Sweet Romance14 min read
The Time My Head Got Stuck and I Met a Firefighter
ButterPicks14 views
I fell asleep on the last train and my head got stuck in the armrest.
"I can't believe this is happening," I said to no one, because I was half asleep and full of bad decisions.
"Don't panic," someone said right next to my ear.
I opened my eyes. He was kneeling in front of me, uniform neat, knees in the aisle. He had a sharp nose and a smile that surprised me by being small and honest.
"My name is Zeke," he said. "Can you try to stay still?"
"Try?" I said. "My head is jammed."
"Then I'll try," he answered.
It began that way: a ridiculous, embarrassing disaster that ought to make a person die of shame. Instead, it gave me a man who could speak quietly and hold my world steady.
"You'll be fine," Zeke whispered as people gathered.
"Am I famous?" I asked, because ten phones were pointed at me like I'd woken up in a circus ring.
"You are a very viral moment," Zeke said.
Someone laughed. Someone said, "One break and it's all over the internet."
"Great," I said. "My life, immortalized."
"We're going to get you out," Zeke said, and he meant it.
He kept talking while things happened: a kind woman called an emergency number, a few folks offered blankets, several people filmed, and a team of firefighters arrived with tools and calm faces.
"Hold her head steady," a captain ordered.
"I will," Zeke answered, and he put his hands gentle against my hair.
"You're okay," he said.
"You're being very calm," I told him, which was true, except my neck hurt and my pride hurt worse.
He smiled. "I'm a firefighter. Calm is part of the job."
Someone opened a case and a stranger said, "We might need to use a saw."
"No!" I screamed, and then I realized how ridiculous that sounded.
Zeke laughed, a soft sound that made the situation less heavy. "We'll try other ways first," he promised.
They rubbed slippery stuff around my neck and face, like oil. I felt like a roasted chicken ready to fly off the spit.
"Okay, try now," someone said.
I wriggled. I inhaled. I hissed. My head would not budge.
"One more." Zeke's voice was close. "Can you try again?"
I tried. Nothing. Then suddenly a hand brushed my butt.
"What—?" I wanted to snap, but the hand did not stay where my mind had feared.
"Your skirt rode up," Zeke said in my ear.
My face heated. "Of course. Of course I am this lucky."
"I'm sorry," he said quickly. "I didn't— I mean, I didn't touch you like— I was just trying to keep the skirt down."
I believed him because his fingers were still poised like they had been trying to balance something delicate, not like they had committed anything shameful.
The crowd made jokes and cheered like they were watching a birth. Someone clapped when my head finally slid out.
"Congratulations, mother!" a man shouted. People laughed. Cameras clicked.
Zeke helped me sit. He offered his arm.
"Do you want me to walk with you?" he asked.
"No," I said. My legs wobbled. "You saved me. Thank you."
"You're welcome," he said. He looked away, like he'd rather be anywhere but the center of viral attention.
I watched him walk off with the other firefighters, and I saved the video to my phone.
When the video appeared online the next morning, my phone buzzed like mad.
"One woman stuck her head on the last train," the headline said.
I watched myself, helpless and ridiculous, supported by strong hands and surrounded by strangers. I left coy comments under the video pretending to be someone who knew nothing.
"He's cute," Jocelyn—my best friend—wrote. She always went straight to the point.
"He's a hero," Cruz wrote, who knew a thing or two about bold statements.
I laughed. I saved the clip.
Ten days later, my life did something I did not expect: it demanded I run into him again.
My friend Jocelyn was heartbroken. "We drink," she said. "You come."
"I promised," I said. "One night out."
We drank more than we should have and came home late. I was sleepy, and the last train took me back like a tired beast. I didn't watch my step. I didn't think. I slept again.
My head did not get stuck this time, but when I passed the corner by the fire station on my way home at dawn, the runners were out. Their jogs were steady and warm and smelled like early coffee.
One of them looked exactly like the man from the video.
I froze.
"Is she the armrest girl?" a voice said in the line behind the runners.
