So her two loves were incompatible. She could live with that. Edison’s blundering wasn’t going to keep her from taking him to the shop, and the delicate things in the shop weren’t going to jump out of the dog’s way. These were the facts of Hadley’s life, and she understood them. She accepted them. To the degree that she could, she celebrated them.
Throwing a truly disgusting tennis ball across the park to Edison gave her a few minutes to focus on how she felt about her lunch with Fletcher. On the one hand, he treated her carefully, like a new acquaintance or the friend of a friend. He was polite, but then Fletch had always been polite.
Hadley picked up the ball Edison spat on the grass and threw it, wiping her hands on her jeans. On the other hand, the way he’d touched her face… it was a whole lot like picking up where they had left off, when he dumped her after she told him she was moving away to finish her degree in Columbus.
With that thought, she whipped the slimy ball between a couple of towering oak trees and watched Edison lumber toward it.
Would it have killed him to offer to transfer, too? Didn’t every school have an engineering program? Couldn’t he have taken any number of hints? But he had ended things between them, just stopped all their forward progress with a few words. Then she was gone, and soon he ran off to be a park ranger or something, probably never to think of her again until he wound up knocking her over in the Greensburg fire station.
The way he’d looked at her, his expression full of surprise and concern and, if her eyes had not deceived her, a little bit of good old-fashioned magnetic attraction, had stayed with her for days after that first crash (and the second, and the third). It was like the universe was conspiring to bring them together or something equally insane.
Lucky for her, Fletcher had been all too eager to tell her everything he didn’t like about her store. Good thing he’d managed to only notice what was wrong. A couple of well-placed compliments might have made Hadley float away to a second-chance-romance fantasy. Good thing she had Savanna to keep her firmly focused on reality. Savanna, the voice of reason.
Savanna who loved the gossip privileges of working an information/dispatch line.
Savanna who worked in a fire station and, for reasons that remained a mystery to Hadley, despised alpha males, the paradox of which both amused Hadley and worried her.
“You know that with your job, you are in the perfect position to catch yourself a man,” Hadley often joked to Savanna, prompting her friend to cross her fingers and pretend to spit on the floor three times in some mongrel version of voodoo curse prevention.
“Heaven forbid,” Savanna said, channeling her Romani grandmother (or so she said; Hadley was never certain if the whole thing wasn’t invented for effect). “This I need?” she glanced around the fire station office. “A musclebound jerk with a hero complex, so secure in his superiority that it never even crosses his mind to check his own biases?” She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Thanks anyway.”
In her insistence that no self-respecting woman should date a fireman, occasionally Savanna might have protested too much.
“I can’t actually conceive of a more antifeminist position than as fire-girlfriend.” When she would begin this line of attack, she always pointed a finger at Hadley. “It’s like everything our foremothers fought for is wasted. Every step forward is followed by a leap back. You’re walking a dangerous line, sis,” she’d say.
Hadley had objected that she was walking no such line, but Savanna was relentless. It didn’t matter that Hadley wasn’t actively dating anyone, much less a firefighter, Savanna had constantly reminded her that giving in to these alpha males was as much a historical and humanitarian regression as repealing the Nineteenth Amendment.
After a year or so of such strange one-sided arguments, Hadley gave up the fight and simply nodded when Savanna started her rants. Without Hadley asking any direct questions, she learned over the months that Savanna’s dad had been a typical alpha-male and something of a jerk. Hadley began to understand that by surrounding herself with firefighters, Savanna was both trying to gather evidence in support of her bias and—in a way that felt odd but sweet to Hadley—redeem her dad. Maybe if there was a tough guy who was also good and decent, Savanna would be able to forgive her dad for whatever he’d done that was damaging, or at least disappointing.
Hadley couldn’t tell how Savanna’s weird quest was shaping up. Things had changed very little since Fletcher returned to town. Savanna took an immediate dislike to him, and Savanna’s dislikes were seldom subtle.
