One Night Flame

by Beverly Evans

  “He co-owns this place. Do you know him?” Krissy nods her head in Noah’s direction, and it takes everything in my power to not pull away.

  “Yeah, we go way back,” Noah says, having caught Krissy’s attention. He snaps his fingers, and the dog comes trotting up to him, tail still wagging. “Funny seeing you here.”

  “Likewise.” I fold my arms across my chest, so they don’t hang there awkwardly. “You never mentioned you owned a gym.”

  “You never asked.” He reaches down to pat the dog on the head. “You never even spoke to me directly last night, so how was I supposed to converse with you?”

  Krissy, bless her, can sense the awkward tension that his words ignited between us, and steps back.

  “I should get going, I think.” Krissy patted me on the shoulder. “See you around?”

  “Yeah, see you,” I reply, not taking my eyes off of Noah. Now that we’re face to face, it’s like my eyes are magnetically drawn to his despite my brain not wanting to give him the attention.

  “You work out now?” Noah asks, glancing down at the dog. She’s sniffing my legs, sizing me up, so I pet her. She’s so thrilled that she makes a little snorting noise and starts to lick the sweat off my legs. “Mabel, stop.”

  “She’s fine.” Mabel’s the only thing calming me down. What a cutie. “And yes, what’s it to you?”

  “You never played a sport in your life.” He looks me up and down. “Looks like it suits you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I shoot back, even though I’m also blushing from what he’s implying.

  “Exactly what I said.” He smirks and uses the bottom of his t-shirt to wipe his face. It has a very different effect on me than when Krissy did the same thing. His abs are cut, and I notice that he has more chest hair than he did when we had our encounter. Not like, a seventies kind of way, but just enough to give him an even more masculine vibe. Why does that make me feel hot? Chest hair? Seriously?

  Maybe it’s the same as his beard stubble. The few other guys I’ve slept with were either smooth as dolphins, or just had a little bit on their chests. I wish I could push him into the background noise of my sexual memory, but everything about him makes that really hard.

  Ugh, bad choice of words.

  I stare down at Mabel, and she looks up at me. She always looks like she’s smiling.

  “Well, yeah, I do work out now.” I give Mabel another scratch under the chin for the road and start toward the door. “But I should go home.”

  “What’s with the running, Nadine?” he asks, thankfully not following me. “We can’t avoid each other forever.”

  “Yeah, we totally can.” I yank open the door and accidentally hit myself in the arm, killing my smooth exit.

  He’s not wrong. I can’t avoid him forever. Always running gives him power over me, and I couldn’t let him have that. Who cares if this is his gym? I had a good time here, and like hell will he keep me away.

  Now I just have to figure out how to not be a nervous, angry weirdo around him. I glance at him through the glass door and immediately regret it. He’s watching me go and was clearly just staring at my butt before I caught him. Instead of looking embarrassed, he gives me one of those infuriating smirks that only he seems to pull off and turns away. The bastard.

  I think having any semblance of chill around him would involve wiping my memory of the past fifteen years of my life. That’s the only way. He can push buttons I didn’t even know I had to drive me crazy — in the regular sense and unfortunately, hormonally.

  I’m so screwed.

  Chapter Four

  Noah

  In college, I thought I could sleep through anything. People blasting music next door, my roommate trying to bone some chick as quietly as he could across the room, thunderstorms that tore trees apart. Having been a firefighter for a few years now, I know I can be a light sleeper when I want to be. Namely, when my phone chimes the way it does when I’m being called in from home in the middle of the night. My eyes fly open, and I roll over, answering the phone. I need to be at the station in five minutes. There’s already a truck at the scene, so I’ll be on the second one. It must be bad, then.

  I’m only on night call twice a week now, so it’s been a while since they’ve actually needed me to come help. Usually, the guys on duty at the station can handle any night calls that happen, especially since they’re usually medical or smaller house fires. My adrenaline’s already pumping, and I don’t even have my clothes on yet.

