February Burning: A Firefighter Secret Baby Romance

by Chase Jackson

  I strung my finger under the triangle of visible thong at the top of her crack and tugged up, lifting the thin slip of fabric out of her damp crevice. I guided my finger along the curve of her ass, lifting as I went, until I reached her sticky center. Then I wrapped my hand around the ruined fabric beneath her crotch. I ripped the thong down her thighs, and she shivered when the air struck her bare pussy.

  I ran my fingers along her slick, smooth skin. Her juices were flowing down her thighs like honey, and I couldn’t resist getting a taste. Gripping onto the backs of her thighs, I licked up the insides of her legs. I stopped just shy of her hot center.

  Her entire body was trembling, and her palms were gripping onto the brick wall.

  “Don’t stop,” she begged, panting desperately for my tongue to finish the job that I had started.

  “You’re the boss,” I said. Then I jerked her hips backwards again, so her ass stuck even higher up into the air, and I buried my face in her pussy.

  She moaned as my mouth consumed her engorged folds, lapping away the evidence of her desire. I ran my tongue around her entrance, testing the tight canal that would soon be wrapped around my cock. While I licked and prodded, I used my thumb and index finger to pinch her swollen clitoris through its fleshy hood.

  She spread her legs further apart and arched her back, giving me access to every inch of her sex. I pinched her clit harder, then I splayed her lips apart with my knuckle and kneaded her bare bean with my fingertip.

  Her knees buckled and her pussy clenched with orgasm. Fresh juice gushed from her insides, filling my mouth with her honey. I stretched my tongue over her hole and licked up every last drop of her climax, until I felt her knees buckle and her hands fall from the wall and clutch onto my shoulders.

  She was like a ragdoll, limp and starry-eyed. But I wasn’t done with her yet. I flipped her around and pinned her back against the wall. Her eyes glanced down at the bulge in the front of my pants, and the sight was enough to knock a second wind into her.

  Her legs wrapped around my waist, pulling me closer, and her hands got to work, liberating my throbbing shaft from my briefs. I grunted, feeling the static of her fingertips send bolts of heat through my dick.

  When she finally managed to get me out of my briefs, her eyes went wide with shock. That wasn’t the first time I had gotten that reaction. Let’s just there was nothing ‘standard-issue’ about my firehose.

  “Think you can handle it?” I grunted, tasting the tangy sweat that had formed on her neck.

  She nodded, but I still felt her shiver when her fingers wrapped around my girth.

  “Tell me how you want it, Boss,” I grinned. I gently bucked my hips towards her, forcing her thighs further apart and teasing her pounding slit with the length of my shaft. “You want me to fuck you?”

  She nodded desperately as she trembled in my arms, and then she muttered the only word that she could manage in her state: “Now.”

  I rolled my hips back and spread her lips apart with my fingers, then I plunged my length into her entrance with one thrust.

  That first thrust was enough to do me in. She was tight…almost too tight. Her walls resisted, clamping around my girth. Her bare skin was too soft…like fucking liquid velvet.

  She sucked in a sharp breath and whimpered -- pain? Pleasure? Both?

  “Don’t you dare fucking stop,” she hissed, pinching her sharp nails into the back of my neck.

  I thrust into her again. Her body started to soften. She moaned into my chest, her teeth biting into my skin through the white cotton.

  My balls clenched up and all of heat in my body pooled in my pelvis, forming the massive load that was about to burst from my cock.

  Pull out, I told myself. You’re not wearing a condom…you don’t know if this chick is on the pill. You have to pull out…

  But then I felt her walls clench around my cock and her hips bucked towards me. I could feel the fire of her orgasm burning through her silky wet folds, and the sensation of her bare skin climaxing against mine was too much.

  I lost control.

  I felt the hot tingle of release as my cock filled her tight tunnel to the brim. Her body went still, hips extended, holding every inch of me inside of her as we both came.

  I could have stayed inside of that sweet hole of hers forever, but I didn’t want to make a mess of her pretty dress, so I slid out and set her down gently.

