I hadn’t even counted the days, because I hadn’t needed to. Somewhere along the line, I realized, Andrew had stopped testing me, had stopped asking me questions to which I always had the answer. If trust is the absence of mistrust, then I guess I’d earned his.

Andrew and I barely talked to each other on calls now, except to exchange critical information. I kind of missed it. Without his relentless testing of my competence and preparedness, Andrew didn’t have much to say to me, and I was afraid to say much to him.

And the real problem?

The less we said, the fewer excuses I had to turn and look at him. And I found myself wanting to look at him a lot. He was a movie star, the guy on screen you can’t look away from, even when he’s at the table behind the real stars, he was the guy who makes everyone else just… fade out.

I know, boundaries, workplace sexual harassment inappropriate, blah blah blah. But the cock wants what it wants. I kept it in check, because that’s what people do all around the world, right? Go to work, nod and smile at someone incredibly hot, and leave them the fuck alone. You can’t even compliment a new hairdo anymore without the risk of getting written up.

Andrew and I spent a lot of time together in the firehouse. Life on a long and often dull shift is easier if you read a lot. I did, and so did Andrew. One night, I saw a well-thumbed paperback in the ambulance, Lights and Sirens, a memoir by a guy who’d gone to the prestigious UCLA Daniel Freeman Paramedic Education Program, basically the Harvard of medic programs.

At least, that’s what its graduates say. Graduates of other very good programs would scoff at that and name their own as the best in the nation. But then, you don’t get through the Every Week a Hell Week pace of a top notch paramedic program without a very competitive spirit and a strong ego.

“Can I borrow that?” I asked Andrew.

“Sure,” he said, closing it and tossing to me. “It’s good.”

It was good. Really, really good. I’d been to EMT school, which was about 120 to 150 hours of coursework. But medic school ran 1,200 to 1,800 hours, and was way more intensive. Some people think a paramedic is like a school nurse kind of job, but no. A medic (we drop the “para” from that most of the time) gets a classroom and hands-on education to rival an RN’s, and there were more than a few people who became medics because it was a leg up on their med school admissions application. There’s a grueling on-the-job training period where you can still wash out even after passing the classroom parts with flying colors.

The author was a smart guy, but he found out that it wasn’t just brains that got you through medic school. The UCLA program was mostly populated with alpha males who’d been sent there by their local fire departments or otherwise selected by their current employers to attend.

And you had to be a macho alpha to survive it, even if you were a woman. It was basically SEAL training for the brain and body, with plenty of points along the road where you’d find yourself wanting to “ring the bell” – or find someone ringing it for you if you fucked up enough times in a row on a key skills test.

“Was your school like that?” I asked Andrew one evening at dinner.

“Yeah,” he nodded, spooning up his soup, a potato leek concoction he’d made the night before when it was his turn to cook. “All the good ones are.”

“Jesus.”

“You ever think about medic school?”

I laughed. “Well, I was, till now. You’d have to be Superman to get through that.”

He set down his spoon and looked at me. “You should do it. You’re smart enough. You don’t lose your cool in a crisis. You already know at least half of what I know about procedures, meds, all of it. It’s intense, yeah, but it’s a fucking classroom. Just remember that nobody’s dying if you fuck up in a classroom. They try and make you forget that, of course.”

My vision was blurred. The compliment, hell not just that, the encouragement from Andrew meant the world to me.

I decided to start the book over. To see all the trials and tribulations the author went through and order myself, every time, to think, I can do that.

Because if Andrew thought I could, I knew I could.

* * *

About a week after my “anniversary,” Andrew sat down at the kitchen table with me, slurping at a bowl of cereal.

“What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Umm…” Tomorrow was a day off, and my plan was basically to catch up on a week’s lost sleep. We’d just pulled calls almost nonstop for 24 hours, so I was really out of it.

He looked at me. “You wanna go on an adventure?”

I tried to catch my breath. This was the first time Andrew had even mentioned the world outside work, never mind asking me to join him there.

“Yeah,” I said, not even caring what the adventure would be.