Singe (8 page)

She wants it too. Jesus. She’s concentrating now, eyes squeezed shut and her bottom lip clamped hard between her teeth. “Oh my God,” she says, so quiet he almost doesn’t hear. “Please.”

Please what
, Eli thinks about asking. Instead he sucks at her clit, starts fucking her harder with his fingers. She was subtle about getting there last time so now he’s paying attention, her tense thighs and her breathing, her pretty, fierce face knitted together. She’s started to move with him, just gently, like she’s worried about throwing off the rhythm. Eli presses down hard on her clit, and she bangs her head off the lockers again.

“That,” she gasps, rocking on his tongue. “Oh God, do that.” Her voice is choked, the hand that isn’t in his hair fisted on top of her mouth.

Bingo
.

“Shh,” he murmurs, pulling away for a split second. “Stay quiet.” Then he spreads her out with his fingers and goes for it hard, strong licks at her clit that make Addie whimper through her nose and shake. Ten seconds of that, maybe fifteen, and she’s done for, thighs coming together to muffle his ears. She doesn’t make a sound. When Eli spares a glance, he sees it’s because she’s biting her knuckle hard enough to draw blood.

“Hey, there,” he says once she’s finished, rubbing his nose along the line of hair. “You good?”

Addie doesn’t answer at first, pressing his face against her stomach. Her hands are sweaty and hot. “Okay,” she says finally. “Yeah, um. You probably need to get up now.”

“Uh-huh.” Eli chuffs a laugh and stands, dragging her yoga pants back up into place as he goes—his own legs are shaky, truth be told, and he leans on the lockers to steady out while he finishes wiping his chin off. Messy, she got him—
Jesus
. Addie’s face is flushed red all the way down into the collar of her T-shirt. It feels hotter in here than it did before. “Told you I’d be fast,” he can’t resist saying, grinning at her.

Addie snorts. “Oh my
God
,” she says, still breathless, “you’re so—”

“I’m so what?” he asks, teasing, leaning in to nip at her plush mouth. He’s sort of pleasantly surprised when she kisses him back right away—he thought maybe she wouldn’t so soon after, that she’d think it was gross or something. She’s still braced against the lockers herself, he notices. Her eyes are very bright. “Hmm?”

Addie shakes her head. “Nothing,” she murmurs after a moment, casting her gaze down and running one curious finger down over the seam of his shorts, just lightly. Fuck, he is so hard. She traces the outline of his cock just as gently as he touched her earlier, this insane tease that’s got him bucking into her hand like a teenager. Then she ducks under his arm and heads for the door. “Well. Better get back, huh?”

“Oh, you’re
fresh
.” Eli swats her on the ass then, sure he’s going to get a nasty look for his troubles, but Addie just laughs.

“Relax, will you?” she chides, pausing in the doorway. Down the hall he can hear Sharpie and the candidate, noisy talk that might or might not be about somebody’s mother. “Manzellas pay their debts.”

Eli feels his eyebrows shoot up, curious.
Manzellas pay their debts
is hardly
we said we’d keep it out of work
, after all. “Okay,” he says cautiously. He’s still so stupidly hard he’s gonna have to tuck his cock up under his waistband to walk. He hasn’t done that since junior prom. “What’s that mean?”

Addie rolls her eyes. A hunk of hair is falling out of her braid, one curl clinging to her sweaty neck. “Use your imagination,” she tells him, all lemon-sour annoyance. Then she gives him a slow up and down and smirks. “Seriously, though.” She juts her chin in the direction of his crotch. “Relax.”

Eli rolls his eyes right back. He can taste her everywhere, on his teeth and tongue and breath. “Make me.”

Addie’s cackle bounces off the lockers. “You wish,” she says brightly, turning on her heel and walking away.

And yeah, Eli does.

Chapter Six

Addie heads straight for the women’s bathroom and grabs a wad of damp paper towels, then ducks into a stall to wipe down her inner thighs. Crap.
Crap
. So much for a one-time thing, so much for a completely professional workplace. Her whole body is shaking so bad she sits right down on the toilet.

