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CHAPTER TWO

DAYTON

“Now, I want you all to take a deep breath in. Feel your muscles slowly starting to relax. Be aware of them. Let go of the tension in your eyelids, your mouth…now in your jaw.” I did my best to moderate my voice, but it was difficult with the noise outside.

The corner of my eye twitched and I tried to follow my own advice and breathe through it.

“Feel the tension leaving your neck, now your shoulders…”

BAM, BAM, BAM!

The bodies in the room collectively twitched, concentration and relaxation broken. I walked over to my iPod dock and hit the button to turn the music up a little louder, but I knew it was pointless.

“Hey! Fuck you, man! Fuck you! This is fucking bullshit! When I asked for…”

I did my best not to grimace, but when someone just outside the building was cussing someone else out, it was hard to get into a good headspace for shavasana.

“Can we stop?” I turned to see Charles—one of my longtime students—sitting up halfway.“Even with my hearing aids out, I can’t concentrate with all that racket.”

“Yeah,” Edith said. She rolled to a sitting position, which seemed to be the signal for the rest of the class.

I couldn’t blame any of them. We were stuck in the only place I could find with cheap enough weekly rent and an open timeslot closest to my previous class so most of my students could attend.

Unfortunately, the place came with a ton of construction work just a few feet from the doors.

I let out a sigh and turned the music off. “Alright. Just shake it all off before you drive home,” I told them.

This class was a low-impact hatha session for people who were elderly and disabled. I had a couple of advanced classes with a younger crowd, but they’d been willing to hit pause until we had more permanent accommodations.

The gym burning down hadn’t been on my Bingo card to start off my transfer to the new station up north.

And I was doing my best not to see it as a sign.

I wasn’t really a superstitious guy—at least, not more than any other firefighter I’d met, but I was having a hard time not taking this as a personal fuck-you from the universe.

Though what I’d done to piss the universe off that badly was beyond me.

I liked to think I was a chill and respectful kind of guy.

I didn’t buy into the whole hero-ego bullshit people in my job position often had because of what we did for a living.

I had a healthy ego and a decent amount of self-esteem, and none of it was built off being a dick to others.

I had plenty of friends, a great relationship with my family, and I always braked for animals.

So I had zero idea why this year was kicking my ass so hard.

The move to the new station was a lateral move, but it had come with a small raise and the promise of less chaos now that I wasn’t working in the city.

Marin County wasn’t exactly some backwoods farmland kind of place, but there were definitely more kitten-up-a-tree rescues than gunshot wounds, which I appreciated.

I wasn’t old, but I was starting to feel my age, and pardon the pun, I was starting to burn out.

And that was making me feel panicked. I didn’t want to lose my sense of self and purpose before I hit my peak years.

“Hey, Dayton?”

I turned to find Sutton wheeling toward me.

He’d started the class a couple of months back after he was given the all-clear to resume working out after his accident.

He was a former firefighter from LA who’d been in a violent car accident when his firetruck was crossing an intersection and a semi hadn’t been able to stop in time.

He was my first spinal cord injury student and it had taken me a long bout of research to find the right training for him.But after the initial struggle of finding an accessible routine, he was now one of my favorite students.

Of course I was also biased, being a battalion chief and all, but no one needed to know I played favorites like that.

I stuck out my fist and he knocked his knuckles against mine. “What’s up, man?”

“So, don’t take this personally?—”

I braced myself and let out a sharp breath. “Let me have it.”

“This just isn’t working.”

I pressed my hand to my chest. “Are you breaking up with me?”

His eyes lit up and he rolled them. “Claire would be devastated,” he said, referencing his wife, whom I loved, and not just because she baked me s’mores brownies twice a month. “But no, I’m not breaking up with you. I think the whole class will be okay if we hit pause until we find a better spot.”

There was a small part of me a little gutted about not doing my classes for a bit, but there was a bigger part wildly relieved because he was right.

It wasn’t working here. The warehouse itself was perfectly set up for what we needed.

It had a sturdy floor, plenty of mats, and high ceilings with massive fans to keep the place ventilated.

