The Single Dad - A Standalone Romance (A Single Dad Firefighter Romance)

by Claire Adams

  I went into my room, still shaking with anger and upset. I should change out of my pajamas and get to the dining hall, get ready for the rest of my day. I should just put the picture I had seen and the article I had read completely out of my mind until I could talk to Zack about it. But my heart was pounding in my chest and I couldn’t take my mind off of the picture. I couldn’t stop thinking about the lurid details that the article had featured, the highlights of the frat’s history. “In 2004, the fraternity was the subject of a long investigation by the administration when an early-admission student, aged 15, told her parents that she had had sex with one of the members of the frat…In 2010, the frat was once more temporarily suspended pending the verdict in allegations of underage drinking and public lewdness, with several students alleging that public sex occurred during at least one party…” Zack hadn’t been a member of the frat for the worst of the infractions, but the frat’s reputation lent itself well to encouraging someone like Zack to do whatever he wanted.

  I pulled at my hair, groaning as I buried my face against my mattress. The thought of seeing Zack with another girl—both the way I had in real life, just a few short days after we had first reunited and then in the picture—made me angrier and angrier. I couldn’t put it out of my mind; it was impossible. I stood up and took a deep breath. I would have to actually confront him about it. There was just no two ways about it. I had to do it before I could psych myself out, before I had a chance to make myself miserable during my morning classes dwelling on it.

  I strode out of my room, stepping into a pair of slip-on shoes and grabbing up the newspaper that Jess had brought in from the coffee table where I’d let it fall. I made sure to grab my keys and card so I wouldn’t be locked out of the dorms, but I didn’t make time or take time for anything else. As I walked down the hall to the stairwell, I considered where I could actually find Zack. It was early enough in the morning that my first thought was that he would be at the frat house, still asleep. But then I corrected myself; Zack had told me about his training routine in our interview together. He and the team would be in the school gym, in the weight room, working out.

  I walked across campus, ignoring the chill in the air that cut through my pajamas and barely looking around me. It was early enough in the day that there weren’t very many people up and about; there was no one to see how upset I was at the whole situation. I caught sight of a few people rushing to early-morning classes in their pajamas, or heading for the dining hall, but anyone who was out of the dorms and the frats that early in the morning was focused entirely on themselves. As I walked I got more and more upset; how could Zack have led me on, if this was the kind of playing around he did? He and I—I thought—had had something special. The words from one of his frat brothers, the first night we had seen each other since we’d broken up in high school, filled my head. Zack was one of those guys, the kind I had started to avoid. All I was to him was a piece of ass—and that’s all I was to his frat brothers; another one of Zack’s conquests.

  It was easy to get into the gym; the card that let me into the dorm building was just as effective on the locked doors in the rec center. As soon as I got into the nearly-vacant building, I could hear the hard workouts going on in the weight room. The entire team would be there. For just a moment I checked, remembering just how much I hated making a public spectacle of myself—and how much I had hated Zack for making me a public spectacle the two times he had done it. But I knew I couldn’t wait. If I waited and let myself cool off, I’d accept any explanation from Zack and never get to the bottom of the situation. I plunged into the weight room and looked around.

  It wasn’t just the football team on the machines and using the free weights; the basketball team was also in the room, going through their own paces—some of them on treadmills, some of them on bikes, most of them lifting weights heavy enough to daunt me. I moved through the room as quickly as possible, ignoring the eddying pause of conversation all around me as I looked around for Zack. He was lying on a bench, a heavy weight hooked on a bar over him, getting ready to do presses.

  “Zack!” I called out, intending only to get his attention before he started; but my voice was shriller, sharper than I wanted it to be. Zack started, pulling his hands back from the barbell as if it was hot. Looking around, he spotted me and grinned.

  “Hey, Evie,” he said, slipping out from underneath the bar and standing up quickly. “I can’t really talk now—but I can hit you up right after class.”

  I shook my head, my heart pounding in my chest. I could feel everyone looking at us, but I couldn’t make myself stop long enough to calm down and think about the best way to do what I needed to do.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked, waving the newspaper in front of his face. Zack grabbed at it, looking at the picture and article. He went red, and then white.

  “This is just some bullshit about them wanting to suspend me, it’s no big deal, Evie—”

  I let out a little shriek. “I don’t care about that! If you get suspended it’s your own fucking fault!” I pointed at the picture hard enough to almost rip the paper. “That. That. What is it?”

  Zack looked at the picture and frowned. “Evie, this is from a long time ago, I don’t even know…”

  I closed my eyes. I was shaking with rage, my eyes stinging with tears that I couldn’t let myself shed in front of half the school’s athletics department.

  “You don’t even know who she is, do you? Do you even care? Is that all I am to you too—just another girl to grab and fool around with?” Zack’s face got redder and redder and I saw him looking around at his teammates, at the members of the basketball team watching avidly.

