Page 1 of Second Alarm
Prologue
TY
Ten Years Ago
Oregon State Fire Academy
Her shirt is on inside out.
That's the first thing I notice, and it's the kind of thing I'm not going to mention, because mentioning it would mean I was paying attention, and I can't afford to be paying that kind of attention to Hanna Larsen this late, this tired, in a dorm room the size of a utility closet on the last night of our three-month secret.
The seams run up the outside of her ribs. The tag flares against the nape of her neck when she lifts her hair. She's wearing my academy shirt, soft gray, the logo on the chest pocket a backwards ghost in the mirror. She doesn't know. She dressed in the dark. She's moving with the absent efficiency of a woman who has somewhere else to be in the morning, who's a thousand miles between her and the state line tomorrow. My shirt is the least of her problems.
I'm not going to point out the shirt.
She's been camping out in my room three nights a week since the end of May, and the overflow has quietly taken upresidence. A toothbrush in my bathroom cup. A phone charger braided into mine behind the nightstand. A paperback she said she'd finish before she left, face down on my desk, spine cracked. Her running shoes under my chair. She's pulling it all back into her duffel one piece at a time, and every piece is a thing I didn't realize I'd started counting as mine.
I'm going to sit on the edge of my twin bed like a man who hasn't just spent the last few weeks learning every freckle on her shoulders. I'm going to watch her pack. I'm going to say something useful. I'm going to be fine.
"You're going to be cold." The words are out before I can stop them.
Smooth. Devastating. The poet laureate of the Oregon Fire Academy, Class of 2016.
Hanna looks up from her duffel. The dorm lamp is a forty-watt bulb with the ambition of a twenty-watt bulb, and in that light, her face is all shadow and cheekbone and the stubborn line of her mouth. She's wearing my shirt and her own jeans and she's holding a pair of socks.
"It's July."
"It'll still be cold in the back half of the drive."
"You're the most useful man alive, Brennan."
"So I've been told."
She rolls the socks into a ball and pitches them at the duffel. They miss. I don't pick them up for her. I'm not going to be that useful.
The mini-fridge hums. It's been humming like it's dying since the day we moved in, and my roommate has threatened to shoot it twice, but nobody's ever actually filled out the work order, so now it's the sound my whole life makes. A dying refrigerator and Hanna packing.
"Cal texted." I drop my eyes to the floor between us.
Her hands stop on the duffel zipper.
"He said to tell you he's meeting you at the tollbooth outside Portland in the morning." I keep my voice even. "Said he'd buy you pancakes."
"Okay."
"He said he's proud of you."
"Okay, Ty." Her voice has an edge now.
"I'm just delivering the message."
She turns around. She stands there in my shirt — inside out, she still doesn't know — and for a second, the whole room is nothing but her eyes on me, and I'm twenty-three years old, and I've never been so aware of my own hands in my life. I flatten them on my thighs. It doesn't help.
"Don't."
"Don't what."
She waves a hand through the air like she's clearing smoke. "That voice. That — that thing you do. The dry voice. Don't do it right now."