Half of it is the orgasm. Sex in public, Jesus, sex at her
work
, but the really, truly infuriating part? Her weak knees are just from the orgasm.

After a minute she pulls herself together, rebraids her hair and cools her neck with another damp paper towel. She can’t stay here too long. The women’s bathroom is really for visitors, the one that little kids and teachers are supposed to use when Eleven does community outreach. The men’s locker room has the standard showers and toilets—Addie walks through it every day to get to her and Jill Buono’s shared closet—but the firehouse hasn’t been renoed since the eighties, and there’s nothing comparable for women. Off the back of the engine garage is an old safety shower she and Jill use sometimes, one of those open concrete things with the twin nozzles at waist level—in case bleach gets in your eyes or whatever, Addie guesses. Jill rigged a curtain across the door two years ago with a power drill, and now it’s halfway bearable. Addie watches herself in the mirror, trying to figure out how bad she wants to hose off.

“Calm down,” she murmurs. When she touches her reflection, her hand is giving off enough heat to fog up the mirror. “Calm. Down.”

In the end she skips the shower and heads up to the crib instead, climbing onto the top bunk with still-shaky limbs and flipping onto her back, counting backwards from a hundred until her breathing finally steadies out. God, she can’t believe she did that—that she
let
him do that,
needed
him to, a thing she has categorically not been crazy about in the past and which has certainly never—never—
ugh
, dumb smug Eli who she works with, she’s never going to sleep.

She’s dead to the world in three minutes, of course. That’s the freaking orgasm too.

It’s a quiet shift at least, no calls until six the following morning when they put out a car fire on Route 7. Afterwards the candidate makes bacon and eggs and home fries, Addie dropping a fistful of ice into her coffee cup. It’s already past eighty degrees.

Eli comes in while she’s drinking it—his break was this morning, and he was already gone when the call came in—shaved and scrubbed in jeans and a gray T-shirt, the pale burned skin of his arms.

“Morning, kids,” he greets them, dropping a box of doughnuts on the table. Addie thinks of last night, how wound up he was when she left him. Wonders if he took care of himself on his own.

She doesn’t have a hell of a lot of time to imagine it though, because a minute later the alarm’s going off again, kitchen flare-up at a community center downtown.

“Had to happen during the morning rush,” Parker mutters as they jog to the garage. He and Sharpie tap the glass of the trophy case on the way by, right overtop of where the biggest service award sits. They do it every time, for luck. Addie has her Florian Cross in her left boot, Rick Brooks has a stripe painted on his red captain’s helmet. She doesn’t know what Eli has.

“You aren’t even driving,” she tells Parker, yanking on her turnout gear and rushing to check the hoses. Her dad once told her that prepping for a shift should be treated with the same gravity as a priest preparing for a sermon—David Manzella never just showed up, checked his assignments for the next twenty-four hours, then rushed through them to get to rec time, oh no. He laid out his equipment like he was handling the Host, washed off the engine like he was hosing down a church steeple. When he was captain of Company 11, chores were completed before breakfast, a ten-mile run before lunch and in-house training until dinner. Addie isn’t sorry she missed being a part of that firehouse.

Except, of course, during moments like this one: their candidate has rolled all the crosslay hoses wrong.

“Gaarder,” she scolds, reaching below the pump panel to untangle them. “Come on, buddy, you gotta do better than this.”

But Brooks grabs her arm, helmet already in place. “No point,” he says. “It’s a Class C.”

Electrical fire, meaning no hoses. “Great,” Addie mutters, slamming the panel box closed. “You got a real funny guardian angel, Gaarder.”

Eli’s freshest so he drives, up in the front cabin with Brooks riding his customary shotgun. Addie piles into the jumpseat area with Sharpie, Parker and a sheepish-looking Gaarder—the bitch seats, Jim O’Neill called them when he trained her. They fold down off the walls of the pumper, jostle you around like anything. The engine is seated by seniority, the highest ranks up front.

“I’m sorry, Manzella,” the candidate says, buckling himself in to the very last chair. “I had to take a leak so bad when we got back this morning, I guess I rushed the cleanup.”

