Page 131 of Set Me On Fire

“Hey, Buster…”

I dropped down to give the dog’s chest a scratch, smiling at his furiously wagging tail, but it was Knox that I watched closely. He was always a grumpy prick, but right now, he was wound way too tight. He disappeared out into his garage, returning with tins of paint and drop cloths before nodding curtly to me. He hadn’t led me wrong in all the fires we’d attended, so I had to believe he wouldn’t steer us in the wrong direction now. And besides, spreading out the cloths, mixing the paint, then loading up a brush? It gave me something to do, got me out of my own head.

There was no road map for what we were doing. The new father articles made that clear as I read through them obsessively. In each one, they talked about the things I would need to do, the adjustments I would need to make, but that’s not how it would work. Co-parenting was largely confined to articles about what to do after you’d divorced the mother of your child, something I never wanted to consider. Negotiating conflict, using parenting apps so everything was documented? Smart, but too depressing for me. Instead, I focussed on cutting in the trims in neat precise lines, because we were building something, not trying to work out what to do after a relationship had failed.

“For the love of god,tell me that Millie likes this colour,” I told him when we stepped back hours later. The walls had been given two coats of paint in this pale, milky green.

“She chose it.”

That was the first time I saw anything in him that resembled a smile, his look of satisfaction contagious. Painting helpedget my mind off things, but acts of service? They were my love language, one hundred percent. In my mind, I could imagine her coming down the hall, walking in and seeing her ideas made flesh. She’d love it, love… I swallowed hard, knowing she wasn’t there yet, but this. I nodded. This would make clear to her how it would be if she ended up returning my feelings. The toot of a car horn broke the spell I was under, Knox jerking himself to his feet.

“Furniture’s here,” he said.

My paint roller was left in the tray as we walked out to meet the delivery guy.

If there was ever an activity to test a team, it was putting together flat-pack furniture. We unboxed each piece of furniture one by one, covering Knox’s lounge room with sheets of foam and cardboard. Buster started to get excited, dancing around and barking, sure somehow this was for him.

“Whaddya reckon, Bust?” Knox asked him, giving the dog a vigorous scratch. “You reckon your little brother or sister will like this?”

I wasn’t so focussed on the baby as the mother. Our child wouldn’t even see clearly for the first few months of its life, but Millie… She’d see our hard work today. I picked up an Allen key and went to work, attaching the side rails to the crib.

After another hour or so, we were done. The change table and the crib were all pristine white and perfect, now placed inside the nursery, but not too close to the still curing walls. The nursing chair was brought in, mounds of soft toys placed on top of a chest of drawers that we’d then stacked with nappies and other things Millie would need. It was all here, all of it, every single thing a mother could want. We stepped back and surveyed the results of our hard work, now with beers in hand.

“It’s done,” I said.

“Almost.” Knox turned to me, the cranky bullshit of before finally fading away. I saw it then, as I stared into his eyes, the same certainty he carried with him into every fire we fought, every time we converged on our truck to clean and maintain it. He was a natural leader, even if he was a tough one and right now he saw it. A great and glorious future. “We just need her.” Always, I thought furiously, always. “And for you mob to move in.”

“Move in?”

He shook his head as I looked around the room in confusion.

“Not here, dickhead.” He led me out of the nursery and down the hall. “When’s your lease up?”

“About a month,” I told him, “though they’re asking if I want to renew.”

“Tell them you don’t.” He shoved a door open to a perfectly generic guest room. Plenty of natural light streamed in through a window that looked out on his very nice backyard. “Move your shit in here.”

“With you?” I asked, wondering how he’d cope with that. Knox was notoriously private.

“With us.”

He waited for the words to sink in, for me to work out what he meant, and it was then that I saw the same future. All three of us rising early in the morning, getting ready for work. One of us would shove a coffee at Knox to stop him from getting snappy, then fight it out over who gets the first shower.

Only for Millie to claim it.

She’d emerge from one of our bedrooms looking perfectly rumpled as she pulled a silk robe around herself. With her eyes still creased by sleep, she’d waft over, sliding into my open arms or Charlie’s, maybe even daring to sidle up to Knox. She’d calm Charlie, cheer up Knox, and me? She’d set me alight the moment she looked my way.

Only for the peace to be broken by the thin wail of our child.

I knew the reality wouldn’t look like this, that Millie wouldn’t calm our baby with one little hush, that breastfeeding could be really difficult or even impossible for women, but that’s not what I saw. In my mind’s eye, we all clustered around the two of them, bringing her food and a drink of water, looking after her as she looked after our child. I shook my head, not letting myself dwell too long on a fantasy that might never come true.

“Us?” I croaked that out, my throat closing over.

“Us.” He was a man on a mission, and we were just all players in a game of his devising. “When Charlie brings Millie here, when she sees the nursery, that’s when I want to ask her to move in.”

“Now?” Apparently, I’d lost the ability to construct sentences of more than one word. I shook my head and pushed myself to elaborate. “I mean, that’s moving fast, real fast. We’ve taken her on one date each.” The frown was back, threatening to silence me, but I couldn’t allow him that. The stakes were too high for me to just leave it all to Knox. “Honestly, I think we’re still working this shit out.”

“What’s to work out?” Knox snapped, but was it at me or the doubts inside his head? “This situation, the relationship, it’s all pretty unorthodox, but it feels right.” He looked at me for confirmation, and I couldn’t help but nod. “This is where Millie belongs, not that bloody apartment building of hers. It’s one of those new builds, and how many fires have we been called out to deal with in one of them?”

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