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CHAPTER THREE

TAMERON

When I’d offered for Nash’s crew to check out my gym, I’d been prepared to run into Dayton from time to time.

What I hadn’t counted on was him teaching my yoga class.

Talk about an unwelcome surprise. I’d been so upset when I’d gotten the email that my previous teacher had accepted another job and they were pleased to introduce the new teacher, yada yada, Dayton Adams.

Fuck me sideways.

Obviously, I’d skipped the first lesson he’d taught, opting to do an online class instead. That hadn’t worked out as well as I’d hoped since the tempo had been too fast for me. I needed gentle yoga, considering my balance issues, and slow instructions.

I hadn’t been able to make the second lesson he’d taught either. I’d had an ASL practice session with someone from my ASL class. He had limited availability, so I’d given up my yoga class for that session. It hadn’t exactly been a hardship.

But now I had to bite the bullet…and I was pissy as fuck about it. To add insult to injury, it was Monday morning, which was a reason to be moody all in itself.

I’d arrived early because I had a score to settle with Dayton. When I walked into the classroom, he was already there, setting up. He wore a white singlet that accentuated his muscular build and a pair of loose shorts.

“You told Nash I didn’t show up?”

He turned around. “And a good morning to you too, Tameron,” he said, flashing me a smile while also signing ‘Good morning.’

“You don’t need to sign. I can hear you.”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t sure if you wore your hearing aids to class.”

“How else would I hear the instructions?”

“Watch what everyone else is doing? It wouldn’t matter to me.”

Oh, so I could turn him off? There was an appealing thought…though it wouldn’t even matter. It wasn’t his voice that annoyed me. It was the whole package. “Why did you tell Nash?”

“Because I was concerned about you. Your records showed you rarely miss a class, so I wanted to make sure everything was okay.”

Fuck, how was I supposed to argue with that? “You could’ve asked me directly.”

“Sure, but I’ve been around you enough that I know Nash is the more effective way.”

He wasn’t wrong, which obviously annoyed me even more. “He was all on my ass about it this morning, so thanks a lot for that.”

His mouth quivered like he was fighting not to laugh. “It clearly worked, didn’t it?”

I put my hands on my hips. “Don’t go behind my back. I can fight my own battles.”

His smile vanished, and he stepped closer to me. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I didn’t look at it that way, but you’re absolutely right. I took agency away from you, and I shouldn’t have.”

Christ on a bike, why did he have to go and be all nice and apologetic about it? Now I couldn’t even ream him out in my head anymore. “Yeah, whatever. Don’t do it again.”

He nodded solemnly. “I won’t. You have my word.”

Why did he always take everything so seriously?

He signed something, but when he saw I’d tuned in too late, he repeated it. ‘How are your ASL lessons going?’

I brought my hand to the middle of my chest, my thumb toward me, and tapped my thumb a few times against my chest. ‘Fine.’

‘What level are you now?’

‘Level four.’

Learning ASL was so much harder than I had imagined. My teacher was a bit of a dick, which didn’t help, but the nuances of the various signs were so goddamn hard to remember, not to mention the fact that it was a whole different language with its own rules and grammar.

Two other students—a lovely grandmother named Shelley, who was battling arthritis, and her grandson Misha, a shy twenty-three-year-old dude who’d been hurt in a car crash—were coming in, and I’d never been more relieved in my life to see them.

“Hey, Misha!” I waved at him.

His face lit up with surprise, probably because I’d never greeted him with that much exuberance. “Hi, T-t-tameron.”

Now that I’d set the tone, I needed to sell the act, or Dayton would realize what I was doing, so I walked over to Shelley and Misha. “How was your weekend?”

“G-good,” he said. “I went s-surfing.”

“He found an amazing new teacher,” Shelley said.

“One who has a lot of experience working with differently abled people. He’s missing a leg himself, though if not for the prosthesis, you’d never be able to tell by the way he surfs.

His balance is amazing. And he’s so freaking nice.

I saw a flyer he put out at a surf shop and immediately told Misha, ‘You should try this. He looks like a guy who could teach you.’ And I was right, wasn’t I?

” She said the last part with a loving look toward Misha, who nodded even as he rolled his eyes at me in clear embarrassment over his grandmother.

Shelley was like a faulty jukebox. If you threw in a quarter’s worth of questions, she’d give you at least ten minutes of conversation.