  “That’s not what I was going to say and you know it,” Zack said, his voice dropping low. “I don’t know who took this picture, but it’s from forever ago.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t believe you. I thought you were different! I thought you gave a damn—I thought…” I shook my head again. “You’re just a stupid asshole like every other guy I’ve ever dated. Well, I hope you enjoyed it, because I’m not going to be your piece of ass anymore.”

  I turned around quickly. My heart was pounding and my eyes were burning, and all I could think of was getting out of there before someone saw me breaking into tears. I hurried out of the weight room and through the rec center, swallowing down the tightness in my throat and trying to keep my trembling to myself.

  I nearly ran across campus, slowing down only when I started to get a stitch in my side, avoiding looking at anyone that might be around as the tears started falling from my eyes before I got to the safety of my room. I couldn’t believe that I had actually thought Zack thought I was special, that I had let myself get suckered into falling for another guy who was just going to take whatever piece of tail came his way without any concern at all for my feelings. My hands shook as I tried to swipe my card to get into the building; it took me three tries before I was finally able to get the reader to scan my card properly.

  I stepped onto the elevator and hit the door close button over and over again; the last thing I wanted was to have to deal with someone riding with me, watching me as I tried to hold myself together. I sagged against the wall of the elevator, against the railing, shuddering and still angry, still hurt. I tried stalling the tears that were already starting to spill out of my eyes. When the elevator finally managed to make it up to my floor, I hurried off, towards my room, not even bothering to tell Jess what I’d done or that I was back—she’d hear the door. I threw myself onto my bed and gave into the sobs that were pushing up through my chest, burying my face in my pillow. Hot tears flowed into the fabric and I shook with anger and depression, not quite wanting to scream in my frustration.

  I lost all track of time, lying there and sobbing my eyes out, punching the mattress and grabbing at the pillow I’d buried my face in. After a while it finally started to dawn on me that before I had seen the newspaper article featuring Zack, I had been waking up, getting
ready to go to class. I had class to get to.

  I pulled myself up and looked at the clock; I had been crying for almost an hour, and now I only had ten minutes to get to class, all the way across campus. I had no time to get dressed. I sighed, grabbing up my backpack and shoving my journalism textbooks into it. At least, I thought, half the student body went to class in their pajamas, especially the morning classes; no one was likely to notice that I wasn’t fully dressed.

  I hurried across campus, trying to focus my thoughts down on the class I was going to; I had missed my window for grabbing breakfast, so I would have to hope I had a little bit of time to get something to eat from one of the vending machines between morning classes or by the time lunch rolled around I would be totally useless. I hoped against hope that my face wasn’t too red, that my eyes weren’t too obviously bloodshot. My little spectacle in the weight room would already be making the rounds among the campus gossipmongers—the last thing I needed was for everyone to see me cried out, panicking that I wasn’t getting to class on time, and thinking that the whole reason for my upset was Zack.

  I took my usual seat in class, feeling oddly conspicuous in spite of the fact that half the people in the room with me were also in their pajamas. Professor Grant came in a few minutes late, apologizing and looking around with a faint grin curving his lips.

  “I can see that everyone’s starting to get a little less formal now that we’re past midterms,” he said, looking at the other people in the room, but not—fortunately—at me.

  During the lecture, I tried to take notes but my mind kept going back to Zack. Why had I thought that he was any different from any of the guys I had ever dated? Because he’d been my first? I was an idiot. I should have known that Zack didn’t belong to the Phi Alpha Kappa group for no reason—he had loved to party even when we’d been in high school together, and clearly he’d just gone on doing that, getting more and more outrageous as he went. Hooking up with an ex-girlfriend wasn’t going to change that about him. I remembered Jess’ advice that I should figure out what kind of person Zack really was and decide if I was okay with it. I thought to myself that I had been acting like an idiot the whole time leading up to seeing that picture. I had believed that sure, Zack was rowdy and liked to get drunk and hang out with a bunch of guys who viewed women as conquests—but why would he hang out with people like that if he didn’t agree?

  Zack had never really seen me as anything other than another girl to get with. The thought of it made me sick. I had let myself start to think of Zack as really special—as someone who wanted me because of who I am, who knew me and who wanted me. In reality he was just the same as any guy; he just wanted a girl he could convince to sleep with him on the regular, who he could toss aside when it was inconvenient. How much longer would I have kept going with him if I hadn’t seen that article and that picture?

  I thought about everything that Zack and I had been through in the previous weeks, and I couldn’t make sense of it. If he really didn’t care about me, why had he performed so poorly when I had ignored him? He could have easily just moved on to someone else. But what if it was just a coincidence? If he had performed poorly because he’d had some other girl distracting him—and not because of me at all. Part of my brain argued that he had tried really hard to get in touch with me even when I was ignoring him, working hard to avoid even seeing him on campus. But had he really? He’d sent me some texts and made some phone calls, and had left a note on my door. I’d been avoiding him, but I had still kept to my usual routine; if he had wanted to find me, he could have gone to the Library, or the dining hall, any number of times and tracked me down.

