“You see that kid on the news?”
Jones shoots him a raised brow, and Tommy shrugs. “Captain Nash will sort him out.”
“Or he’ll wash out in a month,” Jones singsongs, and Tommy bites back on the defensiveness he feels bubbling up.
They’d been growing towards something, when he left. Even he knows that whatever Bobby Nash was doing was rare. He... misses it, some days.
He’s still getting used to this new crew. They’re... there’s nothing wrong with them, it’s just that Tommy’d been at the 118 for years, and even though he doesn’t look back fondly on most of it, or the person he’d been, that had been home for a long f*cking time. He’d made a decision, the moment Bobby slid the LAFD pilot certification across the desk to him, his last review, that he wasn’t gonna hide himself anymore.
It’s f*cking work, being genuine. Honest. Open.
“You got any plans for the night?”
Tommy takes a deep breath through his nose, stretches his shoulders back. Tilts his head a little, tips his chin down so he doesn’t look so f*cking tense. “Does trawling the horrific depths of LA Grindr until I fall asleep count?”
Jones goes still. There’s a terrible, horrible moment where every sh*tty thing Gerrard, his father, his CO’s, his high school buddies ever said washes over him. And then Jones’ face does something strange. Pursed lips, raised brows, scrunched nose, like the surprise is washing over him uncontrollably, and then — “Well sh*t, Kinard, that’s just depressing. Let me and my man take you out tonight.”
Tommy blows the breath back out, feels the corner of his mouth tilting uncontrollably up, has to roll his tongue over his teeth to keep it from going too wide. That — he hadn’t known that. Everyone here uses ‘partner’ to describe their significant others, he figured it was just some initiative they’d all taken to be inclusive. “As long as you’re not looking for a third. No offense, Jones, you’re not my type.”
Jones smirks. “Who says you’re mine?”
Tommy slaps a hand over his heart, really plays up the hurt expression. “I’m everyone’s type.”
Jones’ eyeroll is a thing of beauty. “You’re too pretty for me, Kinard. And I’m too mean for you. You need a nice boy with a heart of gold to keep you humble.”
Tommy thinks, fleetingly, of the lost little look in that kids blue, blue eyes, camera shoved in his face and the flashing lights of a tilt-a-whirl behind him.
“I’d eat him alive,” Tommy says, and Jones’ laugh follows them both out of the lockers.
“What a f*cking day,” Gatlin says, laid out across the length of the bench, one arm over his face,
It’s been a series of days, actually, but Tommy doesn’t feel like being pedantic about it.
Tommy just hums, and does his best not to be annoyed about having to juggle his duffle in one hand while he shifts the sad, unused basketball out of his locker to stuff it in the open neck of his bag. They’ve all been through the ringer, Tommy’s gonna give the new guy a moment to regroup.
“Hey, did the 136 ever find their captain? In all the chaos I don’t remember anyone radioing it in.”
Tommy nods an affirmative. He’s so f*cking tired from calling out locations of trapped survivors that he’s sure his voice sounds like sandpaper. “Swept up in it like all the rest. Someone on patrol found him pinned under debris. An officer had to saw off his arm, poor bastard.”
Gatlin sits up like he’s rising from the dead. “You’re making sh*t up. This is a hazing ritual.”
Tommy slides him the most serious face he can manage around the yawn threatening to escape. His phone is blowing up — texts from dozens of people who’d been working the same sh*t as him, and it’s the first time in a while he’s regretted deleting Facebook. The marked safe function would have saved him about sixty texts so far.
“Heard from Waters that one of the 118’s kids was on the pier when the wave hit,” Gatlin tells him, finally groaning and rising to gather his own sh*t.
Tommy’s gut drops even as he’s opening up Hen’s contact in his phone, gratefully dumping the duffle onto the bench, now that Gatlin’s legs aren’t taking up the entire thing.
“Kid has CP or something, some lady found him and carried him around for like half a f*ckin’ day until she found the old VA popup.”
“Mr. Rogers would have been proud,” Tommy says, and stares at the unsent text he’d typed out with shaky hands. Is Denny okay?
“Huh?”
Jesus, he’s young. “Look for the helpers?” Gatlin blinks at him. “Never mind. Change your clothes. Drink some water. Go the f*ck home and get some shut eye, Gatlin.”
“You too, Kinard.”
He deletes the text the moment he’s in his truck, but scrolls back to her contact about twenty times, lying in bed that night, trying to get some sleep.
