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Sunday Morning, Station 12

Seven months after the epilogue. Reed’s covering a shift. Evan’s on duty. The station remembers everything.

Evan

Reed Walker in turnout gear does things to me that should require a prescription.

I’ve known this for two years — since the day he stood in the bay in his lieutenant’s coat and told me my straps were shit, and my entire nervous system rerouted itself around the sound of his voice. Two years of empirical data confirming that the combination of Reed Walker and bunker gear is a public health hazard, at least for me.

But knowing it and seeing it are different experiences, and the seeing hits different when you haven’t seen it in months.

He’s in the bay, suiting up for the quarterly drill he’s running today — county training officer, visiting instructor, the man who used to command this station and now shows up every few weeks to make sure the next generation of firefighters can tie a bowline without checking YouTube. The turnout coat hangs on his shoulders the way it always did — broad, solid, the kind of fit that suggests the gear was designed around him rather than the reverse. His helmet is under his arm. His jaw is set. His forearms are out.

The forearms. God help me, the forearms. Seven months of sharing a bed with this man, seven months of unrestricted, on-demand access to every part of his body, and the rolled sleeves still hit like a defibrillator.

“Diaz.” Tommy’s voice, from the engine. “You’re staring.”

“I’m assessing gear readiness.”

“You’re assessing your boyfriend’s ass in turnout pants. There’s a difference.”

“Both can be true.”

Reed turns. Catches my eye across the bay. The corner of his mouth lifts — the smile, the real one, the one I spent fourteen months chasing and seven months collecting — and he shakes his head slightly. Later.

Later. The word is a promise wrapped in a syllable, and it settles into my bloodstream like a slow-release drug.

The shift runs clean. One medical call — elderly woman with a fall, no fracture, transport to County — and the quarterly drills, which Reed runs with the same steady, exacting precision he’s brought to everything since he took the county position. He’s calmer now. The burnout has receded like a tide going out, leaving behind a man who sleeps through the night and laughs at dinner and occasionally, when he thinks I’m not looking, smiles at his own reflection like he’s surprised to find it there.

The crew handles our relationship the way they handle everything — with aggressive, affectionate shit-talking that functions as love language in a firehouse dialect.

“Hey, Training Officer, your boyfriend’s ladder placement is two inches off.”

“It’s one inch and it’s within tolerance. Run it again, Nakamura.”

“Diaz, tell your man to stop making us do butterfly stretches. I’m a paramedic, not a contortionist.”

“His flexibility program improved your response times by twelve percent. Stretch, Tommy.”

A small kitchen fire comes in mid-afternoon. Minor — grease fire on a stove, homeowner caught it with a lid, we’re there for safety check and ventilation. We roll together. On the engine, Reed’s knee bumps mine. I catch his eye and wink. His jaw tightens — suppressing the smile, killing it before it can compromise his professional demeanor — and Tommy says from the driver’s seat: “Walker, are you smiling? On my engine? During a call?”

“Eyes on the road, Nakamura.”

By evening, the drills are done, the paperwork filed, dinner eaten. Tommy’s chili, recipe now a Station 12 institution. The crew filters off — Driscoll to the office, Jonesy to the bunk room with his phone, Tommy home to Bree and the kid. The station contracts into its nighttime shape, quiet and amber-lit, the familiar sounds of a building settling into itself.

Reed is in the locker room, changing out of his drill gear. I lean in the doorway and watch him — the methodical way he folds his coat, hangs it on the rack, rolls his shoulders until something in his back pops with a sound like a knuckle cracking.

“Your back?”

“It’s fine.”

“You did the thing with your jaw. Number seven. ‘Back pain I refuse to acknowledge.’”

“I have a thing with my jaw?”

“You have seventeen things with your jaw. I’ve catalogued them all. Number seven is ‘back pain I refuse to acknowledge.’ Number three is ‘Evan said something that turned me on and I’m pretending it didn’t.’ Number eleven is ‘Tommy is being Tommy and I’m choosing not to commit a felony.’”

“You’re making these up.”

“I’m a trained investigator. I observe patterns.”

