Page 70 of Second Alarm
I sleep for an hour. I dream about the academy — not the closet, the classroom, Ty across the aisle with his stupid college-ruled notebook writing notes on a lecture I can't hear. The dream isn't a sex dream. It's worse. It's a dream where he turns and mouths something at me and I can't hear what he says, and he's patient about it, the way he's been patient about everything.
I wake up at seven-ten and go to work.
The shift is nothing. Two calls — a slip-and-fall at the diner and a chest pain that turned out to be an extremely aggressive burrito.Ty is at another station. We don't overlap. Which means I spend the entire twenty-four hours not seeing him, and not seeing him is, as it turns out, worse than seeing him, because when I see him I at least have him to look at instead of looking at the parts of the station that are his. His locker. The coffee machine he hates. The spot on the couch where he sits when he's reading a book he's read four times.
Riley catches me staring at Ty's locker like it's an oracle.
"Come get lunch with me."
"I brought — "
"Come get lunch with me, Hanna." Her tone makes it a statement.
We get lunch. Riley orders for both of us because she's in a mood. She asks me three questions about Cal, two about my mother, and zero about Ty, which is how I know she knows. I eat a sandwich and don't taste it.
"You're quiet."
"Mm." She refills her water.
"You want advice?"
"No."
"Okay."
She eats her sandwich and doesn't give advice and sits with me. At the twenty-minute mark she gets up to refill her iced tea, and stops on the way back, and without looking at me says:
"It's worse in the dark. Whatever it is. It's always worse in the dark."
"That a firefighter thing or a life thing?"
"Yes." She sits back down.
I love Riley Prichard.
My shift ends at seven in the morning. I drive home, shower, make a cup of coffee I don't drink. Ty hasn't texted me sinceOkay.Twenty-six hours ofOkay.He isn't going to text. He said what he was going to say. He's going to wait.
I text him at seven forty-three.
Me: Are you home.
He answers in under a minute.
Ty: Yeah.
Me: Can I come over?
The three dots. The three dots. The three dots.
Ty: Yes.
Ty's apartment is above the auto parts store on Third. Blue-gray carpet. A couch he inherited from his father. A bookshelf fuller than any thirty-three-year-old man's bookshelf should be. Two plants on the windowsill — a basil and a tomato, both living, both apparently cared-for — and something about those plants is going to break me if I look at them too long, so I don't.
He opens the door in a t-shirt and sweats and no glasses, with the kind of tired that comes from not sleeping on principle. He steps back. I come in and close the door behind me, because closing the door is what I came here to do.
"I didn't sleep."
"I didn't either." I look at his kitchen through the open doorway — two mugs upside down on a dish towel, a loaf of bread on the counter, an apartment belonging to a man who feeds himself. "I'm not here to talk about Cal."
