Singe (9 page)

“All right, Manzella,” Parker declares finally, wrapping up a detailed description of newborn crap. “I’m gonna hit the hay. You coming?”

Addie shakes her head. She feels sticky and hot, restless down to her bones. The entire time she’s been sitting here, the thick seam of her uniform pants has been cutting into her in exactly the right-wrong way. “Nah, you go ahead,” she tells Parker, smiling tiredly—out of all the guys at the house, Parker has always been her favorite. He and Addie were candidates together. “Think I need to grab a shower first.” She needs more than that, she needs a change of underwear and an attitude adjustment, but it feels like a good place to start.

She heads out to the engine garage with a towel, drawing the curtain across concrete stall before she starts stripping—that’s one of the main problems with the safety shower, no privacy. Especially in the summer, when the guys like to open the big garage doors and sit out in the shade. This late at night though, everyone is safely inside. Addie turns on the water and prays for the house’s PA system to stay silent.

The second problem with the shower is all the nozzles go at once, the overhead and the twin spray for your eyes that sits at waist height; Jill says she pretends she’s in one of those fancy hotel set-ups with body sprays, but the rusted fixtures and visible pipes kind of kill that dream for Addie. The water pressure is good, at least. No doubt on account of its main purpose being to blast chemicals off your body.

Addie forgot her shampoo so she uses Jill’s, a volumizer for fine hair that makes her curls frizz up to nightmare proportions. She scrubs fast, mindful of the fact that most house fires start at night. But when she uses a palmful of body wash to clean between her legs, the contact makes her flinch. Violently.

Jesus. Addie closes her eyes against the spray for a minute, breathing. Her nipples have tightened up, her whole body feeling like it’s concentrated in a Gordian’s knot at the V of her thighs. She swallows a mouthful of steam. She can’t do
this
here either, in the freaking safety shower five feet from the engines. The alarm could sound literally any second, send the whole company rushing down into the garage. She turns the water colder and soaps up the rest of her body as efficiently as humanly possible, then recites all the Holy Days of Obligation to herself for good measure.

After that she thinks of Eli crouched on his knees in front of her, and she slides her fingers down her body one more time.

Shoot.
Shoot
, she is still
so wet
even though the water’s freezing. Addie leans one hand against the slippery cinderblock wall and squeezes her eyes shut, promises herself she’ll be fast. She can get herself off without a ton of fuss, usually—
that
part’s never been a problem, at least—and she rubs in tight, knowing circles while the water sluices down her rib cage, imagining his mouth and his hands and the edge-of-pain pressure of him inside her. Eli’s voice is in her head saying
Come on, Addie, what do you need
,
as she leans into the spray like it’s a touch, working herself harder
.
After a whole evening of waiting, it feels good enough that she has to turn her head and bite the skin of her supporting arm to stay silent.

One thing’s for sure: she’s
fast
. For a second she thinks it isn’t going to work, the nerves of doing it out here trumping the pleasure, but then she imagines actually having an orgasm while he’s inside—actually clenching down, actually feeling that feeling while he’s rocking in and out—and loses it with a soundless whimper.

Well, crap.

She gives herself the talking to again while she’s drying off and redressing,
stupid
and
at work
and
divorced Eli the player
, but it isn’t working so good. Just last week her cousin Paulina read out loud to the dinner table from
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie,
and Addie can still hear her careful voice sounding out the words:
If you give a mouse a cookie, he’s going to ask for a glass of milk
. Addie feels like the mouse.

She braids her hair into submission and heads for the bunk room, opening the door noiselessly. Sharpie and Parker are passed out on the two lower beds by the door, Parker’s soft, rhythmic snores. Addie keeps walking until she gets to the bunk that Eli always uses, second from the back. He’s still awake, peering up at her out of the dark with his arms crossed behind his head. Somehow, Addie isn’t surprised at all.

“Hey,” he whispers, holding up two fingers in a wave.

“Hey,” Addie mouths back, nudging at the mattress with her knee. Then she climbs up the ladder and lies down on her stomach without another word. After a minute, she feels Eli reach up and jiggle the bed frame with his foot.

