answers and rolled her eyes when I made a bad joke.
She'd talked to me like I was just a person. Not a hero. Not a headline. Just Shane.
I couldn't remember the last time that had happened.
Two weeks later, I was still thinking about it.
The texts had started as check-ins.How's the head?Standard stuff. The kind of follow-up I'd done a hundred times for people I'd helped on calls.
But then she'd texted back something funny, and I'd responded, and suddenly we were arguing about pizza toppings, and she was sending me a photo of her bruise with the captionwarrior status confirmed,and I was smiling at my phone at two in the morning like I’d lost all sense.
Nothing heavy. Nothing that should have meant anything.
But I kept checking my phone between drills, smiling at messages when I should have been focused, and replaying the way she'd looked at me in that teacher's lounge.
"Briggs!" Brian's voice cut through my thoughts. "You planning to join us, or you got somewhere better to be?"
I looked up. The crew was already halfway through the hose drill, and I was standing there like an idiot doing nothing.
"Sorry. I'm here."
We ran the drill twice more, then broke for lunch.
I grabbed a sandwich from the kitchen, found a quiet corner in the common room, and pulled out my phone. I told myself I was just checking messages. Routine stuff.
But I ended up scrolling back through our conversation from last night. The pizza debate, her dry comebacks, the photo of her bruise with “warrior status confirmed.”
I was smiling before I realized it.
"What's her name?"
I nearly dropped my phone. Brian was leaning against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching me with the kind of grin that said I was never going to hear the end of this.
"What?"
"The woman you're texting." He nodded at my phone. "You've been staring at that screen for five minutes with the dopiest look on your face."
"I don't have a dopey look."
"You absolutely have a dopey look. It's the same face you made when they added that new espresso machine to the kitchen."
"I was excited about the espresso machine. It changed my life."
"And apparently so has whoever's on the other end of those texts." Brian pushed off the doorframe and dropped into the chair across from me. "So. Who is she?"
"No one."
"No one." He repeated it flatly. "Three months of ignoring every woman who throws herself at you. Three months of 'I'm focusing on myself' and 'I'm done with the meaningless stuff.' And now you're hiding in a corner rereading text messages like a teenager with his first crush."
"I'm not hiding. I'm eating lunch."
