5. Brenna
brENNA
Icalled him because of the smoke detector.
That was the reason I gave myself, anyway.
The new one I’d bought was sitting on my kitchen counter in its plastic packaging, and the instructions said it was compatible with existing hardwired mounts.
Simple swap—disconnect the old unit, match the wiring harness, snap the new one in.
Twenty minutes, tops, for someone who knew what they were doing.
I did not know what I was doing. Not with electrical wiring.
Not anymore. I’d done plenty of minor repairs in this apartment—shelving, a garbage disposal, a stand mixer I’d rewired myself with my phone propped against the backsplash, playing a tutorial.
But that was before the panel behind the bakery’s kitchen wall had sparked and caught and sent fire racing up to the ceiling.
The thought of opening a wire connector right now, even for a smoke detector, made my hands go cold.
So I picked up my phone and called Gabriel.
He’d given me his number at the cookout—written it on a napkin that Bev had watched him hand me.
She hadn’t said a word. I’d put it in my phone under “Gabriel Hall.” Changed it to “Gabriel.” Changed it back.
His first name sitting alone on my screen felt too familiar.
Too much like I’d already decided something.
It rang twice.
“Hall,” he answered. His voice was low and slightly rough, like he’d been breathing hard or talking over noise.
“It’s Brenna. Are you—is this a bad time?”
“Just got off a call. Structure fire on the county line. What’s going on?”
“It’s not an emergency.” I felt stupid immediately.
The man fought fires for a living and I was calling him about a smoke detector.
“The smoke detector in my apartment is hardwired, and I need to swap it out. I bought a replacement, but after everything with the electrical panel, I don’t—” I stopped.
Took a breath. “I don’t want to touch the wiring myself. ”
Silence for a beat. Then, “I’ll be there in twenty.”
He hung up before I could tell him there was no rush. Before I could say he didn’t have to come right now, tonight, straight off a call. Before I could backtrack and tell him I’d figure it out myself.
Twenty minutes. I looked around my apartment and panicked.
Not because it was messy—I kept the place clean.
The kitchen and living room were one open space divided by a half wall, and the bedroom was a short hallway away.
But the smoke smell from the fire downstairs had settled into everything, and I’d been burning candles so aggressively that the apartment smelled like a Bath & Body Works had collided with a campfire.
I blew out two of the four candles. Then I relit one.
Then I changed my shirt, looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, changed back to the original shirt, and stood in the middle of my living room in cutoff shorts and a thin cotton tee, wondering when I’d become a person who changed shirts for a man coming over to install a smoke detector.
His knock came in exactly nineteen minutes. I knew because I’d been counting.
When I opened the door, the first thing I registered was the uniform.
He was still in his turnout pants—the heavy canvas ones with the reflective strips at the knee—and a dark navy department T-shirt that was damp at the collar and across the chest. His hair was pushed back from his forehead, slightly damp.
There was a faint streak of soot on his left forearm, just above the old burn scar.
He smelled like smoke. Real smoke—not the stale, lingering kind that lived in my walls, but fresh. Sharp. The kind that clung to a man who’d just walked out of a burning building.
My pulse kicked up.
“You didn’t have to come straight here,” I said. “You could have showered. Changed. Eaten.”
“You said you needed a smoke detector installed.”
He looked past me into the apartment, scanning the space with the automatic, assessing sweep I’d seen him do at the bakery. Ceiling, walls, exits. He did it without thinking, the same way I checked oven temperatures without thinking.
“Come in.” I stepped back and held the door open. “The ceiling mount is in the hallway. Right above the bedroom door.”
He toed off his boots by the door without being asked—dropped them on the mat next to mine, heavy and scuffed and still warm from the call—and walked in in his socks.
My apartment immediately felt smaller. Not because he was doing anything—he was just standing in my kitchen, looking at the smoke detector package on the counter—but the physical reality of Gabriel Hall in my personal space was something I hadn’t adequately prepared for.
He picked up the smoke detector, tore it out of the packaging, and walked to the hallway. I followed and watched him reach up and twist the old unit off the ceiling mount. He let it hang by the wiring harness—three thin wires connected by a small plastic clip.
“Same harness,” he said, glancing at the new unit. “Direct swap.”
He unclipped the connector, matched the new harness, and snapped the wires together with a clean click. Then he twisted the new detector onto the mount and pressed the test button. The chirp was loud and sharp in the small hallway, and I flinched.
He noticed. His hand came off the detector and looked at me, and the shift in his expression was immediate—from task-focused to fully present, his eyes on my face, reading me.
“Sorry,” I said. “Loud noises and me aren’t great right now. Apparently.”
“That’s normal.”
“Is it?”