He looks at me. The look is half exasperation, half something warmer, and the combination — the very specific combination that is Reed Walker being annoyed and adoring at the same time — makes my chest do something acrobatic.

“Come here,” he says.

I go. Because that’s what I do — I go where Reed Walker tells me to, and I’ve stopped pretending it’s about rank. It was never about rank.

He catches me by the belt loop. One finger hooked through the fabric, tugging me into his space with the kind of casual possessiveness that used to make him flinch and now makes him smile. His other hand settles on the side of my neck — warm, heavy, his thumb tracing the tendon below my ear.

“I’ve been thinking about you all day,” he says. Low. The voice he only uses when no one else can hear — rougher than his professional register, stripped of the clipped efficiency, revealing the man underneath the training officer. “In that gear. On the ladder. The way your coat pulls across your shoulders when you reach.”

“You were watching me on the ladder?”

“I was evaluating your form.”

“My form.”

“Your technique was excellent. Your ass was distracting. Both can be true.” He echoes my words from this morning, and the callback makes me grin.

His mouth finds mine. The kiss is slow and unhurried, tasting of coffee and the particular Reed-specific warmth that I will never get tired of. His hand slides from my neck into my hair, tilting my head, deepening the angle, and the kiss shifts from greeting to intent. His tongue traces my lower lip and I open for him — automatically, instinctively, the way my body has been opening for this man since the night he pinned me against Engine 12 and demolished every wall between us.

“Shower first,” I murmur against his mouth.

He pulls back. Raises an eyebrow.

“I’ve been in turnout gear for six hours. I smell like sweat and rubber. If you’re going to take me apart tonight, I’d like to be clean for it.”

Something shifts in his eyes. The suggestion — shower — lands with a weight that has nothing to do with hygiene. The shower stall at Station 12. The place where he checked a burn on my neck and his hands were shaking and I dropped to my knees on wet tile and said Yes, Lieutenant for the first time during sex. We haven’t been in that shower together since.

“Shower,” he says. His voice has dropped half an octave. “Then the bunk room.”

“And then?”

“And then whatever I want.” His thumb drags across my lower lip — slow, deliberate, proprietary. “You’re mine tonight, Diaz. Every room in this station that we’ve ruined — I’m ruining them again.”

My cock goes from interested to achingly hard in approximately two seconds. Seven months and the man can still do this to me with nothing but his voice and his thumb on my mouth.

“Yes, sir,” I say, and the grin I give him is filthy.

The shower stall is the same. Narrow, tiled, a single showerhead that takes forty-five seconds to warm up. The same stall where I got on my knees seven months ago while the locker room door was unlocked and Jonesy was one hallway away.

We strip in the locker room. No ceremony — shirts over heads, pants kicked off, the practical efficiency of two men who’ve undressed in this room a thousand times separately and are now doing it together, watching each other, the intimacy of the mundane. Reed’s body in the fluorescent light — broad chest, scarred forearms, the silver spreading at his temples, the line of dark hair below his navel that I have spent an unreasonable number of hours following with my tongue. He’s thirty-eight and he’s built like something forged, and I will never stop wanting to put my mouth on every surface of him.

He catches me looking. “You’re staring again.”

“I’m always staring. You’re always worth it.”

The shower takes exactly forty-five seconds to warm up, and we spend those forty-five seconds kissing against the tile wall — cold at first, then warming, his body pressed against mine, our cocks trapped between us, the friction of skin on skin making us both hiss through our teeth.

The water comes hot. It hits us both and the steam billows and the world outside the stall — the station, the shift, the county training reports — dissolves into the white haze of heat and want.

I drop to my knees.

The tile is warm under my knees this time — not the cold shock of the first time, when my kneecaps protested and I didn’t care because Reed Walker was above me with his hand in my hair and the sound he was making was worth any amount of discomfort. Now the position is familiar. Practiced. My knees find the spots in the tile that are smoothest, and my hands find his hips, and I look up at him through the steam and the spray with an expression that I know from experience makes his self-control evaporate.

“Callback,” I say.

“I remember.” His voice is rough. His hand settles in my hair — not pushing, just resting, the weight of his palm against my skull grounding and electric at the same time. “I remember everything about the first time in this shower.”