Even though he can’t see her, Addie hides her smile behind one hand.

By the end of the weekend, Eli can’t put it off anymore, so he calls his mom in Tucson, where she moved right after Eli started college. Now she lives in a bungalow he visits once a year at Christmas and works at a sun-catcher and windchime store with a bunch of other ladies, divorcees and other widows. She’s okay, Eli thinks. Eli hopes. They don’t really talk about that kind of thing, just his work at the firehouse and the weather and stuff she’s seen on
Nancy Grace
. The avocados at the farmers’ market, four for a dollar.

(Here’s what else they don’t talk about, not ever: Will. Eli’s dad. That one long, hot, horrible summer.)

Today they chat about her backyard garden, whether or not he’s heard from Chelsea lately. His mom’s still harboring hopes they’ll patch things up. “It’s not good to spend too much time alone,” she warns him, the closest she ever gets to dispensing parental advice. For no reason at all Eli thinks of Addie, her cackle and her messy apartment. How he thinks she’s the kind of person it’s impossible to feel lonely around.

“Mom—” he starts, then breaks off abruptly. He imagines bringing it up sometimes, the post-apocalyptic ruins of their family. He’s not sure which one of them drew the line in the ash. “Do you—?”

“What’s that?” His mom’s voice is high and reedy on the other end of the line. “Oh, honey, I’ve got to go. Louise is picking me up for the supermarket and she just honked her horn outside. I love you. Have a good day.”

Eli blinks, feeling instantly relieved—it’s better this way, anyway. Nothing to be gained by wallowing in it. He says goodbye, hangs up and downs a beer in two long gulps.

To avoid downing another—and another, and another—he cleans out his fridge, scrubbing the grimy inside of the crisper where he keeps letting vegetables go bad, wiping down the plastic shelves and walls, refilling the questionable ice cube tray that came with the apartment. He reheats some leftover takeout he doesn’t even want, eats it standing over his sink—since Chelsea left, he’s gained ten pounds. Finally, though, he runs out of things to spruce and the beer’s still sitting there, twist-off caps at the ready. Eli closes the fridge door gingerly and picks up his phone.

He scrolls through the contact list a couple times, past Chelsea and his buddies from the firehouse, considers redialing his mom and leaving a message. What he really wants, bizarrely, is to call up Addie Manzella and ask her to keep him company so he doesn’t have to drink alone, but he doesn’t have her number, so. Finally he settles on a lab tech named Karen who put her info in his phone at a bar two nights before Drew Beecher died. She picks up on the second try.

“You took your time,” she tells him.

They go out to a restaurant near her apartment, and after a Caesar salad for her and chicken parm for him, Eli has the pleasure of fucking lab tech Karen on her Pottery Barn couch. She’s loud in a way Eli’s learned usually means girls are faking, but he doesn’t care enough to investigate. He kisses her goodbye at the door and heads home, in bed before midnight.

The last thing he thinks before he falls asleep: Karen, he’s pretty sure, wasn’t fucking him ironically.

So there’s no reason for him to feel like such a miserable piece of shit.

But he does.

He’s at work again come Tuesday morning, is spraying down the engine with Sharpie when Addie drives up in her crappy sedan, honking her hello. She comes through the garage a few minutes later, Company T-shirt and her station pants rolled halfway up her ankles in the heat, dark hair falling out of its ponytail. She looks like something out of the
Little Rascals
. Eli wants to kiss her pretty fierce.

“Gentlemen,” she says, then swears as Eli turns the hose on the ground by her feet by way of greeting, enough to soak her good and seriously from her knees on down. She’s wearing a pair of cheap rubber flip-flops, her toes painted with a fresh coat of red that matches the pumper. She doesn’t bothering jumping back, just scowls. “Oh you’re fucking hilarious, Eli.”

Eli grins.
Out of work
, sure, but it’s nothing he wouldn’t have done to the candidate and on top of it he likes teasing her, that exasperated expression on her pretty olive face. Almost a week since the funeral and her messy apartment, and he’s still thinking about her way more than he would have guessed. He can’t get over the feeling they’re not quite done.

