Things You Save in a Fire - Katherine Center Page 0,26

very strange half a second when I caught sight of DeStasio’s face as he moved toward the rookie with that knife, and I realized he wasn’t laughing. He was the only person in the room who wasn’t. Even I—not yet technically in on the prank—was smiling a little.

But not this guy DeStasio.

I felt a flash of alarm as he leaned in toward the rookie with that knife, like he might have some kind of psychotic break and just gut him like a fish in front of all of us.

But that’s not what happened.

Instead, DeStasio cut the duct tape at the rookie’s boots to free his legs, then cut the tape at his wrists. The rookie flipped himself around to sit up on the table.

And then something truly, unspeakably horrible happened—far worse than anything DeStasio could have done with that knife.

The rookie lifted his head.

He shook out his wet hair like a dog after a bath, and then he gave the rest of the guys a big, goofy grin, just as I froze in place at the sight of his face.

His stunning, heartbreakingly appealing face.

Oh, no, I thought. No, no, no.

Because the second I saw him—laughing, breathing hard, muscles still tense under his wet shirt—and saw his affable, all-American, Norman Rockwell–esque smile, I had all the symptoms of a heart attack.

I stood there, in a room full of EMTs, silently diagnosing myself with a possible myocardial infarction. It was comforting, in a way, to know that I was standing in a whole room of guys who could save my life if need be.

But then the rookie met my eyes and smiled at me, and I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t a coronary.

It was worse.

It was the rookie himself.

I was having a reaction to the rookie. A romantic reaction. The dumb kind.

A full-body reaction, too. Like someone had lit a Fourth of July sparkler inside my chest. It was so terrible. So humiliating. So … girly.

That kind of thing never happened to me. Not ever.

It’s worth mentioning that he wasn’t a calendar firefighter. He wouldn’t have stopped traffic or anything. He was just a normal guy. There was no reason at all that the sight of him should have hit me like that.

But it did.

I couldn’t turn my eyes away—which was okay, because everybody else was watching him, too. He climbed off the table and stood next to the captain, dripping. Then he took a few bows.

Get a grip, I thought. Pull it together.

I’d seen a thousand firefighters in my life. Tough ones, handsome ones, ripped ones. Hot firefighters were a dime a dozen. Heck, I’d spent three years working shoulder to shoulder with calendar-cover-guy Hernandez. I’d built up a solid immunity, and the rookie should have been no different.

What was it? The straight nose? The square jaw? The friendly curve of those eyebrows? What was I seeing in that face that was reverberating through my eyeballs, into my brain, and off to every corner of my body?

Maybe it was his teeth. They were so—I don’t know: so straight.

Good God. What was happening to me?

“Guys, meet the rookie,” Captain Murphy said, and the guys all shouted hellos and welcomes. “He’s a homegrown real deal from a long line of brave heroes.”

Not helping.

Time slowed down as I watched the rookie meeting all the guys one by one, stepping forward and reaching out with his wet, muscled forearm to shake hands over and over. Smiling at everyone with those heartbreaking teeth, including whoever had just duct-taped him to the basketball pole and turned the hose on him, with the most agonizingly good-natured crinkles at the edges of his eyes.

It goes without saying, but this was not good. Not good doesn’t even scratch the surface, in fact. Firefighters don’t feel sparklers for other firefighters—not if they want to keep their jobs.

Don’t panic, I told myself. It’s physical. He’ll turn out to be dumb, or rude, or narcissistic, or overly fond of fart jokes—and all this weirdness will dissipate. You’ll be fine.

I’d better be. Because there’s no attraction in a firehouse.

There’s no longing. There are no goo-goo eyes, or savoring glances, or secret trysts. Firehouses are temples to heroic masculinity, and ladyish things like heart sparklers are the absolute antithesis of everything they stand for—because there is absolutely nothing girlier than falling in love. As I’d just explained, with many eye-rolls, to my mother.

In fact, one of the reasons I’d always considered myself uniquely qualified to be a female working in a firehouse