“Tell me.” I press my mouth to his hip. His stomach contracts. “Tell me what you remember while I do this.”

“You’re going to make me narrate?”

“I’m going to make you do a lot of things.” I drag my tongue along the crease of his thigh, and his hips jerk. “Start talking.”

I take him in my mouth. He’s already hard — has been since the locker room, maybe since the ladder drill this morning — and the taste of him under the hot water is salt and clean skin and the dark, specific musk that is Reed Walker aroused. I know this taste. I’ve memorized it the way I’ve memorized everything about this man — thoroughly, obsessively, with the investigative precision that Morales keeps telling me will make me a great fire marshal someday.

Reed talks. His voice comes in fragments, broken by the water and the steam and the distraction of my mouth. “You were — you had that burn on your neck. The warehouse fire. I checked it and my hands were shaking and I — fuck, Evan, right there — I couldn’t stop touching you. The checking turned into —” His hand tightens in my hair. “— into this. You on your knees. Looking up at me like — God. Like you’d been waiting for permission.”

I hadn’t been waiting for permission. I’d been waiting for him. There’s a difference, but it’s a distinction I can’t articulate with my mouth full, so I communicate it the other way — by taking him deeper, by hollowing my cheeks and applying the suction that makes his knees buckle, by using the flat of my tongue on the spot just below the head that I discovered three months ago and that turns Reed Walker from a coherent adult into a shaking, gasping wreck every single time.

“You said it,” he manages. “That first time. You said —”

I pull off just long enough to say it.

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

The effect is immediate and devastating. His hips surge forward, his hand clenches in my hair, and the groan that tears out of him echoes off the wet tile in a way that makes me grateful the locker room is empty. I take the thrust — let him push into my mouth, let the urgency of it overwhelm the control he usually maintains — and then I swallow around him and his whole body locks.

“Evan — I’m going to — if you keep —”

I pull off. He makes a sound of such bereft frustration that I almost laugh. Almost. But his face — flushed, wrecked, water streaming through his hair, eyes black with blown pupils — is too beautiful for laughter. It’s the face of a man who has been edged by someone who loves him, and the combination of desperation and trust in his expression is the hottest thing I have ever seen.

“Not yet,” I say, standing. Water runs between us. “I’m not done with you.”

“You’re going to kill me.”

“Not until you come first. And you’re not coming until I say so.”

His eyes flash. The authority in my voice — his authority, reflected back, the command language he taught me on fire scenes and that I’ve repurposed for exactly this — hits him the way it always hits him. Like a key in a lock. Like a hand on the back of his neck, pressing him gently but irresistibly down.

“Bunk room,” I tell him. “Dry off. I’ll be right behind you.”

He goes. Because tonight, he’s following me.

The bunk room is dark and empty and holding every memory this building has of us.

The bunk where he sat at 5 AM and said if we’re doing this. The curtain I tore open when the tones dropped on the night everything changed. The ceiling I stared at for a hundred sleepless hours, counting the tiles and composing sonnets about his forearms while he lay awake across the room doing the same thing about me and neither of us knew.

Reed is sitting on the edge of a bunk when I come in, towel around his waist, damp hair pushed back. He looks up at me and the expression on his face is the one that still gets me every time — open, unguarded, stripped of the lieutenant and the training officer and the stoic. Just Reed. Just the man who loves me and has finally stopped being afraid of it.

I drop my towel. His eyes track down my body and back up, and the hunger in his gaze is flattering and specific — not generic appreciation but targeted desire, the look of a man who knows exactly what he wants and exactly how he wants it and is waiting to be told he can have it.

“Lie down,” I say.

He lies down. The towel comes off. The narrow bunk barely fits him — his feet hang off the end, which would be comical if the rest of him weren’t so devastatingly laid out. Broad shoulders against the thin mattress, arms at his sides, his cock hard against his stomach, still slick from the shower.

I climb onto the bunk. Straddle his thighs. Put my hands on his chest and feel his heartbeat hammering under my palms.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too. Now please touch me before I lose what’s left of my mind.”