But she was so lovely that it was hard to mind her chatty nature…

or the fact that she used a phrase like differently abled people , not exactly an appropriate term, though one that a lot of older folks still had in their vocabulary.

Then what she said clicked. “Oh, you’re talking about Heath, right?”

“Yes,” Shelley said. “You know him?”

“He’s my roommate’s boyfriend. He’s amazing, and I can see why he’d be a great teacher for you, Misha.”

As we kept chatting, everyone else trickled in, and right on the dot, Dayton started his class.

He was annoyingly good at teaching, much to my chagrin.

Couldn’t the universe have at least given me the pleasure of seeing him fail miserably at something?

The man was good-looking, he was a damn firefighter, he was unfailingly kind and nice, and now he turned out to be a decent teacher too?

I needed him to have a flaw. Just one thing he wasn’t good at, something negative.

Anything to justify my dislike of him. Except I wasn’t gonna find it during this class.

Hell, he was so good that halfway through, I forgot my annoyance and was able to fully get into it.

It always felt so amazing to reach that yoga-flow state.

My thought that maybe it wasn’t all so bad evaporated when I walked over to my car after the lesson and discovered I had a flat. “Ugh, seriously?”

I kicked the flat tire. Was the universe now mocking me for enjoying myself for thirty damn minutes?

I did have a spare, but no way would I be able to get that on myself. That involved a lot of bending over while doing heavy lifting, which would not end well if I attempted it. So now what?

“Need help?”

I spun around at Dayton’s voice. Of course it had to be him. My pride battled with my common sense for a moment, but then I surrendered. I’d be a fool not to accept it. “Yeah, that’d be awesome.”

“No problem at all. Do you have a spare?”

I clicked the keyfob to open the trunk and then lifted the floor compartment. “I do, but I don’t have a jack.”

“No worries. I have one in my truck. Let me grab it.”

He was a regular fucking Boy Scout, wasn’t he? But it was hard to be annoyed about that when it came in so handy. He jogged to a big red pickup truck—an appropriate color for a firefighter—then made his way back with the jack.

He knelt next to the flat. “Let’s see if we can get this done.”

Okay, I liked that he said “we” and not “I.” At least he assumed I’d be helping or whatever.

I watched as he went to work, my eyes taking in his form.

Wait, did he have…? Oh man, he totally did.

His nipples were pierced. I hadn’t noticed it before, but I did now that I could peek inside his singlet as I towered over him.

Both nipples had tiny little barbells. Not what I would’ve expected from him at all.

I also saw a tattoo on his back, but I couldn’t make out what it was.

Within minutes, he’d managed to jack up the car—I was dutifully watching, feeling very useless—and was in the middle of taking off the flat tire when he suddenly stopped. He cocked his ear in the direction of a group of trees that lined the parking lot. “Are you able to hear that?”

I turned my good ear in that direction and focused. I heard…a high squeaking sound? Like a…like a mewl? “Is that a cat?”

He nodded, putting down the lug wrench. “I think so. A kitten, even. It’s a little high-pitched for an adult cat.”

We walked over to the trees, looking up and following the sound. “There,” I said, pointing. “Oh my god, you were right. It is a kitten.”

A tiny gray kitten sat on a tree branch, its slender body shivering as it mewled with all its tiny heart.

Dayton stood close to me, and our heads were inches apart as we looked at the little kitten. “It’s scared to come down,” Dayton said.

“Can we coax it out?”

“We can try, but usually, it doesn’t work.”

I quirked an eyebrow. “And you know this, how? Don’t tell me the old cliché about people calling the fire department to rescue cats from trees is true.”

He shot me a cocky grin. “Oh, it is, trust me. I’ve saved many a cat from a tree, and even a few dogs. Plus some kids, a furious wounded raccoon—that one was not fun—and an owl who’d injured his wing.”

I was still gonna try. I made chirpy sounds with my lips, holding out my hands to the kitten. “Come here, buddy… Jump into my arms. You can do it. I’ll catch you, I promise.”

Dayton joined me, clicking his tongue and making different sounds, but the little kitten didn’t move a muscle. It was well and truly stuck, the poor thing.

Finally, I gave up with a deep sigh. “Looks like you’re right, so how do we get it down?”

Dayton shrugged. “The old-fashioned way…with a ladder.”

“You have a ladder in your truck?”

“I do, actually. It’s an emergency ladder, so not an aluminum one, and it’s perfect for situations like this.”