When he wakes up there’s a text from Hen.
Tommy scrolls up to find a keyboard smash he’d somehow managed to send at 2 in the morning.
Hen 3:27 AM: ???
Hen 3:28 AM: You good?
Hen 3:31 AM: We’re fine. If you were wondering. I assume you fell asleep talking yourself in circles about whether or not to reach out.
Hen 3:42 AM: One of our guys was at the pier with the probies kid. They’re both fine. Tell your crew to stop gossiping so much.
Hen 5:53 AM: Call me if you need anything
Tommy ignores the ache behind his ribcage.
Tommy 7:33 AM: Glad you’re okay. Tell Karen I said hi.
Hen 8:24 AM: Karen and Denny send their love.
Tommy’s elbow deep in wiring when Thomas sidles up to the co*ckpit. He’s got a look on his face that Tommy would normally like to entertain, but there’d been something fiddly with the altimeter his last flight out and he wants to check this before they get called out again — better to ground her until someone can take a real look, if he finds anything, than wave it off ‘til the end of the day.
Thomas shifts closer, tips his head in so he can duck under the open door.
“So, you still know a couple of the guys over at the 118, right?”
Tommy grimaces.
The fact of the matter is, Tommy knows a few guys from all over the city. He’s been around a while, has made many an appearance at the bars first responders like to flock to, has seen enough people come and go from stations to know a guy here and there everywhere. He’s thinking of setting up a pick-up game for whichever LAFD members want to show, maybe seeing if he can wrangle enough people for at least a bi-weekly trivia night.
The breakup with Jason sucked and he’s definitely trying to avoid going home to his empty apartment. Maybe he should get a dog.
“I still don’t know the guy under the engine, Hank.”
“But...you could find out.”
“Didn’t you date one of the paramedics on the B shift over there? You were always yapping about how your schedules never lined up.”
Thomas’ face goes a little pale. “Yeah, uh... that didn’t work out.”
“Yeah, don’t sh*t where you eat, Henry.”
And now he’s thinking about Jason, again. Christ. Don’t date anyone you meet on calls, Sal had told him, five years in, when everyone still thought his flirting with every hot chick they ran into meant anything other than him desperately trying to cover for the way his eyes were always drawing to the wide stretch of shirts across broad shoulders and the tight fit of a pair of classic 501s.
How he’d managed to convince himself Jason would be the exception is beyond him.
And the guy pinned under the engine had only made things worse, so he’s not particularly in the mood to gossip about him when Jason had used the whole ordeal as an excuse to start a massive f*cking fight about the risks of the job for the fifth time in as many months.
“Yeah, I get it, oh wise one. Are you wise enough to figure out why the f*ck the guy is suing the department?’
Tommy’s interest is piqued.
God damnit.
It hasn’t even been that long since Chim called him last, Tommy rationalizes as he tips the flashlight in his mouth with his bottom teeth.
“Give me ten minutes to figure out if there’s a short and I’ll make a call.”
Tommy’s got one eye on the television and another on the pool table. Brody’s got a pool cue tipped under her chin, and he can already see the chalk shifting onto her skin.
“So, we all agree they’re f*cking cursed, right?”
Tommy takes a sip of his beer while a few of the guys make noises of agreement.
“Like, I’m thinking of starting a pool to decide what disaster they’re gonna have a starring role in next. But I don’t want repeats, and at this point I’m not sure how to list them all.”
“Rebar through the brainpan,” Trent says, shaking his head. Tommy feels a flash of guilt for never calling Chim after the initial text he’d sent.
“Plane crash,” lists Jones, eyes still on the reporter being drenched in the downpour as she recites the same tired story about the boy down the well.
“Bath salt werewolves.”
“Earthquake high rise rescue,” Tommy tosses out. He’s still a little annoyed he’d missed that one.
“Unwitting bank heist,” Brody says, phone out and typing furiously. “Oh, do we count ‘targets of teenage Unabomber’ and ‘pinned under a fire engine’ as two separate events?”
“This is getting a little morbid,” Trent says. Still no updates about the guy who’s been buried alive with the kid down the well.
“Armed chicken,” Tommy contributes, hoping to lighten the mood, and grins when they all turn to him with incredulous looks. “Maurice. Knives for feet. He introduced Nash and Grant, technically.”
Brody rolls her eyes. He never should have let her in on his secret love of love stories, she’s such a cynic, she hates when they all gossip about each others love lives.