I touch him. Not where he wants — not yet. I start at his wrists, pressing them gently above his head, against the thin pillow. Not binding, not holding — just placing. An instruction delivered through contact: keep them here. He nods, almost imperceptibly, and his hands grip the edge of the pillow and stay.

I map him. The same way he mapped me the first night in his bed — when he took his time, when he kissed every scar, when he said you’re doing so good and my whole body went liquid. My mouth on his collarbone. His neck. The hollow behind his ear where a scrape of teeth makes his breathing stutter. Down his chest — the flat planes of muscle, the dusting of hair, nipples that are embarrassingly sensitive (he’d deny it; I have evidence). I close my mouth around one and his back arches off the mattress.

“Evan —”

“Shh. I’m working.”

I work my way down. His ribs, his stomach, the V of his obliques that I traced with my tongue the first time I undressed him and that still makes my mouth water seven months later. The scar on his forearm — I find his hand, bring his wrist to my mouth, kiss the smooth, shiny skin where the burn healed wrong. The scar he presses his thumb into when he’s holding something too big to hold. I press my lips into it instead, and the sound he makes is not sexual. It’s something deeper. Something that sounds like relief.

Then lower. His hip bones, sharp beneath warm skin. The crease of his thigh, where a bite makes his whole body convulse. His cock, hard and flushed and leaking against his stomach — I breathe on it, close enough to feel but not touching, and the frustrated groan he produces is art.

“You’re being cruel.”

“I’m being thorough. You taught me that.”

“I taught you fire suppression, not — Jesus —”

I lick a stripe from the base of his cock to the tip. One long, flat drag of my tongue that makes his hips lift off the bunk and his hands clench on the pillow. His thighs are trembling. His stomach muscles are clenched. He’s been hard since the shower, edged once already, and the restraint of holding back is written across every line of his body.

I sit up. Reach behind me for the supplies I brought from the locker room — condom, lube, tucked into the waistband of the towel I dropped on the floor. His eyes track my hands as I slick my fingers.

“Watch me,” I say.

I reach behind myself. Open myself up with my own fingers while straddling his thighs, while his cock is inches from where my hand is working, while his eyes go black and his jaw goes tight and his breathing turns into something ragged and broken. I take my time. One finger, slow. Two, stretching, adjusting. The angle is awkward — it always is, doing this to yourself — but the reaction it gets from Reed is worth every logistical inconvenience. He’s watching me like I’m something holy and filthy at the same time, and the duality of that — worship and want, reverence and raw need — is the entire thesis of our relationship compressed into the way he looks at my hand.

“You’re so —” He stops. Swallows. His voice comes out wrecked. “You’re incredible. You know that?”

“Keep talking.” I add a third finger. My own breath stutters. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want to be inside you.” Direct. Unvarnished. The man who spent twenty-two years choking on the word love can now say I want to be inside you without flinching, and the growth of it — the sheer, staggering distance between the Reed who couldn’t kiss me at the kitchen counter and the Reed who tells me what he wants in the dark — makes my chest ache. “I want to feel you. I want to hear you. I want —”

“You want?”

“Everything.” The word comes out like a confession and a commandment at the same time. “I want everything, Evan.”

I roll the condom onto him. The touch makes him hiss — sensitive, edged, close to the limit. I line up. Sink down.

The sound we both make fills the bunk room. Not quiet — not careful, not muffled, not the bitten-off gasps of two men hiding what they are. Full-throated, simultaneous, the sound of two people who have earned the right to be loud in a place where they once had to be silent.

I take all of him. Seat myself fully, my thighs against his hips, and hold. The stretch is familiar and overwhelming at the same time — the fullness, the pressure, the deep, radiating sensation of being connected to another person at the most fundamental level. His hands have left the pillow — I don’t correct him — and they’re on my thighs, gripping, his fingers pressing divots into my skin.

“Good?” I ask.

“Move.”