  I didn’t know how to feel about the weird mixed signals in my mind. I was glad I’d remembered my recorder; I kept it on my desk, knowing that I wouldn’t remember a damned thing about Grant’s lecture with the situation with Zack at the top of my mind, consuming my thoughts. I was barely even able to keep up with the notes on the board—I wondered at one point what I was even doing in class when I wasn’t getting anything out of it at all. But I was present.

  I managed to grab a bag of chips from the vending machine on my way from Introduction to Journalism to English Literature; my stomach was twisting and grumbling inside of me, uncaring about the fact that I was trying to cope with the confrontation between Zack and me. I didn’t even taste the chips as I brought them to my mouth, pretending to pay attention to the discussion about Jane Austen, but still dwelling on the details of everything that had happened. I thought about how good the sex had been, my insecure jealousy at the thought that Zack had to have been with other women to have improved so much since we’d been together. That should have been my first red flag—the fact that Zack had gotten so much better at sex itself.

  It seemed like I had been getting cues, hints, indications all the time about what Zack really was, and totally ignoring them in the face of what I wanted them to be. I had to face facts: Zack didn’t have any special attachment to me and he didn’t particularly care about keeping me as a girlfriend. I didn’t even know if he actually saw me as a girlfriend. I had been fooling myself all along and I should have stayed away when his team mate suggested it—even if his teammate had the interests of the team in mind instead of my own.

  I decided after class that I didn’t want to see or talk to anyone. I went to the dining hall and scanned my card and took to-go containers, making a minimum of eye contact as I got into the line. I got a bowl of soup and a sandwich and then found myself loading brownies, cookies, anything remotely sweet and fattening into my box to take with me. I would have to make it to my afternoon classes, but I was going to stay in my room until the last possible moment and no one was going to stop me. I kept my head down all the way to the dorms, cradling my food close to me and not responding to anyone who seemed like they were trying to get my attention. I could only imagine what the team had said about my appearance in the weight room. I could only imagine what everyone on campus was saying about me—how stupid I’d been, what a crazy fool I was to think that Zack was anything other than a partying frat boy. I decided that I was going to stick with eating in my room, going to the library and my classes and otherwise just avoiding anyone. And if Jess tried to convince me to go to any more parties, I was going to tell her to go to hell.

  CHAPTER TWO

  After a few days, I managed to calm down. I was steadily miserable, but at least I was able to focus on my classes and my life once more. I was actually almost grateful for what had happened; it would have been really easy for me to totally and completely be distracted by Zack in my life if I hadn’t found out the kind of person that he was. I would’ve mooned along, totally wrapped up in him; having great sex, for sure, but probably missing deadlines and losing the quality of my work.

  Jess had been keeping a wide berth around me—or maybe, I thought with grim humor, she was just too busy to be in the dorms very much. In the bottom half of the semester, everyone was focusing down more on their studies, trying to pull their grades up or finish strong. I had competition to book a private study room in the library every morning, but I hated the thought of being out in the middle of the room where Zack could see me and try and talk to me—if he dared. I didn’t want to have to listen to the murmurs around me either; so I kept my headphones on and just went straight to the room I booked for studying and stayed in there as long as I was allotted and came out with my headphones on. It would boil over in time, and someone else would do something humiliating to take the attention off of me. It was just a matter of getting through it.

  I had somehow managed to get through all of my classwork—I even got ahead a few chapters on the American History syllabus and read ahead in the assignments for literature and Intro to Journalism. With nothing to do, I decided an afternoon of watching TV, eating snacks, and just letting my mind drift was the best possible use of my time. I popped cheese-flavored crackers into my mouth mindlessly, staring at the TV and relaxing, not thinking about anything in particular.
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  My vegetation was interrupted by the sound of the dorm door opening. Jess came into the room quickly, grinning as she threw herself into a chair. “Gotten over Zack yet?” she asked me.

  I scowled.

  “Come on, Jess, don’t be a bitch.”

  Jess sighed and rolled her eyes, reaching over and snatching the box from the coffee table and dumping out a handful. She popped a few into her mouth, chewing and swallowing before she spoke again.

  “Well, I mean, it’s been a few days since you kicked him to the curb. So I figured you wouldn’t mind doing me a favor.”

  I raised an eyebrow and snatched the box of crackers away from her, pouring some into my hand and putting the box back onto the table.

  “Oh, so not concern for my well-being, but my ability to help you out.”

  Jess grinned broadly. “Well, see, it’s not just helpful to me, but it could be helpful to you, too!” I was suspicious of the chirpy tone of her voice.

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “Tell me what this is about.”

  “Well you know how I’m having a bit of trouble in Economics?” I had heard Jess moaning from her room over how difficult her Economics class was—and how little hope she had of finishing with a decent grade.

  “Yeah,” I said cautiously. What did her problems with Econ have to do with my single status?

  “So there’s this guy in my class, Derick.” I pressed my lips together. Of course. “Trust me, Evie, if I could have convinced him to help me by giving him a date with me, I’d have done it. But he’s not into me. He’s into you.”

  “So you volunteered me for a date with some guy I don’t know so he’d help you pass Economics?”