“This is life or death situations, not dangerous fowl turned rom-com moments. C’mon, what else have we got? I’m including tsunami. Wasn’t your buddy’s girlfriend at dispatch when it got taken hostage? I’m counting it.”
Christ, he really needs to do a better job of keeping in touch.
Tommy’s eyes flit back to the screen. He can see the NASH dashed across the back of one set of turnouts, the end of a name, just ‘LEY” on the set next to his. He’s suddenly not feeling great.
“I’m gonna grab a drink,” he tells them, and Jones raises a brow at his half-full beer.
Tommy chugs it and tries to ignore Brody continuing to list things off.
Tommy’s getting a little tired of the argument about his job. There’s always a f*cking argument, and he’s always somehow the bad guy for being the one saving lives day in and day out.
At least Peter hadn’t lasted long enough for Tommy to really get all that invested.
The house is too quiet, though.
And the dating scene is hell. He’d never —
The whole landscape of dating had been a sh*t show from the moment he’d decided he was done f*cking around with hookups and lies, and it’s only gotten worse. He feels old, and he hates that he’d never let himself try when everything wasn’t app based and fraught with weird expectations.
He shoots off a message to Chim before he heads in to work. He needs a break, maybe. He’s got half an empty drawer and one less toothbrush in his bathroom and there’s an ache, in his bones, for the easy way he’d always been able to let loose with Chim and Hen.
(He’s not sure they even know he came out, and the superficial relationships in his life just keep smacking him right in the face.)
The pileup on the freeway provides a nice distraction, for most of the day, and he tries not to feel too disappointed when the message he sent to Chim goes unanswered.
It’s three days later before he gets a slightly blurry picture back. It’s — it’s a baby, and Tommy is unprepared for the wave of longing that threatens to crush him.
Howie 4:35 AM: I’m a dad!
Howie 4:35 AM: I made that!
Howie 4:36 AM: Sorry, man, I’ll be tied to this pooping, crying creature for the foreseeable future. But we should grab a beer sometime
Tommy 4:45 AM: Congratulations. She’s beautiful. You get out in, what, 18-20?
Brody pokes her head over his shoulder when he pulls up the picture again. “Cute baby.”
“Chim’s,” he tells her, and her expression shifts.
“Wasn’t his brother in the pileup last week?”
Tommy keeps his eye on the picture, wets his tongue against the top of his mouth before he speaks. “He didn’t say.”
They’ve all been on edge for days, now. Technically most of them aren’t in much danger, eyes in the skies that they are, but there’s not a single one of them who doesn’t have a friend or two outside of Harbor that wears the uniform.
They’re already two men down. And they’re all going a bit crazy.
So of course, when Tommy lands the bird and steps into the hangar, it’s to find everyone huddled around the TV set up in their little rec area, murmuring to themselves. Tommy runs a hand through his hair and makes his way across to them.
“Is he —?”
The guy’s insane. He’s got a vest and a helmet and no cover at all beyond the metal bars encasing the ladders of the crane tower. He’s surrounded on three sides by high rises, with wide windows and balconies just ripe for someone to set up an easy f*cking shot.
The news crew pans to the witnesses on the ground, and there’s 118’s engine.
“Didn’t his partner just get shot? What is the 118 even doing out there?”
Someone hums. There’s a line of tension in every single set of shoulders huddled around the TV, watching, waiting. If Tommy was a praying man, he’d send something up to the big guy. Too bad they don’t believe in each other.
He’s still climbing. Three points of contact always, Tommy thinks, watching, holding his f*cking breath the higher he climbs.
The camera cuts away once he’s out on the arm.
“Did anyone see who it was?” Remy asks, and they all shake their heads, but Tommy’s got a mental list from his sparse contact with Chim. Diaz is in the hospital. Bobby’s on the ground. This is Buckley, the kid he’d missed meeting by the skin of his teeth, when Bobby fast tracked his transfer.
In another life, under a different set of circ*mstances, the idiot making himself a target for a psycho would have been Tommy.
Tommy watches with bated breath until they switch back to the desk, both anchors looking a little wide-eyed as they report that the guy on the crane has been successfully freed from the cable that had had his arm pinned, and both him and the firefighter are fine. On the ground. Out of danger.
For now.
“Pay up, dickhe*ds. Prison riot officially made it on the list.”
Tommy shakes his head, amused more than anything else. He pulls a five from his wallet, and Brody stares at it.
“It was twenty. A piece.”