  “Holy shit,” she panted for breath, steadying herself against the wall. “That was…fucking amazing.”

  “You’re fucking amazing,” I told her.

  She blushed in the moonlight, but she couldn’t look me in the eye.

  “We should get back inside,” she said. “Before someone notices that we’re missing…”

  “We can’t have you going back in there like that,” I pointed out, eyeing the glistening wet juices -- hers and mine -- that were dripping down the insides of her thighs.

  “There’s a bathroom over there,” she nodded back towards the Pond House.

  “Ok. Let’s go get you cleaned up.”

  “I’m fine on my own,” she insisted, her voice suddenly firm. “You go back inside. I’ll…meet you in there.”

  “No way,” I frowned. “I’m not just going to leave you--”

  “I’m fine,” she repeated firmly. “Really. Besides, it would look suspicious if you went into the ladies’ room with me.”

  “Fair point,” I conceded. Then: “But I’ll see you back inside? I think you owe me a post-coital dance…”

  “I’ll see you inside,” she said, fighting off the smile that was forming on her lips.

  “Ok,” I smiled. I leaned down and kissed the top of her forehead, then I asked: “So…are you going to tell me your name?”

  Her smile faded and she swallowed heavily.

  “I thought we weren’t doing that whole ‘names, small talk, pretend-we-care’ thing…” she said.

  “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. But I’d still like to know what to call you when I write about this in my diary later,” I teased.

  Her face lightened into a tiny smile, but she didn’t answer my question. Instead, she said:

  “I’ll see you inside, Fireman.”

  Then she turned towards the building.

  “Is that a pinky promise?” I called after her.

  She just gave me a small wave over her shoulder as she walked away...

  CHAPTER SIX | VANESSA

  Three Months Later

  “Do you want me to look first?” Summer asked, glancing up at me with an apprehensive look on her face.

  “No!” I said quickly. “I’ll do it. Just…give me a minute.”

  Summer groaned and crossed her arms over her chest.

  “You can’t keep stalling,” she pointed out. “I don’t think you’re supposed to leave it that long.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Do the results expire or something?”

  “I don’t know!” Summer threw up her hands. “I’m just telling you what the instructions said!”

  She reached down for the sheet of instructions that she had left unfolded on the bathroom counter. Her eyes scanned the page, navigating the cheerful pastel pink illustrations.

  “Right here,” she said, pointing to a block of printed text. “It says you might get a false positive if you wait longer than ten minutes to read the results. See?”

  She pushed the pregnancy test instructions towards me.

  “Ok, ok…” I muttered, pushing them away. “Can I please just enjoy these last fleeting seconds of peace before my life is turned completely upside down?”

  “Your life isn’t going to be turned upside down,” Summer said. “We’ll figure this out, no matter what. But the first step is finding out what that test says.”

  I took a deep breath, then released it slowly.

  Summer and I both blinked down at the white plastic wand that was resting, face down, on the bathroom countert
op.

  “It’s just like ripping off a bandaid,” Summer said encouragingly.

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “Except there might be a baby hiding underneath this bandaid.”

  “Everything is going to be ok, Vanessa.”

  It sure as hell doesn’t feel that way, I thought darkly to myself.

  It all started with a missed period, a few weeks after Cassidy and Brady’s wedding. A few weeks after…that night.

  That should have been my first clue, but since my birth control pills already gave me an irregular period, I figured it was no big deal.

  Then the other symptoms started popping up: swollen breasts. My clothes didn’t fit quite right anymore. I couldn’t stop thinking about sex…and I also couldn’t stop thinking about food. Hunger would strike at the oddest hours: midnight cravings for potato chips, or an early morning hankering for fried chicken.

  There was already enough evidence for Nancy Drew to crack the case, but I refused to put the pieces together. I was living firmly in denial. And then the nausea started.