"It could be," another voice replied.
I had my hair in a mess and streaked makeup. I wanted the ground to open up.
"Don't look," I whispered to myself and tried to edge away.
"Hadlee!" a voice called.
Zeke saw me. He slowed. "Hi," he said, like the busiest morning had given him an extra breath for me.
"I—" I covered my face. "I look awful."
"You look fine," Zeke said. "Come closer."
I didn't want to, but I did.
"Why are you here so early?" I asked.
"We run," he said. "We run a lot."
"Do you always recognize people from viral videos?" I joked.
"No," he answered. "Just the ones who get excited when they see the squad."
He smiled at me like he was ashamed of how pleased he sounded.
I walked away, but I could not let it go. He had a life beyond the armrest. I had a life full of deadlines and late nights and too much screen time. Still, I wanted to know him.
A week later I marched into the firehouse with a ridiculous prop: a small banner.
On it, in glittery letters, I had written four words as a joke to him: "You saved my life."
The whole station stared. The captain leaned forward.
"What is this?" he asked.
"It's a little joke," I said. "I wanted to say thank you properly."
Zeke looked surprised. "You brought a banner," he said.
"Do you like it?" I asked, too proud to be embarrassed now.
He smiled, and took a step forward. "It's... unexpected," he said. "Will you come in?"
He walked me around like a guide. Men in uniform said hello. I felt like I had stepped into another world, one that smelled of coffee and oil and the bright hope that people felt when danger passed.
"Do you draw?" Zeke asked suddenly. "I saw a comic on the internet yesterday. You draw like that?"
"Yes," I said. "I do that for a living—sort of. I draw comics and small ads. I live in the kind of light where everything glows too bright at two in the morning."
"That's impressive," Zeke said. "Do you have time to draw our life? We could use some humor in the office."
I blinked. "What?"
"Comics of the squad. Small things. You'd get to hang out here sometimes."
My chest did a little flip. "I could. I'd need references."
He pointed to a man in the kitchen. "Ask Cruz. He can be my model."
I met Cruz quickly. He was loud and warm and ridiculously friendly. "You mean the armrest girl?" Cruz said when he heard my name.
"Stop calling me that."
"Sorry," Cruz laughed. "But honestly, you should come more. Zeke is weirdly caring."
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"It means he notices things," Cruz said. "He remembers faces."
Zeke flushed like he had been complimented. "Don't make me sound like a saint."
"You are a saint," Cruz joked. "Saint Zeke."
We left with a plan. I would come to the station to sketch, and I would listen to their stories and draw them as small, silly heroes.
That week, Zeke started to comment on my social posts. I posted grumpy drawings about clients who wanted impossible edits.
"Can't you change the job?" he wrote.
"It's my work," I replied. "A job is a job."
"Still," he said. "You look exhausted sometimes."
"That's the point," I typed back. "I live on coffee and the smell of printer ink."
"Come to a day shift," he offered. "Not you. Someone. Just... rest."
We talked like that, short messages that felt like small windows. He was careful. He sent me photos of the station cat. He asked about my deadlines. He asked questions I didn't expect.
"Do you like this?" he once sent after I posted a page.
"I love this," I replied. "Thank you."
He sent back a thumb-up. Then: "We should have dinner."
We had dinners, as the story goes. He paid. He was insistent about paying. He argued like it was a point of honor.
"Two thousand?" I texted when he asked how much to bring for our dinner.
"Two thousand is fine," he replied.
"You're serious about money for dinner?" I asked.
"It's not about the money," he wrote. "It's about care."
He surprised me. He showed concern in ways that were small and then huge. He would stop mid-phrase to ask if I had eaten lunch. He would wait while I finished a deadline and then he would offer to bring me coffee at midnight.
One night I told him, "Do you like me?"
He answered, "Yes."
"Just 'yes'?" I teased.
"Yes," he replied again. "But words are weird."
"Then what are we?" I demanded.
"Friends," he said.
"Friends?" I typed back. "We are not just friends."
"And?" he asked.
