She reached up to pat the side of his face, the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes deepening when she smiled. “Love you, too, kiddo.”
Brendan sighed. He was twenty-eight years old, but he would always be the baby of the family—whether at home or at the station. Some things would never change.
* * *
By the timeBrendan arrived at the station for his twenty-four-hour shift, he was the last one to clock in, thankfully still on time.
“Sure you don’t want to take another few days?” station captain Gabriel Wilkinson asked when he greeted Brendan out in the truck bay.
“I’m fine,” Brendan assured him.
And it was the truth, mostly. Work was a welcome distraction, Erin even more so when he climbed into the back of their bus while she was doing their morning audit check on supplies for their shift.
“Hey, look who finally made it in,” Erin said with a smile. She got up from her spot on the side bench in the bus to give Brendan a hug after he climbed inside. “How are you doing?”
“Better if everyone quits asking,” he said with a sigh.
Erin patted him on the shoulder. “Yeah, I bet you got a lot of that from your family. Wanna hear about my thousand-dollar vet bill from yesterday?”
Brendan groaned. Erin had an Australian shepard dog who was a garbage disposal on four legs. No food in any packaging was safe.
“You know I do.”
Brendan picked up her tablet and logged in under his RealIdent chip to finish the audit while Erin regaled him with her dog’s hideously expensive antics.
They managed to finish the supply audit before the first call came in. Brendan was glad to focus on his job and not the incident from the other day. Getting back into the swing of things was what he needed.
The first call of the day was to a nursing home and from there the hours blended together. The down times spent at the station eventually included a communal lunch that Brendan helped prepare. Sandwiches with chips and a side salad was easy enough to throw together for the crew.
Most people thought of a firefighter’s job as all excitement, all the time. While they got a lot of calls, there was still downtime that they used to catch up on paperwork, eat, or sleep. Twenty-four-hour shifts were a study in cat-napping, and Brendan was in the middle of one when Erin woke him up with a gentle shake of his shoulder.
“Yeah?” he asked, rubbing at his face. He hadn’t heard the station alarm, so he wasn’t sure what she needed.
“You’ve got a visitor.”
Brendan frowned as he sat up, careful not to hit his head on the bottom of the upper bunk as he swung his legs over the side. “Who is it?”
He doubted it would be any of his immediate family because they all had scattered shifts and knew better than to come around while he was working.
“It’s Trevor Sanchez, from Alpha Team.”
Erin looked a little starstruck when she said his name, and Brendan couldn’t blame her. He’d been thinking about Trevor all weekend. He still felt embarrassed at the way he’d acted at his apartment the other night, practically begging Trevor to stay when he knew the other man probably had a thousand other more important things to do that didn’t include babysitting his drugged-up self.
Brendan had also thought about that moment in the ER, when Trevor had kept him lying flat on the biobed without even touching him. It had been hot as hell, and he shouldn’t be thinking about that right now when he had to go look Trevor in the eye.
“Oh,” Brendan said.
“Yeah, so get moving. He’s talking to Captain Wilkinson.”
Brendan stood and left the sleeping room, heading for Wilkinson’s office instead of the truck bay. One or two of his coworkers were loitering in the hallway, trying to get a glimpse at the people in the office, and Brendan couldn’t blame them. They’d all been working during the attack on the Capitol in the spring. Everyone had seen up close how MDF metahumans had put their lives on the line, to say nothing of Alpha Team, the efforts of which had slowly dribbled out through multiple congressional hearings.
Seeing Trevor at his place of work still came as a surprise.
Brendan knocked on the office door, peering through the plas-glass window off to the side. Wilkinson waved at him, so he stepped inside. Brendan looked at Trevor, gaze lingering on the other man. Trevor wore dark-wash jeans and a crisp button-down beneath an expertly tailored blazer. Aviator sunglasses were folded over his partly undone collar. His dark hair was artfully tousled, the shadow of a beard on his face giving him a rugged, mysterious look.
Trevor looked hot, vaguely intimidating, but in a way that made Brendan think about going to his knees instead of running away.
He hastily shoved that thought aside, refusing to acknowledge it. Instead, he nodded at his station captain before turning his attention to Trevor.