“This is a gesture of goodwill, Dash. You never paid me for the mudslide.”
“We worked the mudslide, it doesn’t count.”
“Oh now you’re creating arbitrary rules after the fact? Give me my five back.”
Brent smiles with his whole body, and kisses Tommy like he’s proving a point, and he doesn’t care that Tommy’s job is dangerous. The problem is that Tommy would like him a little more if he wasn’t so obsessed with the job.
“He worked out of your old house, didn’t he?” Brent asks, legs up on Tommy’s coffee table and a gleam in his eyes as Taylor Kelly reports on some Angel of Death wannabe who’s been shuffled from station to station, city to city, state to state for years with no real oversight, and Tommy — Tommy is tired of talking about work.
He hums, and takes a drink. Brent’s a Heineken man, and for some reason takes real offense to Tommy’s inability to drink them without making faces. Tommy stopped drinking them a month ago.
He’s not sure what he’s doing, anymore.
“Isn’t Taylor Kelly dating one of the guys from the 118?”
Tommy hums again.
“Feels like a quick turnaround on that news story. You think she’s getting an inside scoop?”
“I think we should break up,” Tommy says, and Brent blinks once, twice.
“Yeah. Probably for the best.”
Brent sees himself out. Tommy throws out the lone bottle of Heineken left in his fridge.
Donato is a breath of fresh air. She’s brash, and kind of an asshole, and dead set on proving herself a better pool player than he is.
She’s also a newer source of information for the gossip mongers of Harbor station.
“No, that’s the same guy,” she’s saying, biting her lip as she tries to beat Jones’ high score in Asteroids. She’s got a choking grip on the joystick and Tommy can already tell she’s gonna miss it by a mile.
“I — sorry, the guy who got pinned is the same guy who climbed the tower before the sniper was in custody?”
“Same guy. Also the same guy who hopped into that Speed style runaway truck with me. He’s kind of a badass. I mean, they sort of treat him like the station dalmation, over there, but that’s because if you rub behind his ears he wags his tail.”
“He’s not the same one Bosko accidentally got into Fight Club, is he?”
Lucy laughs. “Uh, no, Buck is absolutely a lover, not a fighter.”
“So which one —?”
“Probably the one I was filling in for.”
“The one who got shot, you mean.”
Lucy hums.None of them have brought up Greenway, which Lucy seems to be marginally grateful for, but Tommy knows she’d worked with him. He hasn’t worked out why she’d worked with him — he’s pretty sure she’d been on the same rotation as Chim and Hen.
Tommy doesn’t feel like touching that with a ten foot pole, if he’s being honest. “So how are Chim and Hen?”
Lucy looks a little cagey. She curses up a storm when she collides with a pixelated flying saucer. “They’re — chugging along.”
“Oh, there’s a story there,” says Lemming, and Lucy shoots Tommy a look between her lashes, something fierce and vulnerable that tells him she’d throw down to protect the open wounds of the 118, same as him. He tips his chin, raises his bottle.
“Boring story,” Lucy says, eyes gleaming. “I bet you’ve got plenty of more interesting stories, Lemming. Weren’t you the one who had to rescue the UFO guy?”
Lemming is easily distracted, and happy to toot his own horn.
Tommy thinks of the text sitting unsent on the blank conversation history with Chim.
“That wasn’t on the list,” Tommy says, trying for levity and failing miserably. His throat feels tight, and there’s an ache somewhere in his torso that feels like it’s spreading.
“Man, any time you think things are gonna stop happening to that house, they gotta go do something to prove you wrong.”
Tommy’s phone buzzes against his hip. It’s Lucy.
Donato 6:30 AM: Hen says he was down for three minutes.
Tommy 6:31 AM: He good?
Donato 6:33 AM: Inconclusive. He’s got a pulse, but he’s not breathing on his own.
Tommy 6:37 AM: You good?
Donato 6:55 AM: I worked with them for five minutes, Kinard
Donato 6:57 AM: Buck’s a good guy, though. I know you’re not a praying man, but maybe we could all send some good vibes the 118’s way
Tommy 7:01 AM: Jones’ is doing his mindfulness sh*t in a few. We’ll all be thinking of them.
Tommy hasn’t prayed since he was seventeen, but when Young ducks his head a few minutes later, eyes closed like he does every time they get news of one of their own going down, Tommy lets his own mind drift to his old house, and the people there who’d made him brave enough to live an actual life. Jones’ little meditation practice turns the hanger quiet, and Tommy listens to them all breathe, and breathe, and breathe.
