“You are also in need of some…” He gave a meaningful pause. “Guess what? You’re the loneliest person I know.” He frowned like I was certifiably insane. “What if I’m the cure for all your loneliness?” “You need to stop living like a nun,” he said. “You’re thinking about it now, though, aren’t you?” He glanced down at himself, approvingly, and then met my eyes. “I’m not holding back,” I said, like we were discussing the weather. How is that possible? It’s such a waste of a good woman. “You need to let yourself have some fun.” It’s not just against the rules, it’s against the culture. Firefighters don’t date other firefighters. In a few minutes they were going to start the awards ceremony. Was he serious? Could he possibly be serious? I glanced up at the stage. But I shook my head, like, Not even that, buddy. “Yet another reason I’d never go home with you.” Then I said, “You’re never serious about anything. I gave one back like, You know exactly who I am. He gave me a look like, And who are you to judge? He lifted his eyebrows and looked delighted. Pranksters all.īut everybody was just sawing away at their chicken. There was no way this was anything but an epic firehouse Candid Camera prank. Somebody had to be making a video, or taking a photo, or poised to jump out and start laughing. I looked around to see if the other guys had heard him. “To finally do something about all that sexual tension.” Picture-perfect Hernandez, the last guy on earth I would ever think of as anything other than a health-food-eating, CrossFit-training ladies’ man, leaned over close to my ear, right there at the banquet table, and asked me to spend the night with him.
He wasn’t just in our department’s calendar-he was on the cover. He lifted weights, and flossed, and preened, and he used his washboard stomach and perfectly aligned white teeth to snare more unsuspecting ladies than I could count. He was like a Latino firefighting Ken doll-so bizarrely perfect, he wasn’t even real. Hernandez, who was so perfectly, mechanically handsome that he didn’t even register as handsome anymore. Hernandez, who I’d never once thought of that way. The newspapers were calling me the School Bus Angel.Īnd Hernandez, of all people, chose this moment to hit on me.
The winter before, a busload of schoolchildren had slid off an icy road into a ravine, and I had climbed inside to push the kids out through a window, one by one, as the water rose.
There we all were, the entire B-shift from Station Eleven, in our dress uniforms, using salad forks-and there I was, in my crisscross tie, getting more and more nervous at the prospect of having to walk up on that stage in front of all those people under all those lights. THE NIGHT I became the youngest person-and the only female ever-to win the Austin Fire Department’s valor award, I got propositioned by my partner.Īt the ceremony.
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