Kyle’s oral fixation was a real problem. He stuck out his tongue at the rubbery taste of the pencil eraser he was chewing on. He’d be chewing on it again within minutes if they didn’t hurry up and take him off hold.

He hated calling insurance companies, especially when he was chasing up on an information request from months ago. They were trying to find out which common group insurance plans covered PrEP and which didn’t, and one insurer was still holding out on the details.

He was nearly at the stage of requesting a meeting with a company representative to discuss it. The insurance company office closed in an hour, so they were probably trying to make him go away. All he needed was one damn simple answer.

There were so many damn balls to keep in the air today that he didn’t even have the heart to make a joke about not neglecting the shafts.

Kyle grabbed the stress balls—his favorite giveaway from a prostate cancer awareness campaign—from his drawer and kneaded them a few times, then put them down. He grabbed his cellphone, opening the app to order pizza again. No, maybe he’d check the office fridge and see if there were any frozen pizzas there first.

It had been a really long fucking day, and to top it off, he’d had to reschedule his meeting with Nic. He knew how it would look to Nic, but it really wasn’t about his personal feelings. Ash and Ben had both gotten the flu on Sunday, and he believed them—they’d been looking rougher than their drinking would justify on Friday night. That left him juggling both their workloads plus his own.

Once the insurance agent came back to him, finally with the authorized answer, he took careful notes on it, added it to his file, and switched to preparing the donor presentation Powerpoint slides for Cal’s next event.

Kyle lost track of time again, but when he finally checked back in and realized he’d just done a day’s work in a couple hours, it was dark outside. He worked late without pay a lot of the time, and didn’t really mind. He knew it was that attitude that led to burnout in many charity workers, but he’d also worked longer hours in shittier jobs just to make ends meet. This? An office job with a salary? He could handle this.

He smelled smoke. Crap. He leaned his head out of his office to look around the main area. Nobody else around, just as he’d thought, which meant it was just him and Denver as usual.

“Denver! You’re burning the fucking pizza!”

No answer. And there it was—the smoke alarm.

Kyle banged his head on the desk. Last thing he needed was having to clean the oven tomorrow. Last time, the pizza had been partly thawed. When Denver threw it in the oven without a pizza sheet for a crispier crust, it had melted clear through the bars and covered the whole thing in burned cheese.

No sense putting it off, then. He’d deal with the pizza situation himself.

When he got to the kitchen, though, there was no smoke billowing from the oven, and no sheepish Denver flapping a towel at it and screeching.

But there it was, in his nose. He definitely smelled it. It took his brain a few seconds to put two and two together: the smoke wasn’t coming from the kitchen. Which meant something else was on fire, and Denver was MIA.

“Shit! Denver!”

Denver wasn’t in his office, and the smoke was visible now. It was just like they drilled into his head at school as a kid: don’t worry about possessions. Everything suddenly became irrelevant except finding Denver and getting out of the building.

A quick scan of the offices and meeting rooms showed he wasn’t there, and he wasn’t in the bathroom, so where the fuck was he? Kyle was breathing fast now, fear making it hard to think.

Wait, maybe Denver had been out on the front step. He didn’t smoke, but sometimes he went to get fresh air there or wait for food delivery.

Please, God, let him have been outside and not wherever that fire was.

It was hot in here now—several degrees hotter, and he was sweating. Shit. Kyle was out of time.

Kyle pressed his hand to the office door and swore with relief under his breath when it was cool. He yanked it open, keeping low as smoke rushed into the office, and scrambled down the staircase.

There was Denver—on the floor, in the hallway between the front lobby and the staircase to their office. The security locks automatically released when the fire alarm went off, thank God, so Kyle shouldered his way through the final door and dropped to the ground by Denver’s side.

Denver was definitely unconscious, but he didn’t look burned. He had… a swelling black eye? How the hell had he knocked himself out?

The flames were licking against the floor upstairs—he could hear them, and it was goddamn terrifying. Nobody had ever said you could hear the fire eating things all around you. And he could see them.

Shit. He could see them eating through the wall from one of the ground floor offices, licking rapidly along the walls.

Fuck, Denver was heavy. He wasn’t sure he could lift him, standing up into the smoke that was filling the air from the top down, and get them both out safely. Dragging him would have to do.

He looped Denver’s arms around his shoulders and pulled hard, his muscles straining and lungs burning. Smoke was filling the hallway from top to bottom. He was choking, even though he wasn’t in the thickest blanket of smoke, and his eyes wouldn’t stop stinging.

At the same moment Kyle realized he was only ten feet from the front door, he also realized he might not make it. The closest he’d ever felt to this was when he’d worked laying sod for a groundskeeping company in the dead of summer, even further south than here. 110º days with full humidity, where he thought he was going to pass out and all he could do was lift one thing at a time, take a deep breath, and assess if he’d still be on his feet a few seconds later.

He’d made it through then—because fainting might have meant getting fired, which would have meant being broke and very quickly homeless and hungry. That, and a dose of luck.

Now, Kyle was going to lean on that survival instinct and his sheer luck again. Fainting might mean death again, and fuck him if he’d gone this long only to die now.

He covered his mouth with his arm and breathed as deeply as he could, then grabbed Denver’s arm once more and pulled him across the carpet. He made it most of the way to the glass front door. There were shouts from outside—the janitor had been around. Kyle recognized his face dimly as he collapsed through the door when the man pushed it open for him.

He heard sirens, and hands were on him, helping him sit down. He had to lie down, though, coughing too hard to breathe.

He swore he saw a few other faces, unfamiliar ones, in the alley by the building, but everything was spinning. Maybe he did know them. Oh, no. They were firefighters. Maybe they’d come to save him.

His heart was going too fast. He wiped his forehead with his arm as his ears rang, but he couldn’t feel his hand.

Fat lot of good they were, just standing there. He’d had to save himself, for God’s sake.

“Too late, bitches,” Kyle gasped.

And then he passed out.