"Then why won't you say girlfriend?" I pushed.
"I don't know," he admitted slowly. "It's not that I don't want to. My parents...might..."
"Your parents?" I repeated.
"They worry," he said. "They worry about who I bring home. They worry if you...work nights."
He said the last part like he had tasted something unpleasant.
"I don't work nights like that," I burst out. "I work late. I draw. I sleep badly. I do not—"
"It's okay," he said. "I just... I want you to be safe. I want them to see you as I do."
He was blunt in a way that wasn't cruel. He was honest and clumsy, like someone learning to say the right thing.
"Tell them someday," I said. "Tell them the truth."
He agreed, but with the same quiet caution.
We had our odd small moments that made me pulse with joy.
"Do you love me?" I asked in bed one night.
"Yes," he said without thinking.
"Out loud. Right now."
He climbed off the bed and stood barefoot on the floor. "Not only in bed," he said. "Also downstairs. Also at the station."
I laughed so hard I cried a little.
"You're ridiculous," I said and kissed him.
He kissed back like a man who had been saving up kisses in case of emergency.
We were learning each other. I taught him about editing comics and client terror. He taught me how to fold a hammock from old rope he kept in the truck. We taught each other how to be small comforts for the other.
Then came the misunderstanding.
One evening we ate in a quiet corner of a mall and then, in a burst of nerves, Zeke pulled me toward a dark stairwell.
"Do you have tissue?" he asked suddenly.
"Yes," I yelled, because I thought he meant the obvious.
He grabbed my arm and half-ran with me. "Wait here."
He shoved me against a wall. Then he leaned in, and the world became all teeth and breath and the sound of someone finally stepping up.
He kissed me in the dim stairwell. It was clumsy and perfect and smelled like popcorn and the lip gloss I forgot to wash off.
When he pulled back he asked, "Paper?"
"Paper?" I repeated.
"For your mouth. I didn't want us to leave lipstick on each other."
"What?" I said, in shock and amusement.
"Don't waste paper," he said, and then he kissed me again, this time long enough that the world tilted.
It was a small, funny, human thing. He cared about a small detail: that our kiss not be messy. It was domestic, it was unromantic in the best way, and it made my heart dizzy.
That feeling reached me often. Once he came to my studio unannounced and sat on the floor watching me draw.
"You always draw small faces like this," he said, smiling.
"Because it's easier to tell stories," I said.
"Can I be in a story?" he asked.
"Already are," I answered, because I had a strip pinned on the wall that showed a stick figure with a triangle helmet saving a small stick figure with a big scarf.
He read it out loud and laughed.
"You're terrible," he said, gentle and delighted.
I loved how he stumbled into tenderness. He was not smooth. He was not fast with words. But he was steady like a ladder.
One day, there was fire in a building near the station. They ran. I watched on the news as men in dark uniforms fought orange light and smoke. I felt my chest like it was a drum.
Later, when the smoke cleared, Zeke picked up a small boy's homework from the rubble and handed it back. The family cried and thanked him, and Zeke smiled with the innocent satisfaction of someone who believed in doing right things for no applause.
"You're good at this," I said later.
He looked at the small stack of papers. "I like being useful," he said.
"You're more than useful," I replied.
The next week, the station got a thank-you banner from the boy's family. They hung it in the kitchen where we shared meals. Zeke snapped a photo and sent it to me with a caption: "You were right. We are heroes sometimes."
"Only sometimes," I wrote back.
We fit together like two messy halves learning to hold.
There were moments that made me forget the world: when he reached in the middle of the night to wrap a sweater around my shoulders; when he brought me coffee without being asked; when he stood at a crosswalk and waited for me to finish buying a cheap comic and then walked home beside me, slow and content.
These things were small but precise.
"Do you always carry wet wipes?" I asked once.
"Always," Zeke said. "For everything."
"Even kisses?" I teased.
"Especially kisses," he answered, and he tapped the small packet in his pocket like a priest tapping a rosary.