“After what you went through, yeah. It’ll ease up.”
He said it with certainty. Not the empty, reassuring kind—the kind that came from having watched people go through this before, having been the person pulling them out and checking on them after.
He was still standing in my hallway. The hallway was narrow. There were maybe two feet between us, and I was leaning against the door frame of my bedroom, and he was standing under the smoke detector he’d just installed, and the apartment was very quiet.
“Thank you,” I said. “For coming over. For doing that.”
“Took thirty seconds.”
“That’s not what I’m thanking you for.”
He didn’t ask me to explain. He just looked at me with those green eyes that saw too much and said too little, and the space between us felt like it was getting smaller even though neither of us had moved.
“You were on a call tonight,” I said. “A structure fire.”
“County line. Barn on a horse property. No one was hurt.”
“Do you always go in?”
“When it’s my crew, yeah.”
“Every time?”
“Every time.”
I should have let it go. It wasn’t my business how he did his job, and the man had been a firefighter for fourteen years—he didn’t need me worrying about him walking into burning buildings.
But the thought of it—of him in the smoke, in the heat, on the wrong side of a wall that could come down—sat in my chest like a coal.
“That scares me,” I said.
The words were out before I could stop them. They hung in the narrow hallway between us, and I watched his face for the reaction—the dismissal, the reassurance, the “it’s the job” response that would put distance between us and make this easier to walk away from.
He didn’t give me any of those.
“Good,” he said quietly.
“Good?”
“Means you give a damn.”
My breath caught. He was looking at me the way he’d looked at me in the truck—steady and certain and unhurried—but this time there was heat behind it.
Not the careful restraint of a man choosing his moment.
Something rawer. He’d walked out of a fire tonight and driven straight to my apartment, and he was standing in my hallway in his turnout pants with soot on his arm, and the control I’d watched him maintain for the past four days was thinner than I’d ever seen it.
“Gabriel?”
“Yeah?”
“Why didn’t you kiss me in the truck?”
His jaw tightened. His eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up. “Because I wanted you to know it wasn’t about the moment.”
“And now?”
“Now I’ve been thinking about it for two days and I just drove here in my gear because you called and I couldn’t—” He stopped. Exhaled through his nose. Started again, quieter. “I couldn’t not come.”
I reached for him. My hand found the front of his shirt—the damp navy cotton, warm from his body—and I closed my fingers in the fabric and pulled. Not hard. Just enough to close the distance I’d been pretending didn’t matter.
He came forward. One step. His hand found my hip, and the weight of it—heavy, deliberate, his fingers pressing into the curve of it—sent a current through me so strong my knees softened.
His other hand came up and cradled the back of my head, his fingers sliding into my hair, and he tilted my face up toward his. I could feel his breath. I could count his eyelashes. My heart was hammering so hard, I was sure he could feel it through his palm where it rested against my hip.
“Brenna.”
My name in his mouth. Low and rough and careful, like he was making sure he had it right. Like it mattered.
“I’m going to kiss you now,” he said.
“I know.”
His mouth found mine, and the world went quiet.
Not the nervous, tentative quiet of a first kiss between strangers. This was the deep, ringing silence of something finally falling into place—a key in a lock, a door swinging open, the held breath before you realize you can breathe again.
His lips were warm and firm and he kissed me like he did everything else—deliberately, thoroughly, without a single wasted motion.
His hand tightened in my hair. His thumb pressed into my hip bone.
I made a sound against his mouth that I’d never made before—something between a sigh and a gasp—and I felt his chest expand on a sharp inhale, like that sound had gone straight through him.
I pulled him closer. Both hands on his shirt now, fisted in the cotton, pulling him down to me.
He came willingly, his body solid and warm and smelling like smoke, and I kissed him harder because I needed him to know this wasn’t gratitude.
This wasn’t the girl he’d saved, clinging to the man who’d carried her out.
This was me. Just me. Wanting him in a way that had nothing to do with fire or fear or the worst morning of my life and everything to do with the man who’d sat across from me in a diner and told me he wouldn’t insult me by saying it could be worse.
He pulled back just far enough to look at me. His breathing was rough. His eyes were dark—that sharp green gone deep and liquid—and his hand was still in my hair, still cradling my head like I was something he’d been given and intended to keep.
“Stay,” I said.
The word came out before I thought about it. Before I could weigh it or qualify it or wrap it in something safer. Just the bare, honest truth of what I wanted, standing in my hallway in a smoke-stained apartment with a man who’d driven across town in his turnout gear because I’d asked.
His head dropped. His eyes closed. I felt his thumb trace a slow circle against my hip, and then he exhaled—a long, unsteady breath that told me the control was gone.
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”