He tries not to think too hard on it when they get the news, days later, that Buckley’s expected to make a full recovery.
Tommy’s been eyeing the guy at the bar through his lashes for the past fifteen minutes, and he knows Donato has clocked it. But there’s something — there’s something that keeps drawing his attention.
He’s — objectively attractive. Tall, broad shouldered, jeans that fit nice. Full pink lips and a flirty smile aimed at the woman he’s with.
Tommy’s always refused to bring dates to a ladder bar, even when his crew gives him sh*t for it. Mostly it’s because the conversation always eventually turns to all the crazy sh*t they’ve all pulled, all the risky maneuvers, all the scars. It’s always a pissing contest, and Tommy’s been burned a few too many times by guys who like the look of him, and not the reality of his career.
Tommy loses sight of Lucy for half a second only to find her approaching the couple as they move from the foosball table to the bartop.
He shakes his head. She’s spent weeks trying to squirrel information out of him about his love life, which is distinctly lacking at the moment. He doesn’t expect that to change any time soon.
Maybe he’ll hit up Brian once he’s had a few more beers. See if he’s seeing anyone. See if he’s still as flexible as Tommy remembers.
She doesn’t linger when Thomas calls her back for her turn, but by the smirk on her face she’s managed to put her foot in it exactly how she meant to. The couple are closing out, the guys head tilted to stare at his tab, color high on his cheeks. Tommy takes a deep pull off his drink and rolls his jaw when Lucy sinks three in a row, and then the eight ball too.
He gets a full thirty second reprieve before she’s sidling in to the seat beside him, a knowing look on her face.
“Look, I get it,” she starts, and Tommy takes another drink as Young starts a to rerack. “When the bar light hits just right on those broad ass shoulders, you really can’t help but wanna see if his lips taste as sweet as they look.”
Tommy knows his expression is long suffering.
“They are, just in case you were wondering.”
“Donato,” he warns, and she grins, playing with the pool cue with her free hand.
“Got it, Kinard. Backing off. But you know, I’ve got a cousin...”
“Not interested,” he tells her, already swinging out of his seat to break for his round.
He barely even notices he couple leaving. He breaks clean, a few stripes finding their way into pockets, and doesn’t pay a lick of attention to the way the guys flustered laugh sounds as he guides his date out the door.
Donato still looks a little shell-shocked.
“They — uh — they’re all good?”
“They’re all pretty banged up. But yeah, from what I heard, they all made it out.”
“Cap — Captain Nash. They found him?”
“Pinned at the bottom of the rubble, but he got lucky. No serious injuries.”
Lucy slumps. She looks exhausted, minutes out from crashing. Tommy’s flown away from enough disasters moments before they get worse to know exactly how she’s feeling.
“Go change, Donato. I’ll drive you home.”
“I’m fine,” she argues, and Tommy’s gaze catches hers. Holds.
“Yeah, okay, fine. I’m gonna cry all over your nice leather seats, though.”
He doesn’t point out that they’ve seen his tears plenty, but from the look in her eyes he figures she kind of knows, anyway.
She’s quiet, for most of the drive. It’s a longer one than he’s used to, and the detour caused by the bridge collapse makes it longer.
“I don’t know what it is about them that makes me feel like I’m losing a limb every time one of those stupid assholes gets hurt. They’re a magnet for disaster, you think I’d be used to it. I didn’t even work with them that long.”
They’re still ten minutes out. Tommy had thought she’d passed out with her face plastered to the passenger window.
“You miss it?”
“Do you?” she asks, defensiveness creeping in to her voice.
Tommy flips his indicator as the light goes red in the turn lane. “I missed the bulk of the Bobby Nash Experience. Mostly I’m just bitterly resentful that I never got to experience the turnaround of my old house.”
He can feel her eyes sliding to him, the curious stare. “Is this what it takes for Tommy Kinard Honesty Hour? I witness something traumatic and you finally open up a little?”
Tommy shrugs, thumb tapping along to the sound of his blinker. “I’m old school, Donato. Usually you gotta save my life for a glimpse up here.” He taps to fingers to his temple.
She takes that in in silence. There’s always been a kinship there, between them, some part of Tommy that sees a lot of himself in the way Lucy conducts herself, the brash way she pushes past the rough days, the spark in her eyes when she’s seconds away from doing something ill-advised.
