Chapter Twenty Max
Zack stopped complaining about paperwork on Wednesday.
He’s been complaining about paperwork since before I made lieutenant, which puts it at somewhere around six years of consistent low-grade grievance that I had accepted as a permanent feature of this station.
Then Brielle reorganized the incident report system on Tuesday and by Wednesday morning Zack came into the kitchen, poured his coffee, and sat down without saying a single word about filing.
I didn’t comment on it.
But I noted it.
That’s been most of the past two weeks. Noting things.
The way Rory started eating lunch in the kitchen again, instead of at his desk.
The way Evan answers questions about himself.
The way Jase is funnier around her, not louder, actually funnier, sharper, like she draws something out of him that the rest of us don’t know how to reach.
The way the station feels different.
I have been very disciplined about what I allow myself to do with all of this noting. I note it. I file it. I move on. It’s a system that has worked reasonably well for about thirteen days and is starting to show some structural weaknesses.
Weston knocks on my open office door on a Thursday afternoon, which he never does, and closes the door, which he also never does, and I know before he puts his phone on my desk that whatever comes next is going to require those structural weaknesses to hold for a little longer.
The article is on a site I’ve never heard of, with a name designed to sound reputable.
HAYES HEIRESS HIDES OUT: Runaway Bride Takes Refuge With Brooklyn Firefighters.
It’s not long. It doesn’t need to be. Four paragraphs establishing that Brielle Hayes, heiress to the Hayes family fortune and former fiancée of Richard Montgomery, has been living at a fire station in Brooklyn since the now-infamous wedding fire two weeks ago.
There’s a slightly blurry photo, taken from the street, that is unmistakably her, coming out of the station’s front entrance in a grey hoodie, a coffee in her hand. One paragraph refers to her as a stray cat that the firefighters took in.
I put the phone down on the desk very carefully.
“Max,” Weston says.
“It’s Montgomery,” I say. “Has to be. His PR team has been running stories about her since the wedding. This is the same playbook.”
“Probably,” Weston says. “But that’s not the point.”
“The point is someone photographed her outside our station.”
“The point,” Weston says, with patience, “is that we now have media attention on this station that I did not ask for and cannot easily manage. The situation with Miss Hayes, which I agreed to on the understanding that it was temporary and discreet, is currently neither of those things.”
I look at the phone on my desk.
“She’s been here two weeks,” I say. “She’s doing good work. She’s not causing problems.”
“I’m not saying she’s causing problems,” Weston says. “I’m saying she can’t live here indefinitely. Not now that there’s a camera pointed at our front door.” He pauses. “You need to think about next steps. She can continue working here, of course.”
He leaves me with that and closes the door behind him, and I sit with it for a long time.
The practical problem is simple enough. She has no apartment. Her parents’ house is not an option. Her cousin’s place is too small. A hotel is expensive and exposed, and also, though I don’t examine this thought too carefully, wrong in a way I can’t fully articulate.
The apartment is what keeps surfacing.
I and Jase’s place is four blocks from the station. Three bedrooms, one of which has been used for storage since Jase moved in three years ago and has been cleaned out once.
Enough space, and close enough to the station that she could still come in for the admin work. It makes logistical sense, which is what I tell myself when the thought comes up. And it comes up with increasing frequency.
Logistical sense. A practical solution to a practical problem that has nothing to do with the fact that I fell asleep in a chair next to her bed two weeks ago. I close the budget spreadsheet that I have not been looking at for the past twenty minutes and go down to the gym.
An hour later, I am on my fourth mile on the treadmill, and the situation has not improved. I run harder. It doesn’t help.
The problem with physical exertion as a solution to a mental problem is that it only works if the intensity is sufficient to occupy the brain completely, which requires a level I am approaching but apparently have not yet reached, because I am still thinking about Brielle Hayes and the apartment and Weston’s face and the word stray and the way she looked two mornings ago across the kitchen table when she thought I wasn’t watching her.
I know she was watching me, too.
I’ve known for a while.
I stop the treadmill, stand there, breathe, and accept that the gym is not going to fix this today.
***
The shower is cold at first, the way it always is when I step in immediately, and then hot, and I stand under it and let the heat work on muscles the treadmill got to and try to think about the budget projections waiting on my desk.
I last approximately forty-five seconds.
I close my eyes under the hot spray, and her face is already there, waiting for me.