I move. Rolling my hips in a slow, deep rhythm that lets us both feel everything. Rise and fall. The wet sound of our bodies meeting. His hands sliding from my thighs to my hips, guiding without controlling, letting me set the pace. His eyes are locked on mine in the dim amber light, and the expression on his face — the open, unguarded, devastated tenderness of a man being ridden by the person he loves in the room where he learned to love them — is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

“I love you,” he says. Not a whisper. Not a confession dragged out under duress. Just a statement, clear and certain, delivered while I’m above him in a station bunk with his cock inside me. “I love you, Evan.”

“I love you too.” I lean down. Change the angle. His hips snap up and we both cry out and the bunk creaks so loudly it sounds like the building is filing a formal complaint. “Now stop being romantic and fuck me harder.”

He laughs. The laugh — full, real, the one that uses his whole face and makes his eyes disappear into crescents — and then he grips my hips and drives up into me with a force that turns the laugh into a moan and the moan into a string of profanity so creative it would make Tommy blush.

We find the rhythm. Fast, hard, the bunk protesting with every thrust, his hands bruising on my hips, my hands flat on his chest, both of us chasing the edge with the single-minded focus of two men who’ve learned exactly how to wreck each other and are deploying that knowledge without mercy.

“You’re so good,” he grits out between thrusts. The praise voice. The one that started in drills and migrated to the bedroom and now lives permanently in the space between authority and adoration. “So fucking good for me, Evan. You feel — God, you feel incredible —”

He reaches between us. Wraps his hand around my cock — hard, leaking, neglected while I focused on his body — and strokes in time with his thrusts. The dual sensation — full and gripped and overwhelmed — sends me over the edge so fast I don’t see it coming. I come with his name on my lips, my body clenching around him, and the orgasm drags him with me. His hips stutter, his grip locks, and his groan erupts as a shout that bounces off every surface in the bunk room.

We collapse. The bunk makes a sound that suggests structural fatigue. Neither of us moves.

Later. Much later.

We’ve migrated. Not to the locker room, not to the common room. To the apparatus bay.

Engine 12 sits in the dark the way it always does — massive, red, gleaming faintly in the amber glow of the security light. The bay smells like diesel and rubber and the chemical tang of gear. And underneath it, if you’ve been in this room long enough, the ghost of every fire this engine has fought and every person it’s carried to safety.

Reed is leaning against the fender. The same spot. The exact spot where he was standing the night I cornered him and said I’ve wanted you since day one. He’s in shorts and a T-shirt now, bare feet on the concrete, and he’s looking at me with the expression of a man who’s replaying the same memory.

“Right here,” I say. I walk to him. Stand where I stood that night — close, too close, close enough to feel his breath. “I was standing right here when I said it.”

“You said, ‘I’ve wanted you since the day you told me my SCBA straps were shit.’”

“And you said —”

“‘I can’t tell you that.’” His voice is quiet. “You asked me to say I didn’t want you, and I couldn’t, and that was the moment. That was when I knew the transfer was bullshit and the boxes were bullshit and every wall I’d built was coming down whether I wanted it to or not.”

“You grabbed me.”

“I grabbed you.” He reaches out. His hand fists in the front of my T-shirt — the same gesture, the same grip, the fabric bunching in his fingers the way it did seven months ago. He pulls me in. Our chests meet. Our mouths meet. And the kiss is the bay kiss and not the bay kiss — the same desperation without the despair, the same hunger without the clock counting down.

He turns me. My back hits the side of Engine 12 — cold metal, same cold metal, the shock of it against my shoulders through the thin T-shirt — and he pins me there with his hips. His mouth on my neck, my jaw, the spot below my ear. His hands under my shirt, sliding up my ribs, thumbs finding my nipples and pressing.

“The first time,” he says against my throat, “I got you off right here. Against this engine. My hand in your pants. You bit my shoulder to stay quiet.”

“I remember.” My voice is already wrecked and he’s barely touched me. The sense memory is doing half the work — my body remembering what it felt like the first time, layering the past over the present until every touch carries double the weight.

“You don’t have to be quiet this time.” He pulls my shirt over my head. Drops to his knees on the bay floor — the same concrete I knelt on that first night — and looks up at me from below. Reed Walker, on his knees. In the apparatus bay. Looking up at me with storm-gray eyes that hold nothing back.