We learned each other's flaws. He hated messy rooms. I hated loud alarms. He could not say "sorry" like other humans. I could not trust easily. We grew into each other's cracks.
Then a rumor started.
Someone in my social feed misread a late-night post, and people assumed the worst about me. Words like "night worker" began to crawl across the comments. I read them on the train and felt my stomach cold.
Zeke saw one and his face went dark. He took my phone without asking and scrolled like he wanted to find a way to fix the world by scowling.
"People say awful things," he said.
"They're wrong," I said. "They don't know me."
"It doesn't matter what they know," he answered. "I know you."
"I know you think I'm less than," I said, and I felt like a cracked thing.
"It's silly," he said. "They don't matter."
He hesitated and then sat down next to me. "I want to tell my parents," he said.
"You do?" My heart sped.
"Yes," he said. "But they might worry about your job. They might not understand that you draw till two a.m. and that you get sticky from printing."
"I'll meet them," I said. "I'll show them who I am."
"Not yet," he said. "Give me time."
That 'time' pushed at me like a gentle tide. I wanted everything fast. I wanted him to be brave for me. He wanted to be sure.
Then something small and precious happened to prove us right for each other.
One midnight I was locked out of my studio. My client had sent a correction at one a.m., and I had gone to the building to fix it. The door wouldn't open.
I sat on the steps and I cried. Tears and cold made a map on my face.
I didn't think I'd stand up tonight.
"Hadlee?" Zeke's voice said from the shadow. He had his helmet in his hand, his jacket over his shoulder.
"What are you doing here?" I asked.
"I come by sometimes," he said. "I thought you'd be here."
"You came at one a.m.?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
He sat down on the steps. He didn't know the right words, so he wrapped his arms around my shoulders. He didn't hug tightly, but he held me like a flashlight in the dark.
"I'm ridiculous for you," I said.
"No," Zeke murmured. "You're not. You're the one who draws things that make people laugh. You're the one who keeps going when everything else shuts off."
He said it like it was fact.
"Do you love me?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, certain as daylight.
We kissed there on the stairs. The city hummed and cars washed by, and we were small and safe and a little wet with midnight dew.
It was one of the moments I would save for later, when the world needed proof we had been true.
We had a small fight after that, because parents had opinions and my career was messy. He wanted me to take a 'respectable' job at the station—file cabinets, official forms, something he thought would make things easier for his family.
"I can't give up my work," I told him. "I need it."
"You could still draw," he said. "But not at two a.m."
"So change your mind about what you want from me," I said. "Don't ask me to shrink my life for someone else's comfort."
He looked stricken. "I am not asking you to shrink," he said. "I only want a life where you are safe and the people who meet you respect that."
"It's not easy," I said. "People see late nights and make stories."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I only— I want people to see you the way I do."
He reached for my hand. "Can you be in our life? Not hide, not change. Just... be."
I studied his face. He was simple and plain and full of good will. He looked exhausted from having to be brave in small steps.
"Yes," I said. "I'll try."
The next Sunday we walked to a small town fair. He watched me eat too-sweet cotton candy. I watched him play with a folding ladder he found at a vendor's stall. We laughed at a clown and later, we stood under a carousel and I felt something solid and true in my chest.
"Marry me someday," he said jokingly.
"You're joking," I said.
"No," he said. "I mean someday. Not now. But someday."
"Okay," I answered. "Someday."
And we kept making small promises that sounded like jokes but were built of intention.
The station became both quiet and loud in my life. There were mornings when Zeke would hand me a cup of coffee and say, "You should sleep," and nights when I would stay up drawing until he sent a voice message that said, "Go to bed."
I learned their jokes. I learned Cruz's love of dramatic stories. I learned how Zeke dried his wet gloves on the radiator rather than the sunny windowsill.
We did not become a tale of instant fireworks and dramatic finales. We became one of those slow, warm things that make a person sleep well.
One afternoon, a local paper ran a piece on the cartoon series I made for the fire squad.
"You did it," Zeke said, pride breaking his voice.
"It was a team effort," I said. "You gave me life to draw."
