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“I can’t believe this,” Liam moans into his bowl of cereal.
“Buddy, in the second grade you couldn’t believe that the King Tut bust on display at school wasn’t the real thing,” Mason says unsympathetically as he pauses nearby with his overly ornate granola and yogurt concoction. “You’re gonna have to be a little more specific about what you can’t believe this time.”
Liam lifts his head enough to glare at his purported best friend through his overgrown bangs. “You know what I can’t believe.”
“I don’t, actually.”
“That Theo got picked for the calendar and not me!” Liam throws his hands up in the air, the perfect dramatic greeting to the rest of the squad as they start filing into the house kitchen for their respective breakfasts. Alec, ever ready and ever a pest, already has his phone out and is semi-discreetly filming what promises to be another legendary Dunbar breakdown in the break room.
“If you wanted to show off your muscles so bad, you could just, I don’t know, take off your uniform next time we need to go rescue Mrs. Guggenheimer’s cat,” says Corey. The traitor. Liam knows he laid to rest his violent intentions against Mason’s boyfriend many years ago, but some days the guy just truly tests his patience.
“It’s not about the muscles. It’s about—it’s about—being recognized for contributing so much to the firehouse and to our county and our town in general!” Liam rages. “Who gets picked for these calendars? Traditionally, we know it’s the ones who have seniority!”
Alec coughs out something under his breath that sounds suspiciously like traditionally it’s the ones with abs, bro. Liam decides to ignore him. He can’t murder all his friends at once. The captain would start to get suspicious.
At least Mason is trying his best to be placating as he scours the freezer for his baggie of frozen strawberries. “Look at it this way, bro. Not everyone from every squad can get picked, no matter how qualified. Take the 118, for example. Scott’s definitely qualified—he’s jacked, he's the captain, and he's been there the longest. But the guy they picked was Derek.”
Knowing the captain of the 118, he probably gave over the slot to Derek out of pity, and grinned benignly about it. Liam mutters as much to the table.
“Well, no, Scott was already on the calendar a couple years back. So it makes sense that they might pick Derek from their house to do it this year. And, hey! That means you’ve got some hope to get the slot next time,” Mason says reasonably.
Liam wants to go back to moping in his cereal. He doesn’t want to be lured into being reasonable by his best friend’s reasonable voice.
“Why’re you so twisted up about this, anyway?” Hayden wants to know as she wanders in, chomping on an apple. “He’s your boyfriend. You get to see his disgustingly cut body all the time. The least you can do is share.”
Liam looks up at his ex, scandalized. “You’re a lesbian.”
“Yeah, and that means I can appreciate a good set of tits. Your boyfriend has one of those.”
Liam squawks over the soggy remains of his breakfast in Hayden’s direction. “I can—I can have great tits, too!”
Hayden fixes him with a look over her shoulder as she slots an english muffin into the toaster. “There’s a reason we broke up, Dunbar.”
As Liam opens and closes his mouth in defeat, Mason pats him comfortingly on the shoulder.
“I have at least halfway decent tits,” Liam insists in a mutter.
“I’m sure you do, and the world will get to see those halfway decent tits at some point in the future when you get picked for the next calendar,” says Mason.
“Why do you enjoy giving him false hope, babe?” says Corey.
Liam thinks he definitely needs to be bumping Bryant up to the top of his hit list.
“That’s all he’s got to live on, now that his fragile self esteem has been crushed,” Alec answers for everyone.
Scratch that. Gonzalez is shooting to number one on Liam’s assassination plan on his notes app.
“What’s all that who’s got to live on?” comes none other than Raeken’s voice from the doorway of the kitchen.
Liam lifts his head just in time to see his boyfriend breezing in, looking for all the world like he just stepped off the set of a modeling shoot.
Considering that today was the day he bared his abs for the world, he probably did just step off the set of a modeling shoot.
Liam takes one look at Theo Raeken with his artfully tousled hair, his lightly gleaming biceps, and his criminally tight uniform shirt, and makes a noise like a strangled chicken in the back of his throat.
“Liam,” Alec pipes up helpfully, really gunning for the top spot in Liam’s black book. “All he’s got to live on now is the false hope that he’ll have halfway decent tits someday.”
“Okay,” Theo says slowly, all innocent like the devil. “Why does he need to hope for halfway decent tits? He doesn’t have any.”
Liam’s mouth drops open, offended. “He is right here!”
“I know, sweetheart,” Theo says with a grin, coming closer and pressing a kiss to the top of his forehead that is totally not sweet and definitely isn’t making Liam melt a little in his toes. “If it makes you feel any better,” Theo says quietly, “I am an ass man and trust me, you have a glorious ass.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” Liam grumbles.
“Not even a little laid tonight?” Theo murmurs in his ear.
Alec points at the two lovebirds at the table. “Guards! They’re being disgusting again.”
“They never stopped being disgusting,” Hayden tells him around another mouthful of apple.
“That’s homophobic, actually,” Liam complains.
“No, no, it’s not. You guys absolutely make me wanna throw up,” says Corey, like a total hypocrite, as he wraps his arms around Mason from behind.