  I leap out of bed and throw on the set of clothes I keep on the chair next to my bed. Mabel senses my adrenaline pumping and stands up from her spot on the opposite side of my bed, stretching.

  “Go back to sleep.” I pet her on my way out of the bedroom and hear her flop back down onto the mattress.

  When I bought my house, I bought it to be close to the fire station just for moments like these. I’m out the door and jogging down the block in an instant, my eyes drawn to the lights of the station in the dark of the rest of the neighborhood. The second group of firefighters is suiting up when I arrive, and I join in wordlessly. I’m wide awake again, fueled by the mixture of anxiety and pure energy that the job brings. Minutes later, we’re on the truck, speeding across town.

  I can smell the fire and see the light of the sky above it before we’re even on the street, going from a home construction site toward the other, already built homes in the neighborhood. It’s been so dry that I’m not surprised the fire has spread so quickly. The newly planted trees and fancy landscaping probably aren’t helping the situation. When we finally pull up to it, I can see streams of water already entering the fire. The guys on the outside are spraying it down with water, but it doesn’t look like it’s getting the job done.

  “Are there people inside?” I ask, my voice distorted from my mask.

  “One in the house to the left,” Russell, one of the older guys on the team, says. “Henry’s inside.”

  Henry is new. I rarely have strong negative feelings about people right when I meet them, but he's an exception. He quickly backed up my hunch about him by being a strange mix of arrogant, weird, and attention-seeking. He just moved to town and joined full time, with solid recommendations from the fire station he came from. Ever since he's been overly confident in his firefighting abilities but always fishes for the compliments on his skills. But once you compliment him, he won't shut the fuck up about everything that he's done.

  I’m not surprised he’d go into the fire.

  I wait anxiously, assessing where the fire is now. The fire in the house under construction is lessening, based on the smoke, but the one in the occupied house is still blazing and possibly spreading. Even though my gear, I can feel the heat and almost taste the ash in the air.

  James, the fire chief, calls the second group into action, and we try to contain the fire. The intensity of it genuinely scares me. Even though the job is always scary, this feels different. The last time we needed this many guys on a fire was the night my uncle died.

  I focus on doing my part, hoping that Henry’s in there saving whoever’s left. Fighting fires always takes a physical toll, but I’m tense for reasons that aren’t related to what I’m doing at that moment. Half of my job is being scared and doing it anyway, but that doesn’t mean I always do it gracefully. My neck is going to be fucked up after this, just from anxiety. The scene is uncomfortably familiar.

  After what feels like ages, the fire’s out. It had spread dangerously close to another house in the neighborhood, so much so that the family that had been inside the house next door is assessing the damage with Tyler, another firefighter. Thankfully it’s not too horrific, at least for them.

  But the people whose house is completely wrecked are another story. I still don’t see Henry, but I see the family whose house is in ashes sitting on the sidewalk with James in their pajamas, ashen even in the flashing lights of the fire trucks. There are three of them; a man, a woman, and a kid around nine with a small do
g tucked under his arm. They’re being treated by the paramedics for smoke inhalation.

  Once things are more settled, my boss, Harry, comes up behind me. He claps a hand on my shoulder, the weight of his glove jostling me.

  “Hey, you can head back to the station. I’ve got this under control. Police are here to help gather evidence if there is any,” he says. “I can handle interviewing the family.”

  “You sure?” I glance at the scene.

  I'm itching to dig into the scene since it feels off. My judgment might be clouded, though. Seeing a family’s home burned down in an intense fire only reminds me of the fire Jack died in.

  I can’t go around being paranoid as hell about every fire that happens to look similar to that fire. Arsons happen, which is why my job exists.

  “Yeah. I have some suspicions, but I think I can handle it. Get some rest, since we have a big day this weekend.”

  We have a fire safety demonstration at a local fair. It’s one of the more fun parts of my job, and important, but I’ll have to be up and alert without the help of adrenaline. I’ll need a gallon of coffee in place of my missing sleep since I have to get up early tomorrow too.

