Page 1 of Heat Advisory

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“Dams break under intense pressure. So do I.”

—It’s science

Cora

Have you ever had a kiss that was so incredibly good, it ruined you for all other men?

For me, that was my high school crush, Jay Rainer.

He was the epitome of handsome, everything my teenage brain had imagined. That first kiss didn’t disappoint—it sailed past the usual cliches of stars and butterflies and landed somewhere deeper. He made me feel special. Noticed. Like I actually mattered to him.

The only problem was he left two days after that kiss, never to speak to me again.

What was worse, his sister, Morgan, was my best friend, so I still heard everything about him through her, which only dug the knife in deeper. Just like I filled her in on what was happening with all my sisters, she did the same about her brother.

It wasn’t her fault. Morgan didn’t know that her brother and I had kissed. So how would she know that every time she brought him up, it was both information I craved and loathed at the same time?

Jay had left town right after graduating because he was drafted to play for a minor league baseball team in Texas. He played for them for two years, and just before he got his big break, he suffered an ulnar collateral ligament tear and had Tommy John surgery.

I still remember getting Morgan’s call that he was in the hospital having surgery. I swear that phone call took years off my life.

“The surgery went well, but the doctor said the damage was worse than they originally thought,” she said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

She sighed, and I felt the weight of that sigh deep inside me.

“It means his baseball career is over.”

My heart tightened like a vise was gripped around it. This was Jay’s dream, and it was over before it ever really had a chance to take off.

“Can’t he do physical therapy or something? Maybe see if another doctor can do something else?”

There had to be something that someone could do.

“I don’t know.” Her voice showed that she was just as sad as I was for her brother.

After his baseball career ended, he stayed in Texas but moved on to his next dream—becoming a firefighter.

Not long after, she mentioned that the heat had gotten to him, so he’d moved north to become a firefighter in Colorado. She missed him and wished he would move back home, but she thought he was embarrassed because of how his career had turned out. Especially because their dad pushed the major league dream so hard.

So, color me shocked when I was in Las Vegas at a training exercise and saw Jay across the room.

The same man who, even years later, still occupied an enormous amount of space in my mind.

My sister Iris’s voice cut into my thoughts. “What do you keep staring at?”

“Umm…nothing,” I lied to her, shaking my head to help clear my brain. “Did you get that thing to load yet?”

My sister was a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Las Vegas, and I was the Nevada State Hydrologist, and we were here to do a fire and flood safety training event.

“Yeah, it just took a little magic, sweet talk, and a full reset of the program,” Iris’s coworker Christine responded. “PowerPoint is up and running—finally.”

The event included the three of us, plus some local firefighters, the fire marshal, EMTs, the Public Works Department, Nevada Highway Patrol, a public information officer from the Las Vegas PD, emergency managers, and a few local TV meteorologists. It was a large group to make sure everything went smoothly in an emergency—prepare for the worst but hope for the best.

My hope, however, was dwindling that the man across the large conference room was just a Jay lookalike when he finally looked my way and our eyes connected.