Seven months ago, this image would have short-circuited my brain. Now it short-circuits my brain and fills my chest with a warmth so intense it’s indistinguishable from pain.

He pulls my shorts down. Takes me in his mouth without preamble — deep, wet, the aggressive thoroughness that Reed brings to everything he does. His hands grip my hips, holding me against the engine, and his mouth works me with a focus that makes my head fall back against the fender with a dull clang.

The bay is quiet. Just the hum of the building, the distant tick of the clock in the common room, and the sounds I’m making — gasps and groans and his name, repeated, a chant that echoes off the high ceiling and the engine bay doors and the concrete walls that have heard everything and kept every secret.

He pulls off when I’m close. Stands. Kisses me — the taste of myself on his tongue, the salt and musk of it — and his hand slides around to the small of my back, pulling me flush against him.

“Turn around,” he says.

I turn. Hands flat on the engine. The metal is cold under my palms, warming where my skin touches it. Reed’s body presses against my back — chest to shoulder blades, hips to ass, his cock hard against me through the thin fabric of his shorts.

He reaches around. One hand flat on my stomach, possessive and grounding. The other finds my cock and strokes — slow, lazy, the rhythm of a man who has all night and plans to use every minute of it. His mouth is on my neck, biting gently, and his hips grind against me in a counter-rhythm that has me seeing stars.

“Every room,” he murmurs against my ear. “I said every room in this station.”

“We’ve done the shower,” I manage. “The bunk room. And now —” I push back against him. “— the bay. Where it started.”

“Where it started.” His hand tightens around me. His strokes accelerate. His mouth finds the spot below my ear and bites down — not gently this time, hard enough to mark, hard enough that I’ll feel it tomorrow and the day after — and the combination of his teeth on my neck and his hand on my cock and the cold metal of Engine 12 under my palms pushes me over the edge.

I come against the engine. Hard, shaking, Reed’s arm around my waist keeping me upright while my body empties itself against the fender that’s carried us both through a hundred fires. He follows — grinding against me, his face buried in my shoulder, his groan vibrating through both our bodies as he comes in his shorts like a teenager and doesn’t even pretend to be embarrassed about it.

We stand there. Breathing. His arms around me, my hands on the engine, the bay dark and quiet around us.

“We need to clean the truck,” I say.

“I’ll get paper towels.”

“This is the second time we’ve had to wipe down Engine 12 after —”

“Don’t say it.”

“— defiling it.”

“I said don’t say it.” But he’s laughing. The laugh that shakes his chest and makes his eyes crinkle, the one I pulled out of him like a splinter, the one that lives in our house and our bed and now, again, in this bay.

We clean up. Steal fresh clothes from the station spares. End up back in the bunk room, on the same narrow bunk, tangled together in a way that defies the mattress’s intended capacity.

His head is on my chest. My hand is in his hair — the silver at his temples, spreading, beautiful. His breathing is slow, deep, hovering between awake and asleep.

“Hey, Reed.”

“Mm.”

“Remember the first time? In this bay?”

“I remember everything about the bay.” His voice is drowsy, rough, the voice of a man who has been thoroughly taken apart and reassembled and is at peace with the result. “Your back against Engine 12. The sound you made when I kissed you. The way you said that didn’t feel like nothing and I couldn’t answer because the answer was too big for my mouth.”

“And now?”

“Now the answer fits.” He presses his lips to my chest, right over my heart. “You. You’re the answer. You’ve always been the answer.”

From somewhere outside the station — far away, muffled, transmitted through the speaker of a phone connected to the station scanner — Tommy’s voice: “I CAN HEAR THE BUNK CREAKING FROM MY LIVING ROOM. THE SCANNER IS ALWAYS ON. GOODNIGHT, GENTLEMEN.”

We look at each other in the dark. Reed’s mouth twitches. My grin splits my face. And then we’re laughing — both of us, tangled and sticky and thoroughly wrecked, in a station bunk that was never meant for this, laughing so hard the frame shakes and the sound carries through walls that have heard everything and kept every secret.

He stayed. Not because I asked him to. Because we built something worth staying for.

And every night — first, last, and every one in between — is ours.

— End of Bonus Chapter —

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