Page 21 of On Fire

He strips off his oxford green button-down, tosses it on a plaid overstuffed sofa and is down to a white T-shirt, black jeans, and white athletic socks. I watch while he throws open windows trying to make the tiny place less stuffy. He’s such a big guy, probably weighing in at two fifty, taller than me, and he has to be sporting a forty-three-inch chest. I’m lean, tapered, and I lift, but I’m not built like him. His biceps are nearly the size of my thighs. Covered in clothes though and with his golly-gee-gosh manner, you almost don’t notice how ripped he is. He just looks big.

I’ve seen him in action though at a fire scene and the guy is a premiere professional.

The first beer he hands me goes right to my head.

I tend to nurse a beer, easily finishing one for everyone else’s third. This one I down immediately and start poking around his place. It’s a mashup of doilies on old-overstuffed furniture, crocheted throws and then two masks from Kenya, figurines from Australia, and coins thrown in a bowl on the mantle from at least six different countries.

Everything is tidy, tucked in its spot and clean. I stretch and feel his eyes on me. I watch as he pulls vegetables and romaine out of the fridge and returns with a crumpled foil wrapped package in his hands: cornbread.

It’s those hands. They are massive, and I fantasize for a moment what it would feel like to have them cupping my ass.

I offer to chop up an avocado and this sends him rummaging for a block of cheddar. The muscles of his huge arms move under his shirt and the cleft made by his spine diving between muscles, pulls the material taut.

Maybe it’s the heat, the smell of food, the close proximity to this man, but when he turns around, a pec flinches under that thin material. I drop a slice of avocado and stoop to retrieve it while he starts grating.

On the way up, I’m dizzy again and close my eyes.

His voice eclipses the ringing in my ears. “Nic. Hey?”

It passes. When I open my eyes, he’s starting toward me and part of me is desperate for him to just keep coming. But he stops. There’s real concern in his eyes.

“Sorry,” I explain. “I’m tired. I know the owner of the bar . . . and this thing. These bombs. It’s. . .”

He says something about PTSD, but it’s not that.

The nausea is the memory of my dad beating me when he found me with a boy, it’s my mother reading to me out of the Bible, it’s feeling claustrophobic when the priest cornered me in my bedroom, not for nefarious reasons, but to tell me I was doomed to Hell, burning alive, forever.

It’s the memory of waking up alone, desolate, in the hospital at sixteen having had my stomach pumped and angry I was still alive.

I don’t know why after a decade and a half, the past I’ve successfully run away from has suddenly become so palpable, so present.

I peck at the salad, making a decision. My second beer is gone as well. Maybe it’s drinking on such an empty stomach, but the beers are doing what they do best. For me, it’s always been about inhibition.

I decide to ask the question—the one that will change everything between us. The courage to ask doesn’t come from the beer alone—it’s from the look I saw in his face when I took off my suit jacket and tie. It’s the same look he’s giving me now when I roll up my shirt sleeves to start the dishes.

“I’m having another. You?” Keller asks, standing in the kitchen, holding a beer and church key.

Trying to sound measured, hoping my voice doesn’t catch, I just go for it. “Who have you come out to?”

“What?” He looks stricken, but I can’t take back the question.

“Give me that,” I say, taking the bottle from his hand and torquing off the cap with my hand. I offer it back to him and then reach into the fridge and grab another bottle for myself. “So, you’re not out,” I say, and retrieve the church key he dropped.

Hoping to revive him somehow, I tap his bottle with mine and then throw back my head and chug about a third of the bottle.

I need to grow a pair.

I set the bottle down and I do grow a pair. We are only a few feet apart now. I catch his gaze and do not lose eye contact. I can’t afford for my “Come here” to be misinterpreted for anything else. I don’t want to spend the next month second guessing why he turned me down.

The nervousness I’m feeling seems absent from his body. He’s standing before me like a rock, but his question is almost plaintive. “What do I need to do?”

Watching his lips, full and damp with beer, I have two conflicting thoughts and they both come out at once in a twist of doublespeak: “Never mind,” (and we will both walk away) and “Do nothing,” (meaning I’ll step up).

I take my own advice and close the gap between us.

He mumbles “What’s happening?” and all I can think to say is “This.”

I put my hand behind his head and do what I’ve wanted to do for a long time. A sigh escapes his mouth before my lips close over his, and for a moment he shifts backward. But as I start to pull away, he engages, and I feel his breath come fast. A shudder runs through that huge frame making me harder than I’ve been in a very long time, and I thrust my hips towards his just to feel him.