“Chim’s getting married,” she says into the silence, and Tommy hums. “I’m pretending not to be upset I didn’t get an invite.”
She’s the only one who gets being jealous of that tight-knit little group of psychos.
“So yours got lost in the mail too, huh?”
“Been a long time since I’ve been close to anyone there. I didn’t expect one.”
Lucy tips her head back against the headrest. Sighs. “Yeah. I guess eventually I’ll get there too.”
Jones levels him with an incredulous look.
“They should fire your ass.”
Tommy raises both hands in supplication, but he can’t quite keep the grin off his face as Diaz and Buckley both round the side of the chopper, both of them looking like they’ve been caught with their hand in the cookie jar. It’d been an uphill battle, trying to figure out the logistics of who was going where, after the fact. Chim and Hen had gotten stuck in the back of buses to the hospital.
Diaz and Buckley had ro-sham-bo’ed for shotgun to get back to Diaz’ truck, and Tommy had spent the short flight back from the rescue ship trying not to notice the pouty tilt of Evan’s lip from the back, or pay attention to the back and forth over the headset as Diaz reminded him he’d already had his chance.
There’s a thrum, under Tommy’s skin — the thrill of being reckless is fading, a little, but beneath that there’s a possibility opening wide — Eddie Diaz in the seat beside him pumping him for information on his army days, Evan Buckley shifting restlessly at his side as he comes to stand beside him, arms crossed and staring at Jones like he’s about to go guard dog mode.
All this time he’s been getting second-hand gossip about these people, listening to the wild and sometimes exaggerated rumors that follow them around the LAFD. This time he got to play a part, and neither one of these virtual strangers seems keen to let the moment pass.
Evan’s shoulder glances off of Tommy’s, and he fights the urge to dart his gaze to the side, to check out his profile, to see how ridiculous he looks when those puppy-dog eyes get defensive.
Eddie claps a hand to his shoulder on the other side. “They should give you medal,” he says, pointedly aiming the comment in Jones’ direction, and Jones huffs, eyes rolling.
“Get the hell out of my hangar before I find a reason to be anything other than jealous.”
Tommy laughs, cheeks aching as he waves his passengers out through the open bay door to guide them back to the spot he’d had them hide their truck.
Tommy rolls up to the court and watches as some ten-odd firefighters clam up completely.
Well, sh*t.
This is the first time he’s ever been on the other side of this.
Price is the first one to break. “You’re not bringing anyone from the 118 this time, are you? Seriously, Kinard, one was already pushing it, you’re tempting fate. I don’t want to catch the curse.”
Tommy rolls his eyes good naturedly, doesn’t mention that if the curse were contagious he’d be neck deep in it by now.
“Tommy’s the one we need to be worried about, Price. He’s lucky he wasn’t collateral damage in that lovers quarrel, last time.”
It’s been two weeks.
Tommy has to remind himself. It’s been two weeks. Since he’d gone to make it clear he had no intention of stepping into whatever sh*t was between Eddie and Evan, to make it clear that he planned to keep spending time with Eddie but he’d never meant to get between them. Two weeks since he’d taken a leap, hedged his bets, kissed a beautiful boy in the orange light of his kitchen.
Less than a week since he’d taken a sip of a terrible coffee concoction and leapt right back into the chaos.
“Are we playing, or do you all want to crack open a bottle of red back at my place and play at being Dan Humphrey?”
Tommy dribbles the ball, raises an eyebrow, watches them all shift guilty looks between themselves as they grumble and move to stand.
Lucy spins the metal chair across from him, settles with a leg over each side, arms crossed over the back of it, sh*t eating grin on her face.
“So. I heard a rumor.”
Tommy’s not sure what his face does. He’s hoping for disinterested, but more likely than not his lips are twitching bashfully.
“The nurses at PIH are incredibly easy to pump for intel,” she continues, and Tommy can feel his ears burning. Donato’s grin goes wide. “I can’t believe you didn’t get me a last minuet invite, too.”
Tommy recovers in time to avoid the full-body blush. “Well, the next time you No hom*o me in front of a mutual friend and make up for it with a grand gesture, I’ll think about it.”
Lucy tilts her head. Her grin goes soft, eyes taking him in. “sh*t, Kinard, you like him. Damn it. I can’t tease you about that.”
“I’m sure you’ll find a way.”
The expression goes mischievous again. “He really didn’t even wipe the soot off his face before he hard launched you?”
Tommy ducks his head, failing miserably at hiding the grin on his face.
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