  I can’t live in denial anymore, I decided. I need to know…

  I reached down and gripped onto the contoured handle of the plastic pregnancy test. Then I turned it over and blinked down at the results.

  “What does that mean?” I asked, my mouth going dry. “What do two pink lines mean?!”

  “Um…” Summer frantically reached for the instructions again, even though we both had already read them thoroughly…and we both already knew exactly what double pink lines represented.

  She set the paper down slowly, then turned to me.

  “It’s positive,” she told me. “Double pink lines mean that you’re pregnant.”

  I blinked down at the test, staring at the two pink lines as if I could will them to dissolve and fade away.

  “Holy shit,” I gulped. “I’m…pregnant.”

  ***

  “You’re pregnant?!” Cassidy Laurent stammered, gawking at me in disbelief through the front door of my apartment.

  I had delivered the news an hour earlier to my best friend via an emergency 911 phone call. Cass had been attending a Firehouse 56 company picnic at the time, but she had immediately dropped everything and rushed to be by my side.

  Apparently the drive across Hartford hadn’t been long enough for the news to sink in: when I opened the front door to greet her, she looked like she had swallowed a brick.

  I felt exactly the way that she looked.

  “Come on in,” I said, ushering her into the apartment. She stumbled over the threshold and sank down onto the white canvas sofa.

  “How is this even possible?!” she wanted to know, staring up at me.

  “Well,” Summer said, taking a seat by Cassidy’s side. “When a man and a woman engage in an act called intercourse--”

  “No,” Cassidy scowled, rolling her eyes at Summer. “I mean…how is this possible when Vanessa avoids men like the plague?”

  “I don’t avoid men,” I said defensively.

  “Oh, come on,” Summer said. “You totally avoid men! If they made a man repellent that you could spritz on like bug spray, you’d wear that shit like it was Chanel No. 5!”

  “That’s…a little bit of an exaggeration,” I said, pinching my lips into a firm line. Then I added: “Clearly I can’t be avoiding them that much, if I’m pregnant.”

  “Are you seeing someone?” Summer asked, sounding slightly hurt that she had been kept out of the loop.

  “No,” I said honestly. “This was a one-time thing.”

  “So…does that mean you do know who the father is?” Cassidy chimed in. I grimaced and rolled my head towards her.

  “Of course I know who the father is!” my cheeks turned bright red. “There’s only one person it can be.”

  “Ok,” Cass said eagerly, leaning forwards on the couch. “So…who is it?”

  I sighed. Cassidy and I had been best friends since grade school. I had never made a habit of keeping secrets or lying to her, but there hadn’t exactly been an easy way to confess that I had gotten a little too friendly with the best man at her wedding. So, I had kept that indiscretion to myself.

  But now, there was no way around it: the truth had to come out.

  “Wait a second…” Cassidy blinked at me. “It’s not Josh, is it?”

  I winced, wrinkling my nose and pinching my eyes shut so I couldn’t see the look of disapproval on her face. Then I nodded slowly.

  “We might have run into each other after the wedding,” I admitted. That was technically true; I decided that I didn’t need to get any more specific about when after the wedding.

  “I’d say you two did more than run into each other,” Cassidy chuckled dryly.

  “Someone fill me in,” Summer said, clearly feeling left out. “Who is Josh, and why am I just hearing about him now?!”

  “Josh is my husband’s brother,” Cassidy explained. “They both work at Firehouse 56, and Josh was the best man at our wedding a few months ago.”

  Cassidy turned to face me, and then she added: “I knew that Vanessa and Josh were getting a little friendly at the reception--”

  “Wait,” I stammered. “You knew?” My heart was pounding through my chest, and my cheeks were burning bright red. How much did Cass know?

  “I didn’t know how far it went,” Cassidy said. “I just knew that you two seemed to…enjoy each other’s company.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” I demanded.

  “I was respecting your privacy,” Cassidy said. “I figured that if you wanted me to know, you would have told me yourself. And since you didn’t bring it up, I assumed that there was nothing to talk about.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “There wasn’t anything to talk about…”

  “Until today,” Cassidy added. I just stared down at the pink toes of my socks.