At the thought of “seldom subtle,” Edison smacked into the backs of Hadley’s legs and took them out from under her. She landed in a tangle with her dog, grateful that she was alone in the park.
Or not. A voice came to her through many pounds of dog. “You need rescuing?”
Fletcher Gates? Here? Now?
Even though she could hear the gentle laugh in Fletcher’s voice, she felt annoyed that he would see her in such an undignified situation so many times since returning to town. Her instinct was to leap up and brush the grass and leaves and dog slobber off herself, but she resisted. She wrapped her arms around Edison and peered out over his huge, hairy brown shoulder.
“I’d thank you for the offer, but I’m not sure you could help. If this animal intended me harm, you couldn’t save me.”
Fletcher looked unconvinced. “He’s that dangerous, huh?” He held out a hand to Edison, and the traitorous dog just about licked his fingers off. “Oh, yeah. I can see that he’s a real threat.”
Hadley sat up straighter as Edison nudged his way into every inch of Fletcher’s personal space. “Well, obviously he wouldn’t hurt me,” she said. “But one word and you’d be history, pal.”
Fletcher sat on the grass beside Hadley. Edison snuffled his way into Fletcher’s lap. “What’s the kill order?” he asked, his voice as casual is if this were a question everyone asked each other. “Attack? No, that’s too common for you. Um, how about this?” He looked at Edison. “Antagonize,” he said, pointing at Hadley. Obviously nothing happened, and Hadley managed not to laugh. It would only encourage him.
Fletcher was not defeated by his failure. He tried again. “Irritate.” Edison licked the side of Fletcher’s head.
Fletcher leaned in toward the dog and spoke in a tone of someone offering a deal. “Come on big guy. Show me what you’ve got.” He sharpened his voice. “Provoke.”
Hadley let out a little snort. Shoot. Keep it together, she told herself. If she burst out into one of her giggling fits, she may never stop. She’d rather Fletcher not see that again. Maybe after all these years he’d forgotten how undignified it was.
Fletcher didn’t seem to notice that she’d avoided giggle-borne humiliation as he consulted whatever thesaurus he kept in his head. He pointed at her again. “Incite.” When he was rewarded with a particularly drippy lick to the ear, he said, “Aw, come on. That was a good one. Okay, try this one.” He lowered his voice to a dangerous whisper. Hadley was glad it was directed to Edison’s ear instead of hers, especially when she heard him say, “Inflame.”
Inflame, indeed. She was laughing now, but without hysteria. “Stop it. You’re going to confuse him,” she said, pushing her hair out of her face. “Honestly, it doesn’t take much to confuse him.”
Edison, under some canine delusion that he was a lap dog, settled himself over Fletcher’s legs.
“I sure hope you don’t have to be anywhere,” Hadley said. “He might decide to stay there for hours.”
The look in Fletcher’s eyes called up memories she was trying to suppress. He didn’t make it any easier with his reply. “I don’t. There’s not any place I’d rather be.”
Was it getting hotter? Or was it only Fletcher? Hadley cleared her throat. “I think Edison has decided we should stay, but you have to promise to stop trying to make him kill me.”
“Just one more time?” Fletcher asked. “Edison, impale.”
Hadley picked a
stalk of grass from beside her leg, tied it in a knot, and slipped it over her finger. “You are greatly overestimating my dog’s vocabulary, Fletch.”
He looked up. Something glinted in his eye. “Nobody calls me Fletch.”
“Sorry,” she said, embarrassed at the small act of intimacy. “Old habits and all that.” She shredded the stalk of grass and threw it away to her side to keep from meeting his eye, surprised how silly she felt. She often thought of him as “Fletch,” but she hadn’t called him that in years. What had made her speak with that kind of familiarity?
When he answered, his voice was low. “No, I mean, I’ve missed it. It sounds good to me, you know, when you say it.”
The stammering? It was kind of endearing.
