Can’t Fight the Fire #2
That’s when I realized that the power was out—the thing that we were assured wouldn’t happen because the apartment had a generator specifically to keep our front door lock systems working.
And yet…
The entire electronic lock system was dead, which meant my door was a sealed metal rectangle with no handle, no keyhole, and no interest in my suffering. I was quietly cursing the idiot who had designed this system.
I pressed my forehead against the cold surface and seriously considered crying. That's when I heard the door behind me open.
"You look like you could use a hand."
I turned around and saw him.
Callum was standing in the doorway of 6B, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed over a grey Henley that looked like it had been specifically tailored to make his chest look as wide as possible.
His blue eyes moved down my body and back up—quickly, but not so quickly that I didn't notice—and a faint, lopsided smile settled onto his face. He looked about as comfortable as I felt miserable—which is to say, very.
"Power's out," I said, stating the obvious because my brain was too cold and too tired to produce anything clever. "My lock's dead. Can you believe this?"
"Mine too," he said. "But I've got a manual deadbolt I installed myself. Old habits from the station, I guess." He stepped back and held the door open wider. "Come in. Dry off. I'll make you some tea or coffee or something."
I should have hesitated; Should have done the polite dance of oh, I don't want to impose and are you sure and I'll just wait for maintenance.
But I was freezing, and dripping, and the warm light spilling from his apartment looked like the first kind thing the universe had offered me in months.
"Yeah?" I said. "Thanks. That would be…thanks."
I walked through Callum's door, leaving a trail of wet footprints on his hardwood, and heard it click shut behind me.
Callum's apartment was the same layout as mine, only, flipped like a mirror image. But it felt like a completely different building.
Where my place was a monument to neglect—water stains on the ceiling, a kitchen faucet that dripped in morse code, baseboards that were pulling away from the walls like they were trying to escape—his was warm and clean and smelled like cedar and coffee and something faintly spiced that I couldn't identify.
The furniture was simple but solid. There was a dark leather couch, a wooden coffee table with a book on it, facedown, spine cracked, a floor lamp casting amber light across the hardwood.
And the windows—the same wall-to-floor windows my apartment had—were alive with the storm, rain sheeting down the glass in thick, rippling curtains, the sky beyond them a bruised grey-purple lit by the occasional silent flash of lightning somewhere over our midwestern college city.
"Shower's through there," Callum said, nodding toward the hallway. "Use whatever you need. Towels are on the shelf.” He grinned and added, “Just treat it like a hotel."
I should have just said thanks and disappeared into the bathroom. Instead, I stood in his living room, dripping onto his hardwood floor, and started talking.
Everything came out. The plumbing. The A/C. The leaks. The locks. The fact that our landlord hadn't returned a call in six weeks. The fact that I'd moved off campus to feel like an adult and instead felt like a castaway on a sinking raft.
And then, because the floodgates were open and I apparently had no filter when I was cold and miserable, I told him about my now ex-girlfriend, Jess.
"She dumped me over text," I said, wringing water out of the hem of my ruined t-shirt. "Four months of dating and she couldn't even call. Just — I need space to figure things out. That was it."
Callum leaned against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, listening with the patient stillness of a man who was professionally trained to stay calm while everything around him burned.
"That sucks," he said. Not performatively. Just factually.
"The worst part is I wasn't even upset," I continued, and I didn't know why I was telling a near-stranger this, except that he was looking at me like he actually cared, and I couldn't remember the last time somebody had done that.
"I was… relieved. Which makes me feel like an asshole, but—I don’t know—I am relieved. And I don't know why."
Callum nodded slowly. "Sometimes you don't figure out the why until later. Go shower. You're turning blue."
The hot water hit me like an act of mercy.
I stood under it for ten minutes, letting the heat soak into my bones, watching the cold drain out of my skin in real time.
Callum's shower had actual water pressure—strong, consistent, the kind that my apartment's corroded pipes hadn't produced since I’d moved in—and the soap he had was something woodsy and masculine that smelled expensive without trying to.