  I hop back on the truck, and we go back to the station. There’s a mix of excitement that the job’s done without any severe injuries and late-night exhaustion. Well, the excitement is mostly from Henry, who must still be running on the high of surviving. He never initiates conversations because he's kind of awkward, but he looks filled with energy that doesn’t have anywhere to really go.

  My exhaustion’s back, and I ache all over, so his abnormal pep is pushing my buttons the tiniest bit. Still, I don’t want to burst his bubble, even though he’s not my favorite. He saved the woman from the fire without getting her or himself hurt. I would be happy too.

  But what’s worse — having him be annoying or have him let it out and eventually be less annoying?

  “That was an intense fire,” I say to him since I know he’d probably explode sooner than start a conversation.

  He pulls off his outermost layer and hangs it up. “Ehn, sure.”

  I narrow my eyes at him, hanging up my gear as well. He says it in the way that people do when they’re trying to be cool about something, they’re not at all chill about in the slightest. Any goodwill I have toward him evaporates almost entirely. Almost.

  “What d’you mean?” I ask, trying to sound lighthearted about it.

  “It was intense, but I handled it really well. I don’t know about how you guys fared outside, but I could have handled both easily. It really wasn’t a big deal.” He pauses, hopefully realizing how douchey he sounded.

  He’s waiting for me to say something, but I don’t have the energy. There’s no place for pissing matches here, especially when lives are at stake. We’re a team, and all of these situations don’t boil down to one person pulling most of the weight. That attitude shouldn’t fly here.

  “We did fine.” I hang up my mask. “All of us did it together.”

  “But I made that dog save,” he points out. There’s a challenge in his eyes like he’s daring me to question him. Continuing to push him would only make things worse.

  “Fine. You made the dog save,” I protest. I’m too tired to not roll my eyes a little.

  “You sound happy for me.” The challenge is still in his eyes.

  So I don’t say anything. I know it pisses him off, but it’s too late for me to give a shit. I ran out of patience for his shit before I even got there. I don’t care if he hates me or not.

  I quickly finish taking off my gear and change my t-shirt. Just as I’m about to head out, one of the guys, Owen, stops me.

  “Yo, you don’t want to decompress a bit? Harry’s wife made some amazing cookies,” he says, pointing over his shoulder at the lounge.

  It’s been a while since I’ve hung out with the crew after a fire. We rarely get straight-up downtime, so the post-fire snacks and banter are usually the times when we bond. But they feel empty without Jack there to brighten them up. I’ve tried to hang out with everyone again like I did before, but I feel the loss so strongly that it hurts whenever I do.

  I know I should, but I don’t know when I’ll be able to without it hurting.

  “Nah, I’m exhausted. I have some shit to do tomorrow anyway,” I say.

  “Ah okay. Been a while since you have, so I figured I’d ask.” He’s openly disappointed. “See you next shift, then.”

  I head home to get some sleep. Mabel’s at the door to greet me, doing her excited dance as if I’ve been gone for a month instead of a few hours. I scoop her up like I have since she was a puppy and give her a kiss on the top of the head before putting her back down. She’s way too big for this now, but I don’t want to break the habit.

  It’s well past three in the morning, but I need to shower off the sweat and smoke smell from my body before I get back into bed. My bathroom’s one of the best parts of my house — my shower’s huge and has great water pressure. I strip and hop in, sliding the glass door shut before Mabel gets the dumb idea to join me. Instead, she sits on the bath mat a couple of feet away and stretches out on her belly.

  I rest my forehead on the cool tile wall and let the hot water rain down on the back of my neck. Just as I’d feared, my brain is wide awake, but my body is exhausted. If I lay down and try to sleep, I’ll just toss and turn forever. But if I take a sleeping pill, I’ll probably feel drowsy as hell tomorrow.