He read the comments with me. People liked the honesty. Someone wrote, "She must be brave." Another person said, "They seem perfect together."
We laughed.
He took my hand and squeezed.
And later, at night, he said, "My parents want to meet you."
"Your parents?" I asked, my pulse flipping.
"They want to," he said. "Finally."
I prepared. I ironed a shirt and thought about what to say. I sketched little pictures to bring—comic panels about small things, like toast and coffee and last train mishaps. I thought that would be amusing.
His parents' living room was tidy and soft and filled with photo frames. They were cautious at first.
"Thank you for meeting us," Zeke's mother said.
"Thank you for having me," I replied.
There was a long moment of quiet. It felt like the breath before a long dive.
"Hadlee," Zeke's father said finally, "Zeke is a good man. We see that."
"Thank you," I said.
"And you work late," his mother added slowly. "We worry."
"I draw," I said. "I don't sell anything else. I draw for clients, for comics, and sometimes I work late. I am not what the internet thinks."
She studied me. She looked like she was trying to weigh the facts against the heart.
"Show us," she said.
So I did. I pulled out the sketches, one by one. I told small stories about the nights I had spent in the studio and the times I had stayed up laughing with people who needed a joke. I showed them the comic about the man who got his head stuck on the train—our beginning, told as a tiny, humiliating adventure.
Zeke's father chuckled. "You turned his rescue into a comic?" he asked.
"Yes," I said. "He was brave."
"Brave," Zeke's mother echoed. She smiled slowly. "You make him light."
They began to warm. They asked about my job details and where I lived. They asked how our life would work.
"We will figure it out together," Zeke said quietly.
And then they said exactly what I had hoped: "We would like you in our family."
I felt my heart like a small bell.
That night after the visit we walked near the river. The air smelled like the city after rain. Zeke took my hand and then stopped.
"Do you remember the last train?" he asked.
"I do," I said.
"Will you ever tell me you regret it?" he asked.
"Never," I said. "It gave me you."
He kissed me quiet and deep, and the world folded into the small things—our breath, the slick pavement, the soft sound of passing cars.
We never had a dramatic public punishment scene, because there was no real villain in our story. There were only gossip and awkwardness and the slow way the truth can come out if you are patient.
The story did have public moments—the viral video, the banner at the station, the way people watched us on the street—but these were not trapdoors. They were windows.
My life appeared online and people made stories. Some were cruel. Many were kind. Zeke learned how to hold my hand in public and how to say "that's mine" quietly at a party.
We grew. We argued about safety and art. We laughed about tissue in stairwells. We learned that love could look like paying for dinner, or like waiting until the right moment to tell parents, or like bringing a thermos of soup to a studio at midnight.
Months later, at a small ceremony, we hung the rescue banner in our living room. It was the glittery one I had made at the start. It looked ridiculous and perfect.
"Remember the armrest?" Zeke said, and he kissed the banner with a half grin.
"Yes," I said. "It was the worst and the best night."
He squeezed my hand.
"We will keep being small and honest," he said.
"Yes," I answered.
In the evening light we sat on the couch and watched one of the little cartoons I had made about the fire squad.
Zeke picked up the packet of wet wipes from the table, tapped it against his palm, and said, "For kisses."
I laughed and kissed his cheek.
"I will never go on that last train again," I joked.
"You don't have to," he said. "But if you do, I'll be there."
We both smiled.
I kept the banner where I could see it from my drawing table. It was not glamour. It was not a ring or a poem. It was a ridiculous, glittery truth: that a stupid accident on a last train had brought me a man who was steady and slow and honest.
Sometimes people ask me whether it was fate. I say, "It was mostly embarrassment, some luck, and a man who was kind."
And when the city grows loud and bright and I worry about tomorrow's deadline, I look at the banner and remember one simple thing.
"Don't be afraid," Zeke said on a small, ordinary morning as he fixed my coffee.
"Not brave?" I teased.
"Not brave," he said, "just here."
We learned to be small and here.
The End
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