As Theo’s hand starts carding through Liam’s hair and he plants another absent kiss on the top of his head, Liam bats his hands pettishly at his boyfriend’s side. “Stop kissing me. Your kisses aren’t going to win me over from your betrayal.”
“How ever did I betray you, Li?” Theo says innocently.
Liam reaches upward to poke his boyfriend in the chest. The tip of his finger gets lost somewhere between the material of Theo’s shirt and the…voluminous expanse of his muscular, muscular tits. “By saying yes to the photoshoot.”
Theo laughs, low and gravelly in Liam’s ear, and steals a bite of Liam’s banana on the table. “Jealous, Dunbar?”
“No,” Liam fumes, even as the metaphorical steam billows from his ears.
“Wanna see the screencaps I got of the raw shots?”
“No,” Liam continues seething, even as his traitorous little heart does a jump and a flip and screams yes, yes.
It doesn’t matter, because Theo reaches into his back pocket for his phone and scrolls through his gallery anyway. When he finds the snaps from today, he thrusts them under Liam’s nose.
Liam, quite unwillingly, is confronted by the preposterous and frankly obscene sight of Theo running shirtless up a hill, muscled shoulders squared and popping biceps swinging, with an axe in one hand and the suspenders of his turnouts flapping low around his ass. The waistline of his pants doesn’t even deserve to be called as such with the amount of tanned skin at his V-line revealed onscreen.
Liam wants to gag. Why is his boyfriend so insufferably hot?
“Tell me that smoke screen was real,” Mason whispers in awe.
“Firefighters setting actual fires for the sake of a killer shot? Never,” Theo says dryly. “It was a smoke machine.” The saucy wink he shoots in everyone else’s direction says otherwise.
Liam sniffs. “They missed a spot.”
Theo blinks. “Come again?”
Liam jabs the screen with a finger. “They missed a spot, when they were oiling your pecs.”
“Pay that much attention to what my pecs look like with or without oil, do you, Li?”
“Making me hear this is, like, at least second-degree assault on my ears,” says Alec. “I'm pressing charges.”
“I'm just saying,” Liam protests. “If they were gonna steal your pecs, they could've at least done their job oiling them.”
Hayden looks over at Alec. “I'm pressing charges too.”
“A bit possessive of another man's chest, don't you think, dude?” Mason teases Liam.
His best friend arches a challenging brow in his direction. “You haven't seen possessive. I'm buying all those firefighter calendars the day they come out and I'm keeping them in our condo.”
Theo’s eyebrows are hiking steadily toward his hairline. “With what money, Dunbar?”
Liam leans back into his boyfriend's stomach and smiles beatifically up at him. “Well, yours, of course.”
“Dude,” Alec says to Theo. “I think you need to be pressing charges against your boyfriend, too.”
But Theo's already laughing. There's nothing he loves more, apparently, than a wildly jealous Liam threatening to steal his life savings and blow it on a bunch of soon-to-be-outdated calendars for the sake of keeping his abs and shoulders away from the prying eyes of middle-aged suburban California women.
“If it makes you feel any better…” Theo starts.
“Doubt anything will,” says Liam.
“...This is the sort of shit they had Brett pull during the photoshoot.”
“Wait, what?” The legs of Liam's chair slam on the floor as he tips back forward in surprise. “Brett Talbot? From the 199?”
“Eight-pack Brett Talbot?” Mason clarifies helpfully.
“Six-foot-two Brett Talbot?” Corey adds.
Theo rolls his eyes at all of them but taps his phone to scroll further through his gallery anyway. When he finds what he's searching for, he presents it to the now tightly huddled 126 with a flourish.
Liam takes one look at the screen and erupts, guffawing.
Crystal clear in Theo's camera roll is a snap of Brett standing shirtless and breathless, clad—barely—in his low-hanging turnout pants, and getting absolutely blasted in the face and chest with a jet of water the size of a mini Niagara Falls.
“Is that—did they actually…open up a fire hydrant?” Hayden asks, a commingling of awe and disgust in her tone.
Theo gets out a nod through his answering snicker.
“Dude,” says Corey. “His skin is gonna feel like it's peeling off for days.”
“Absolutely flayed,” Alec agrees. “Like the skinless chicken breast you shred by hand for chicken salad.”
“A lil tossed Talbot,” Mason quips.
Liam can't even say a word from how wide he's grinning. He leans back and tilts his chin up to meet Theo's mischievous gaze again, and the two lock eyes with a private, childish smile. Theo knows exactly what will make him feel better: seeing his other ex and former bully getting brutally blasted by twenty pounds of pressure on a stupid thirsty photoshoot.
Liam reaches back to slip a finger through Theo's belt loop.
“You're still not off the hook, Raeken,” he tells him, trying and failing to be stern and unforgiving.
Theo serves him a mock pout. “What if I lovingly eat chocolate off your entire body tonight?”
“Guards!!” Alec shrieks for a second time that day.
Lucky for Gonzalez, his eyes and his innocence are literally saved by the bell as the alarm for the first call of their shift blares to life.