  “Well as far as I’m concerned,” I said flatly. “There still isn’t anything to talk about. I got myself into this situation, and I can figure it out on my own. I’m not going to go running back to beg him for help just because I’m pregnant.”

  “Vanessa, you can’t be serious!” Summer groaned disapprovingly. “It’s not about ‘begging for help.’ He has a right to know. This is his baby, too.”

  I pinched my eyes shut and when I did, I saw a vision from my childhood flash across my eyelids:

  I was ten years old. It was the first Christmas after my parents had gotten divorced. I hadn’t seen my dad in months, but he was supposed to come by the house so we could all eat Christmas dinner together.

  I knew that I was supposed to hate him…but I couldn’t stop myself from missing him. I was just a kid, and he was my dad…he was my hero.

  By the time Dad showed up, Christmas dinner had gone cold and untouched on the table. He was hours late, and he reeked of cheap beer and some other woman’s perfume. His hands looked strange and unfamiliar without his gold wedding band, and when I tried to hug him, he felt cold from being somewhere that wasn’t our home.

  Mom had pulled me away and told me to go to my room, just like she had a hundred times before. I sat on my bed, but I could still hear them yelling through the walls.

  I’ll never forget what I heard that night...

  “She’s your daughter!” Mom screamed. “You can’t do this to her!”

  “This is all your fault,” Dad screamed back. “I never wanted a fucking kid in the first place!”

  “How can you say that about your own child?!”

  “That child was a mistake. This whole thing was a mistake…”

  I didn’t see much of my dad after that. Even all of these years later, those words still cut straight to my core. I pinched my eyes shut until the memory disappeared, replaced with fuzzy black nothingness.

  “Vanessa?” Summer’s voice squeaked. “Are you ok?”

  She gave my hand a squeeze. I opened my eyes and blinked a few times, adjusting to the light of the room.

 
; “I know what it feels like to be unwanted,” I sighed heavily. “Whatever happens…I don’t want this baby to ever know that feeling.”

  “Josh is a good guy,” Cassidy said gently. I knew she understood what I meant: I had confided a lot in her over the years, and she knew all about my parents’ divorce. “He’s nothing like your father,” she added in a soft voice.

  “But he’d still see this baby as an obligation,” I reasoned, swallowing the lump in the back of my throat. “I don’t want to force him into something.”

  “You don’t know how he’ll feel,” Summer chimed in. “You can’t assume the worst of him before you’ve even given him a chance to react.”

  “You need to tell him,” Cassidy nodded, smoothing back a loose strand of hair that had fallen out of my messy bun.

  I sighed heavily. I knew that Cassidy and Summer were right…Josh did have a right to know.

  “I will,” I promised finally. Then I turned to Cass and added: “But I want him to hear it from me. Please don’t say anything to Brady?”

  Cassidy sighed reluctantly.

  “Fine,” she agreed. “I won’t mention it. But you need to tell Josh. And sooner, rather than later. If there’s one thing I’ve learned the hard way, it’s that nobody benefits from keeping secrets.”

  I considered everything that Cassidy had gone through a few months earlier, when she had come clean about her secret marriage arrangement with Brady. I knew that she had a point…and I knew that telling Josh was the right thing to do.

  But just because it was the right thing to do, didn’t mean that it would be easy...

  CHAPTER SEVEN | JOSH

  Duke slammed on the brakes, causing the rubber tires to screech to a stop on the freshly poured black asphalt.

  “So,” he said, flinging the gear stick into park, “What do you think?”

  I blinked through the windshield of Duke’s fire engine red BMW Z4 convertible and gazed up at the cement behemoth that was planted ahead of us. The building looked like the sort of modern masterpiece that belonged on the cover of Architectural Digest: it was a mix of brick painted ashy black, vibrant planks of cedarwood, and giant glass windows that reflected the Connecticut River and the Hartford skyline.