Page 25 of Off-Limits Daddy
REID
By midday, the bay of the station smelled like sweat, metal, and stale coffee.
Trent was on mop duty, sliding the bucket across the bay floor, dancing with it, andhumming some country song off-key. Boone sat on the couch flipping through a car magazine, shirt sticking to his back, a streak of sweat curling around the collar. Even with the garage doors rolled up, summer heat hung in the air like someone forgot to turn off the oven.
I liked the routine of it. Clean, polish, restock. Gear where it belonged. No emergencies. Just muscle memory.
Me? I was checking one of the hoses again—running my hands down the length of it, testing for cracks I already knew weren’t there. Didn’t need to, but my hands didn’t like being still. Idle hands, idle mind—and lately, my mind felt like a bad part of town. Somewhere I shouldn’t linger.
“Why’re you going over that line again?” Boone called from the couch, eyeing me like I was trying to build an extension to the station. “You checked that one yesterday.”
“Checking it again today.”
“Man, you need a hobby.”
Trent chimed in from across the bay. “You know what his hobby is.”
“Don’t start,” I warned.
They both grinned like wolves.
But the teasing only went so far. They respected lines when they mattered. And right now, I needed lines.
The overhead speaker crackled to life, cutting through the quiet: “Dispatch to Station Three—report of a downed power line on Orchard. City electric’s en route but requesting fire standby.”
“Finally,” Boone muttered, tossing the magazine aside as he stood.
Trent abandoned the mop. “Let’s go make ourselves useful.”
That was the thing about this town—you got enough of the real stuff to keep sharp, but not enough to break you in half like the bigger cities.
We rolled out smooth, dust kicking up behind the truck’s tires, the hum of the engine steady under my boots.
By the time we got there, the whole thing was more nuisance than threat—a delivery truck caught a low-hanging wire pulling into one of the old produce depots. No sparks. No flames. Just a pissed-off city worker pacing the sidewalk like his pension depended on whether the pole fell before or after lunch.
Trent and Boone took crowd control, easy enough with nothing but a couple of curious bystanders squinting into the sun. I stayed focused on the sagging line, one hand resting on the side of the rig, waiting for the moment things might go sideways. They didn’t. They usually didn’t. That was half the job—standing still, bracing, waiting for a disaster that never showed up.
Didn’t make the waiting any easier.
By the time we got back to the station, the sun was a hammer overhead, pressing heat into the roof, into the asphalt, into thespaces behind your knees. The kind of heat that made your clothes stick and your thoughts crawl.
No breeze. No shade worth a damn. Just that thick, buzzing stillness that told you summer wasn’t even close to letting up.
The rest of the afternoon drifted in slow, sticky stretches. Small-town hours, stretching long enough to think too much, want too much, and wish you’d kept busier.
Boone sat at the kitchen table, shuffling a deck of cards one-handed, the corners snapping together with clean, practiced flicks. Could’ve worked in a casino if he had the patience for drunk tourists and stiff uniforms. He didn’t.
Trent dragged the box fan into the kitchen, positioning it so the air hit him but didn’t scatter the cards. The blades clicked faintly as they spun, stirring the thick heat but not doing much else.
I sat with a bottle of water, letting condensation soak into my palm, thinking aboutnothing—and thinking too much.
It’d been days since I’d seen Ari. Long enough to wonder if maybe that was for the best.
Or maybe I was just waiting for an excuse to see him again.
Boone cut the deck, let it fall back together, then glanced over. “You in or not?”
“Nope,” I said with a smile I knew didn’t quite reach my eyes. “I’m not in the mood to get my ass whooped.”