It was mostly used by an aerialist company that did cirque performances during street-festival season.

But it was near several industrial plants, and they were renovating the building next door, which meant it was loud all the time. And hearing workers screaming fuck you during shavasana wasn’t exactly ideal for the end-of-class meditation.

“Please don’t make that face. You know we love you,” Sutton pleaded.

I dropped down to one of the acrobatic cushions and shook my head, letting my forearms rest over my knees.

“Nah, man. It’s not you. This really does suck.

The station is in a damn tizzy because of this.

You know how the crew feels when their routine gets fucked.

”Apart from this class, half my people at the fire station had also gone to the gym where I taught.

Then the damn thing had burned down and we were all left a little lost.

Sutton’s expression went sad for a beat when I mentioned the crew because even with accommodations, there was no way he could go back to work as a firefighter. Sutton was currently in training to work dispatch, but I could tell that for him, it was a compromise.

And not one he loved.

“Any leads on somewhere new?”

“Actually, yeah. One of the EMT rookies—I think you’ve met him. Nash?”

Sutton grinned. “That hulking Army dude?”

I couldn’t help my laugh. That was a pretty good way to describe Nash. He’d become something like a best friend over the last few months, and he came with a small group of veterans as his little family. I loved them, even if not all of them loved me back.

Tameron’s face flashed in my mind, and I felt a tiny tingle at the base of my spine.

I’d expected to bond with him more than the other guys, considering I came from a Deaf family and he was hard of hearing and learning ASL, but for some reason, that seemed to piss him off instead of creating a bridge toward friendship.

“Yeah. His buddy goes to a gym not too far from here, and he’s checking into whether they can accommodate us.”

“Will you make sure I can fit through the door?” Sutton asked, patting his wheels.

“I won’t set foot in a place where your wheels aren’t welcome,” I told him.

His face softened. “Well, I hope it works out. Sorry class sucked today.”

That was one way to put it. I pushed to my feet and clapped him on the shoulder before walking to the desk. Sutton made his way out as I gathered my things, and by the time I’d locked up and put the key in the drop box, the meager parking lot had cleared.

A small rush of loneliness hit me in the center of my chest, but I shoved it away and quickly got into my car.

I was determined not to let anything spoil my day off.

I didn’t get a lot of them, but this transfer was supposed to mean more of those.

The last ten years had been filled with work, the commute to work, and the commute home.

The fatigue had begun to weigh so heavily on me that the most I’d had energy for was stealing a plate of leftovers my brother had thrown together and eating it in bed before passing out.

I wanted more than that kind of life. I wanted something for myself.

Something good. Something that had more purpose than working myself into an early grave.

I wanted to find joy in what I did again, and I knew a big part of that was slowing down and taking time to give myself not just what I needed but what I wanted.

The problem was I had no clue what that was supposed to be. And with the way things were going, I wasn’t sure I would find it any time soon.

“…so we managed to get the bleeding slowed and then turned him over to the attending. And now I realize why all the EMTs are stressed out about Christmas tree figurine season.” Nash’s face on the phone screen was kind of pale, and I was doing my best to hold in a laugh.

I wish someone had thought to warn the poor bastard about how often people got creative with plug-shaped objects and buttholes.

It had definitely been a shock to me when I first started, but I knew the only way past it was going through the trauma of watching someone limp and wince because they had a tree-shaped ornament stuck up their ass.

“You can laugh at me,” Nash said miserably. “Everyone else has been.”

“They’re only laughing because they’ve been there. Now we’re all jaded, and someday, you will be too.”

“Please remind me to tell my little baby queers in the house that just because something looks like a buttplug doesn’t mean it will function as one.”

At that, I lost it. I covered my face with a pillow as I held the phone away from me. I could hear him chuckling along, and that made me feel better. “Can I be a fly on the wall for that talk?” I asked once I could speak again.

His eyes crinkled in the corner. “I’ll set up a FaceTime. Creek will probably go quiet and turn seven different shades of red. Bean will ask questions. Tameron is going to lose his mind.”