  I sigh and grab my shampoo, dumping way more than necessary into my hand and slathering it on my head. I used to call my fuck buddy, Jade, after nights like these if it wasn’t too late. We met when my gym opened, and we’ve been hooking up since then. I like her just fine, but mostly in bed. Outside of it, we have next to nothing in common and hardly have anything to talk about except for working out. There are only so many conversations I can have about muscle pump and pre-workout shakes before I lose my mind with boredom. Thank god she travels all the time for work. I can only handle so much of her in a stretch.

  And seeing Nadine again makes me want to forget other women exist.

  But why? She openly dislikes me. I mean, she’s sweet when she lets her guard down a little bit and cares a lot about her family and her work, which I admire. She’s always been like that, especially at school. She used to decorate posters for various drama department events, and all of them were almost unnecessarily detailed. She was an honor roll kid all the way.

  I like her poise and how she likes what she likes, even when assholes (namely, past me) teased her for it. Yeah, she’s girly as hell, but she hasn’t changed that despite being made fun of. She’s got a backbone when it gets down to it, whether she realizes it or not. It seems like after that asshole cheated on her, she retreated inside herself, hiding from any rejection in the world. I can imagine her putting on that armor on the outside world and relaxing to her usual self when she gets home, binge-watching bad TV and knitting or whatever she’s into now.

  Maybe it’s all that and the fact that everything about her just does it for me. Those big, dark eyes and her delicate features. Something about her reminds me of an old movie star like she time-traveled to today.

  And her body. God, especially her body. Seeing her at the gym was like slamming the accelerator on my sex drive. Sure, lots of women in the gym just wear sports bras and leggings, but her ass looks especially good in spandex. And the way her face gets flushed when she’s mid-workout sent my brain to other places very quickly. Good thing there was a punching bag in front of me to punch away my problems.

  But now that I’m alone, I can ease the pent up sexual energy inside me. I grip my cock and slowly jerk off, thinking of Nadine splayed out underneath me, her face and neck red from exertion. I come quickly since I’m not trying to hold back, and just like that, my energy takes a nosedive. I finish up my shower, dry off, and slide into bed naked. Mabel’s asleep again on her side of the bed, her legs twitching as she chases squirrels in her dreams.

  I fall
asleep, still thinking of Nadine. We have a bakery errand to run for Babs tomorrow, so hopefully, it’ll go smoothly. Then I’ll see her at the fair, I hope, assuming we haven’t knifed each other by then. What else could melt a woman’s heart like a cute dog helping kids learn about fire safety?

  Well, that and the fact that she has to pretend to not hate me. She can’t rip me a new asshole or be too ice cold to me in public.

  She’d probably find a way, though. She can be surprisingly stubborn underneath that poised exterior.

  My alarm goes off much too soon, and I drag myself into some clothes. I text Nadine — Andy gave me her number again, probably because he didn’t know I already had it — and tell her I’m on the way.

  What do you mean????, is the response I get almost immediately.

  I run my hand over my face, groaning. Andy was supposed to tell her that I’m helping her pick up and deliver some bulk flour that Babs’s normal delivery guys couldn’t deliver in time for the fair. I have the lifting ability and the truck, and Nadine knows what all the baking stuff they need is. Andy was supposed to go, but he’s got a work thing now. I took the morning off to do this, so we have to.

  I text her back: The flour delivery for Babs? We’re picking it up from the flour place and dropping it off at the bakery? Because they couldn’t make the run themselves in the time frame she needs?

  I see the dots telling me she’s typing pop up and disappear a few times.

  Andy’s supposed to do it.

  I can practically feel the annoyance steaming off her words through my phone.

  Too bad. Be there in ten.

  I tuck my phone into my pocket, ignoring the angry buzzing every few moments. I make sure Mabel’s settled and head out, taking my pickup truck. It’s usually in my garage all the time, so it’s nice to take it out for a spin.

  I’m still dreading this errand, my truck aside. Now I’m coming, and Nadine has hardly had a moment to soak in the fact that we’ll have to spend an hour each way in the car with each other. When I pull up, she’s standing out front with her purse on her shoulder and her arms crossed. She’s wearing running shorts and a t-shirt and looks like an angry cat being forced to take a bath.