Addie grits her teeth, reaching for her air pack. “Next time, go in your pants.” The air packs and masks are always kept in the engine, so all they have to do is shrug them on en route. Addie has yet to actually use either. Her pack has thirty minutes of air, no more, no less.

The community center’s attached to a Reform Jewish temple running a year-round preschool. The kids are out and, according to their harassed-looking teacher, all accounted for, but they’re not far enough away for Addie’s liking so she sends them all across the street while Brooks and Sharpie cut the power to the building—the place was built in the forties and the wiring’s for shit. Once it’s dark they can go in with CO2 extinguishers without worrying about getting blown to Kingdom Come.

“You’re fine,” Addie tells the candidate as they file in through the side doors, fire alarm still shrieking overhead. He looks cowed, and she wants his head in the game. “You got this.”

Back at the firehouse that afternoon, Sharpie brings in tri-color Popsicles shaped like rocket ships. Eli waits ’til nobody’s looking then touches his to the back of Addie’s bare neck. “Jerk,” she tells him, although the truth is she doesn’t totally hate being flirted with. Eli grins at her with a cherry red mouth.

He mostly lets her be other than that, sitting clear across the couches when they watch
Anchorman
in the rec room after dinner, keeping a real respectful distance when they pass in the hallway later that night. Addie can still feel his mouth between her legs. “You going to bed?” she asks, forcing her voice to stay even.

“Thinking about it.” He looks at her with a friendly, open face, hands in his pockets. He’s in his station uniform now, same as Addie, the NFPA-certified trousers and the five-crease military shirts, all of it in a deep, emergency services blue. They’re supposed to change into them as soon as they get to the station—sleep in them, even. Hardly anyone does. Once Sharpie had to go commando in his turnout pants.

“Well.” Addie resists scuffing her boot along the floor. “See you, then.” Her double shift ends tomorrow morning at eight a.m., forty-eight hours off before she’s on again for Monday. She’s not sure if she’s hoping for a fire in the middle of the night or not.

Eli smiles. “See you.”

Addie heads down to her locker and strips off her uniform shirt, leaving just the standard-issue crew neck underneath. The AC in the house shuts off at 9 p.m. to conserve energy, part of some public relations crap the new county chief started about carbon footprints. It won’t come on again until well after Addie’s left tomorrow. Already she’s starting to sweat.

She heads back out to the kitchen where Parker and the candidate are finishing off the last of the popsicles. Brooks is in his office. Sharpie is doing the dishes. Without quite knowing what she’s doing, Addie counts them. Just to check that everyone’s present and accounted for.

Which they are. Except Eli, by himself in the bunks.

Addie stalls out in the kitchen doorway, heart thrumming. She wants to. Shoot, she
really wants to
. She lets herself imagine it for a minute, clapping a hand over his mouth and swinging one leg over his narrow hips, sitting on him like she did in her apartment and rocking until they both couldn’t take it. Pulling down the sensible cups of her bra. Sliding along his body and getting her fist around him, ducking her head and—

“Manzella.” Sharpie’s waving a dish towel at her, eyebrows crawling up to his hairline. “You waiting for an engraved invitation or…?”

Shoot
. Addie startles. “From your mom, yeah,” she replies automatically, crossing the kitchen to the dishrack, picking up a plate to wipe dry. Her whole body feels prickly and hot. God, what was she even
thinking
? She’s at
work
; she isn’t stupid. She needs to put a stop to this before it gets totally out of control. It’s unprofessional, Eli is ridiculous, and if heaven forbid anyone ever found out? Fair or not, there are two chicks working at this firehouse. Addie knows exactly who’d take the heat.

She’s wet between her legs though. Standing here at the sink in her T-shirt and uniform pants, drying pots way more aggressively than she needs to, she’s really,
really
wet between her legs.

After the dishes are done, she sits with Parker at the kitchen table for a while, listening to stories about his twin baby boys. They shit in perfect unison, Parker claims. Can’t even lift up their heads, but already they’re psychic little poop machines. Addie tries to focus on the more disgusting parts of the story, but it isn’t necessarily working for her.