It’s a busy shift, four-alarm at an apartment complex and a car accident that downs a sparking power line in the lot of a packed strip mall. It is so endlessly fucking hot. Addie is on schedule to drive, so Eli spends the day watching her from back in the jumpseats, her arms and her hands on the wheel. She’s a capable driver, hardly ever runs the sirens unless she has to. Eli finds it bizarrely appealing.

“Thanks for this morning, by the way,” she tells him as they’re heading back from the strip mall. It’s Brooks’s day off so after the first few calls Eli conned his way into riding shotgun, a privilege usually reserved for the captain. With Brooks gone, he’s the highest ranking guy in the company. “I’m still wet.”

The light above their intersection turns green, a car behind them leaning on the horn. Eli just looks at her.

After a second Addie blushes, a mottled, purpley red that spreads up from her neck to behind her ears. She’s not a pretty blusher. “Oh shut up,” she mutters, yanking the engine into gear. “You’re a jerk.”

“I didn’t say a
word
,” Eli promises, eyes on the road. He hopes Buono and Parker can’t see his face from back in the jumpseats.

The whiteboard schedule has
GRANT
written down beside the lunch and dinner slots, but the house is running low on just about everything, fruit and veg and every variety of meat. Eli was thinking about a stir-fry, but it turns out they’re out of soy sauce too. “Gonna do a grocery run,” he announces, shoving back from the kitchen table. “Any requests?”

There are. Buono wants baby spinach, while Parker and Terry Klink, the oldest guy on rotation and a grandfather of three, want frozen burgers, the pre-spiced kind. The candidate is too smart to make any requests. Eli laughs, writing down the Hot Pocket flavor he knows the kid likes anyway. When he gets to Addie though, she shakes her head.

“I better come with you. Last time you bought the pasta that tastes like cardboard.” Addie eyes him benignly over her bottle of water.
I dare you to say one single thing
, her expression seems to communicate.

Eli’s no dummy. He feels his eyebrows go up, surprised and pleased. “Well, come on then, princess,” he tells her, angling his head toward the doorway. “God forbid we get the wrong noodles.”

“God forbid,” Addie echoes, heading past him in that direction. Eli tries not to sneak a look at her ass and mostly fails. Even in her station pants, navy blue twill and cargo pockets, it’s—fuck, it is a good ass. The next thing he tries not to do is imagine bending her over. “I’m driving.”

Her car’s just as random and messy as her house is. Addie tosses a gym bag and her phone charger into the back before he gets in, then hooks a hand over the back of the camo-covered passenger seat as she backs out of her parking spot. “I meant it, you know,” she tells him, pulling out into traffic. On the radio is noisy girl-pop, Kelly Clarkson or Pink or something, Eli doesn’t know. “I legit do not trust you with the food of my ancestors. I’m not, like, trying to get you alone.”

“You’re trying to get me alone a little bit,” Eli says. The hair at the nape of her ponytail has frizzed up into baby curls, cherubic and heavy against her neck. He wants to lay his hand there as she drives.

Addie shoots him a glance over the rims of her sunglasses, an oversized plasticky pair that must have set her back all of five bucks. “Well, if I
was
,” she says finally, turning the radio up a few bumps. “I sure didn’t have to try that hard, now did I?”

Eli laughs. She has him there.

He follows her bobbing ponytail through the Price Chopper as she instructs him what to put in their cart, this variety of apples and not that one, ground turkey instead of beef. As promised, she points out which kind of pasta is the right kind—“Oh God, not that one, Eli, you might as well be eating paper”—then holds court in judgmental silence while he tries to select an appropriate brand of soy sauce. “Do what you feel,” she says when he tries to ask for advice. She swapped out her work boots with keds for the trip, the low-cut kind that show off her ankles. That, plus her curly hair, plus the rolled up uniform pants, and she looks like Shirley Temple’s older, darker sister. Eli is well on his way to having a full-blown crush.

“You guys cops?” asks the checkout woman, obviously trying to place their station uniforms.