When I stepped out and dried off, I found a small stack of clothes folded on the bathroom counter: A pair of navy cotton gym shorts with the university logo on the hip, and a heather-grey t-shirt with the school crest across the chest.
“I set some clothes out for you,” Callum called. “They were gifts for my nephew. He’s coming to the college next year. My clothes would be way too big on you.”
I pulled the clothes on and immediately saw a problem.
Callum's nephew had definitely not inherited Callum’s massive build. Because the clothes were too small for me, a five-nine competitive swimmer who carried a hundred and fifty pounds on a frame designed for cutting through water.
The shorts were too short—sitting way too high on my thighs, the inseam riding up into territory that practice jammers usually covered—and too tight across the hips, the thin cotton stretching across my dick and balls in a way that left very little to the imagination.
The t-shirt was worse; it clung to my chest and stomach like it had been vacuum-sealed, the heather-grey fabric showing every line of my torso, and the sleeves were so snug around my arms that I felt like a sausage in expensive casing.
I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I looked like a guy who'd gotten dressed in the dark using clothes meant for someone two inches shorter and fifteen pounds lighter.
I walked out anyway given it was the best I had.
Callum was in the kitchen, his back to me, pouring hot water into two mugs. When he turned and saw me, something crossed his face—quick, controlled, there and gone in a half-second—that he smoothed over with a casual smile.
"They fit," he said. It was not a question, and it was not accurate.
"Barely," I said, tugging at the hem of the shirt. "Your nephew must be tiny, huh."
"He's sixteen. He'll grow into them, I’m sure." Callum handed me a mug. "Earl grey. Only thing I've got that isn't black coffee."
"Perfect. Thanks,” I said.
“I was a small guy when I was his age, too. Not a lot bigger than you, in fact,” Callum said, before wincing and correcting himself. “Sorry. I wasn’t implying you’re small or?—”
“No worries,” I quickly interrupted.
We settled into the living room—him on the leather couch, me in the armchair across from him—and the conversation found its rhythm the way conversations do between two people who've skipped past the small talk and landed somewhere real.
He asked about swimming. I asked about firefighting. He told me he'd been at the station for fourteen years, that he'd transferred to this city three years ago after a divorce, and that the apartment was supposed to be temporary but he'd gotten comfortable.
"Divorced," I said. "So, you get the whole relationship-implosion thing I’m going through, huh?" It was naive to compare my piddly relationship to a marriage.
But, hey, I was nineteen. And Callum was somehow kind enough to not laugh at my ridiculous comparison.
"I get it," he said, and something in his voice told me the story was longer than he was offering. He took a sip of his coffee. "You said you were relieved when your girlfriend ended it. Have you figured out why yet?"
"No," I said. Then, because the tea was warm and the storm was loud and Callum's apartment felt like a confessional booth with better furniture: "Maybe. I don't know. I think I just wasn't that into her. Which sounds shitty."
“It’s not shitty. It’s honest,” Callum said, running a hand through his short, dirty-blond hair. “Better to break it off now than string her along. You’d end up like me and my wife—and trust me, you don’t want that.”
"I think I'm bad at the whole... girlfriend thing.
Like, the concept of it. I like girls—I mean, I think I like girls.
I mean… of course I like girls. I've hooked up with a few.
But it always felt like I was going through the motions.
Running a play I'd memorized but didn't actually understand.
" I stared into my mug. "Does that make sense? "
"More than you know," Callum said quietly. “You just need to find the right person.”
Something about the way he said it—the weight of it, the knowingness — made me look up.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
Callum set his coffee down on the table. Leaned back. Met my eyes with an expression that was open and unbothered and carried the particular calm of a person who had long ago stopped being afraid of his own answer.
"Well, I'm gay," he said. "Figured it out at about your age.
Spent a few more years pretending I hadn't.
Got married to a woman, tried to make it work, failed.
Moved here. Started over." He shrugged—a small, settled gesture.
"The motions you're talking about? I ran those plays for a decade before I admitted the playbook was wrong. "
I stared at him.
I don't know what I expected a gay man to look like. I knew, intellectually, that the stereotype was bullshit—that sexuality had nothing to do with build or voice or how many tattoos you had on your forearms.