Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 96970 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 485(@200wpm)___ 388(@250wpm)___ 323(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96970 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 485(@200wpm)___ 388(@250wpm)___ 323(@300wpm)
Even if it meant sitting on this news for thirty more hours.
25
ALEX
DrunkenPoet: Please just tell me you’re alive. I don’t care if you changed your mind about us. I don’t care if you want me to fuck off. Just tell me you’re breathing somewhere.
IndexEcho: [No response]
DrunkenPoet: I love you. I love you and I’m sorry for whatever I did wrong.
IndexEcho: [No response]
_____________________
Kincaid was officially being weird. I was half-tempted to duck out of work early and surprise him at his house, but I’d heard from Javi Sujo’s girlfriend that the fire crew had been out battling a big barn fire all afternoon. The man probably needed hydration and rest after that.
“The fire chief’s a tasty treat,” someone said as I placed another pizza on the large row of tables pushed together for the SERA instructors. “We should’ve invited him.”
“Forget about his ass,” Monroe said with a shake of his head. “You should ask him about his work experience, man. Guy’s hardcore.”
I moved back to the kitchen, even though I was desperate to hear what he was saying about Judd. We still had several pizzas to get out in addition to the extra appetizers Trace had ordered when the original ones had run out.
After bringing more food out, I did a round of drink refills and helped two of my servers bus a few tables. Juni and Karim were beginning to clean up in the kitchen, and I was eager to stay caught up, on the slim chance the SERA group would make it an early-ish night.
Make that a very slim chance, considering they usually celebrated the end of another cohort session with a long night of craft brews and cocktails. I’d already had three orders of the Slingshot Flame tonight, and they seemed to be just getting started.
Judd would have been proud of me for my responsible fire-making.
“Hey, Alex, can I get another Get Lost Pale Ale?” Tommy asked as I moved behind him.
“Absolutely. What about Foster?” I glanced at my cousin with my eyebrow raised toward his boyfriend.
“Bourbon, but this is the last one since I’m not strong enough to carry the bastard.”
Their dog, Chickie, lifted her head up from her spot under Tommy’s chair. I leaned over and gave her long ears a little bit of love. “Good girl,” I murmured. “And a treat for you, hm?”
Just as I was headed back with their drinks and a dog biscuit tucked in my apron pocket, I overheard Monroe say something about Kincaid again.
“And he’s ARFF. So I asked him, what the fuck are you doing working here instead of on an airfield someplace? He used to work with big planes, like index E–level shit.”
I stopped and stared. Then I carefully set down the drinks and asked Monroe to repeat what he’d said. I probably sounded deranged, but I didn’t care. “What’s ARFF, and what’s index E?”
“Oh, aircraft rescue and firefighting. And index E means big planes. That’s the indicator that an airport serves mostly planes longer than two hundred feet. Like 747s and 777s and MD-11s. It means the airport has to have at least three big-ass trucks with over six thousand gallons of water for foam production.”
I already knew this, of course. I’d asked IndexEcho the origin of his username at one point and had gotten an explanation very similar to this one.
“How do you know all of that?” I asked, like I was just making casual conversation. “I thought you were mostly a helicopter pilot.”
“I am.” Monroe took a quick sip of his beer. “But my brother’s a United pilot out of Denver. He’s super-nerdy about all this stuff and bragged like a bitch when he got rated to fly MD-11s.”
My stomach felt hollow, and my toes tingled with a strange kind of numbness. “That’s cool,” I said. “How do you know all of that about Chief Kincaid?”
“He told me about it one night last summer. And, honestly, I got the feeling he was probably just taking a break before finding another big ARFF job somewhere. Sounds like he needed a temporary gig until jumping back in the fray.” Monroe grinned and winked. “Why the interest in the chief?”
I felt like my face was made of stone. “No reason. I just didn’t realize that about him.”
Tommy shot me a look, like he heard the strain in my voice, but he cleared his throat and summoned a smile. “Alex is probably fishing for some dirt on the chief. Guy’s been a total pain in Alex’s ass with inspections every week and shit.”
The chief had definitely been a pain in my ass.
But he’d quickly become something else—the man I was falling for.
And now, it seemed, he was something way, way worse.
A fraud.
I didn’t have the brainpower right now to figure out what this all meant, but I could feel in my bones it wasn’t good.