Page 37 of From Air

“When’s the last time you put a new battery in it?” He opens the driver’s side door and pops the hood.

I rub my hands together and blow on them. “I have to say never.”

He chuckles. “You need a new battery. I might start it for you, but it probably won’t start when you leave work later. If it were me, I’d go to the gas station this morning and see if they have time to slip a new battery in it.” He treks to his truck and positions it in front of my Jeep.

“What do you need me to do?” I ask.

“Didn’t your dad teach you how to jump a car?” He rests the jumper cables over his shoulder while opening the hood of his truck.

“He died when I was five.”

Fitz eyes me for a second and offers an apologetic smile. “Red goes to the positive. Black is negative.” He holds up both cables. “Connect them to the dead battery first.”

I pay close attention because I have a feeling this might not be the last time I need to jump my Jeep.

“I’ll start my truck, then you’ll start your Jeep.”

After my Jeep starts, Fitz shows me how to disconnect everything in reverse order. “Drive around for a bit before you stop at the station, and leave your Jeep running while you ask them if they can fit you in. If they can’t, then call me.”

I climb into my Jeep, and he stands at my open door.

“Thank you,” I murmur before scraping my teeth along my lower lip and averting my gaze.

“Anything for my person.”

My heart doesn’t simply stop; it explodes into pieces so tiny I’ll never put them back in order.

I clear my throat. “Calvin Fitzgerald, there are rules in our household.”

“I’m aware.”

“I’m not getting evicted.”

“Neither am I.” He’s so confident.

Me? Not so much. “My job in Missoula is temporary.”

He nods.

“You’ll be nonexistent when fire season starts.”

Again, he nods.

I can’t look at him and say the words, but I also can’t dance around them any longer, so I grip the steering wheel to steady my nervous hands, gazing at his truck in front of me. “You kissed me, Fitz. Twice. Why did you kiss me?”

“Becausenotkissing you became too exhausting.”

A man has never broken my heart. Homeschooling helped by reducing the size of my dating pool. Casual dating has helped too. So it doesn’t make sense that IknowCalvin Fitzgerald is on his way to obliterating my heart. Yet, I do. I know it with absolute certainty.

I slowly turn toward him.

Fitz bites the inside of his cheek with a downcast expression. I’ve never seen anything sexier than this man at this moment showing me a sliver of vulnerability.

He rubs the back of his neck. “And I have impeccable endurance, which means I have a complicated relationship with my feelings toward you,” he says, lifting his gaze with a tense brow. “So I need to be consumed by work. And I need to know that you’re temporary in my life.”

My heart digs through its emergency kit and pulls out the tools to construct a fortress around it.

I manage to say the opposite of what I feel. “It was just a kiss.”

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