This morning in the kitchen. She was sitting across the table with her coffee mug held in both hands, hair still messy from sleep, the bruise on her temple is barely visible now.
She thought I was focused on my phone. I wasn’t. I watched the way she looked at me when she thought I wasn’t paying attention, soft and curious and a little hungry.
I tell myself I am only remembering. Just a memory. Nothing more.
But the thought shifts anyway.
In my mind’s eyes, she is in our apartment now. Not the station. Her things are in the third bedroom: a few boxes, a pair of shoes by the door, and her grey hoodie draped over the back of a chair.
In the morning, she would come into the kitchen in bare feet and one of my old t-shirts, and reach for the coffee mugs as if she had lived there for years.
The domestic image hits me harder than anything explicitly sexual ever could. My cock twitches, already half-hard from the heat and the run and two weeks of denial.
I wrap my hand around myself and stroke once, slow, trying to keep it clinical.
It does not stay clinical.
The fantasy deepens. She is still in the kitchen, but she is not alone. Jase is behind her, his hands at her waist, pulling her back against his chest.
Her head tips back against his shoulder, eyes half-closed, that small pleased sound she makes when someone touches her just right. Jase kisses the side of her neck, while his fingers slip under the hem of her shirt.
I step into the room in the fantasy. She opens her eyes and sees me. No surprise. No hesitation. She reaches out one hand toward me like it is the most natural thing in the world.
I cross the distance and take it. My palm slides along her jaw, tilting her face up so I can kiss her while Jase keeps working her from behind. There is no competition in it, no rush to claim.
Just the three of us fitting together in a way that feels dangerously right. Her mouth is warm and eager against mine. Jase’s hand moves lower between her legs, and she moans softly into my kiss, the sound vibrating through me.
My grip tightens on my cock in the real shower. The water beats down on my shoulders as I stroke faster.
Then Evan is there, leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed and that half-smile that means he has already decided how this is going to go.
Brielle turns her head toward him without pulling away from Jase or me. She stretches her other hand out. Evan takes it, steps in, and suddenly it is all four of us.
Her body is caught between us, warm and responsive. Jase’s mouth on her neck. Evan’s hand sliding up her thigh, and my fingers are threading into her hair as I kiss her deeper. She arches between us and whispers my name.
“Max…”
I groan low in my throat, the sound lost under the spray. My strokes turn rougher.
I wrap my hand tighter around the thick length of my cock, thumb pressing firmly along the underside as I pump faster from base to tip, twisting slightly at the head where I’m most sensitive. Warm precum leaks steadily, mixing with the hot water.
With my other hand, I reach down and cup my balls, rolling them heavily in my palm, squeezing enough to send a sharp jolt of pleasure up my spine. They’re tight and full, drawn up close to my body. I tug gently, then harder, matching the frantic rhythm of my fist.
The fantasy blurs into pure sensation. The wet heat of her mouth around my cock.
I brace my free hand against the tile, forehead pressed hard to the cool surface. Water runs down my back in rivulets. My hips jerk forward into my fist as I stroke faster in tight pulls from root to leaking head, the wet slap of skin echoing under the spray.
My toes curl hard against the shower floor, gripping for balance as my thighs start to shake.
A raw grunt tears out of me, then another, deeper and more desperate. “Fuck…”
My balls draw up even tighter in my palm. I squeeze them rhythmically while my hand flies over my cock, thumb swiping roughly over the sensitive head on every upstroke.
Her name leaves my mouth on a rough, broken exhale.
“Brielle.”
The orgasm crashes over me hard. My hips snap forward one last time as thick ropes of cum spill over my fist, pulsing out in heavy spurts that the water immediately washes away.
My whole body locks up with my toes digging painfully into the tile, thighs trembling, a guttural groan ripping from my chest as I keep stroking through it, milking every last wave until I’m empty and vibrating.
I stand there for a long moment after, forehead still pressed to the tile, chest heaving, water beating down on my shoulders. My hand is still loosely wrapped around my softening cock, cum and water dripping from my fingers.
Then the clarity hits.
I am standing in the station shower with my hand still wrapped around my softening cock, fantasizing about sharing the woman currently sleeping down the hall with two of my closest friends like it is some kind of inevitable future instead of complete insanity.
I turn the water all the way to cold and stay under it until my teeth are nearly chattering and my mind is back on budget projections, staffing schedules, and anything that is not her.
It almost works.