A flood of memories of nervous teenage Fletcher flowed through Hadley’s mind. The way he would pull at the back of his hair. How he used to seem terrified that he might run into her parents when he brought her home. How everything felt like an occasion, and so many of his lines seemed rehearsed, but in a cute way, like he wanted so much for her to be pleased.
Shaking off the trip down memory lane, Hadley asked, “How’s life at the fire station these days?”
She expected him to tell stories about big adventures, but he said, “It’s a good job and I’m grateful to have it.”
She could tell there was something he wasn’t saying.
“But?” she prompted.
He shrugged and picked up a sycamore leaf from the grass. “I kind of miss the BLM.”
Hadley pointed vaguely west. “Living out there in the wilderness?” She couldn’t believe he meant it.
“It’s not like we never saw civilization,” he countered.
“Right. The civilization of Wyoming.”
“Montana.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?” She laughed. She was pretty sure he knew she was kidding. Mostly.
“Okay,” she said. “Tell me. What’s there to miss? Seriously. I want to know. What did you have there that you can’t have here?”
“Besides being called a fireman, there’s nearly nothing about my job here that’s the same as my job there.”
Hadley’s face must have shown that she didn’t get it. “You put out fires.” How complicated could it be?
He put his arms behind him and leaned back on his hands, and the line of his triceps, that little triangle at the back of his arm that made her squirm, stretched the sleeves of his shirt. She sat on her hands. Edison resettled himself on Fletcher’s lap. “City station jobs are busy because we get a lot of calls, but they’re not usually about fires. Emergency crews answer all kinds of calls. Moms with new babies too nervous to drive to the hospital. Older people who need all kinds of help.”
She nodded. “Right. Climbing trees to retrieve cats. I’ve seen movies.”
He laughed and scratched Edison behind his ears. “We do that more than you’d think,” he said. “But the forest fires were something else completely. The hugeness of the destructive power, the total devastation that would lead, after a few years, to acres and acres of fertile new growth…” He stopped. “This is boring you.”
It wasn’t a question, but it also wasn’t true.
“No, I’m not bored.” Hadley lay on her side on the grass and propped her head on her arm. “Tell.”
“The smokejumpers,” he started, but she stopped him, holding out her hand as if she were trying to push the words back.
“Wait.” She shook her head. “It sounded like you said ‘smokejumpers,’ but surely if there was such a thing, I would have heard of it.”
Fletcher sat up and attempted to shove Edison off his lap. “Are you telling me that you saw my mother just about every week, literally for years, and she never told you what my job was?”
“Okay, first of all,” Hadley said, her eyes snapping, “there are plenty of things for two intelligent women to discuss over lunch, even over several years, without needing to talk about men.”
He put up his hands in surrender. “Okay, got it; that’s good. Really, great.”
Hadley looked at the grass by her knees. “And maybe I told her I didn’t want to talk about you.”
He didn’t say anything to that, but when she looked, he was watching her.
He nodded, and she gave him a small smile. “I’m over that now. But barely. We agreed to keep our conversations to relevant discussions of books, food, and local gossip. It worked for us.”
If Fletcher could hear the pain she was hiding, he didn’t mention it.
She bumped his leg. “So, the wilderness,” she prompted.
He cleared his throat. “I had this cool job. I mean, I think it was cool. I was a smokejumper, which is actually a thing. I wore many pounds of Kevlar and parachute fabric and jumped out of helicopters into the burn zone.”
Hadley shook her head. “You did not.”
“I didn’t?”
“Nope. Not buying it.”
“Which part?”
“Your job in the wilderness of that one state I can’t actually remember the name of was to leap out of helicopters into burning forests and put out fires?” She honestly couldn’t tell if he was messing with her.
He answered by counting off on his fingers. “One: Montana. Two: Only to the edges of burning forests. Three: Yeah, kind of.”
“Where did you connect the hoses?”
She watched Fletcher’s face light up in a carefree laugh. “No hoses. Sometimes we pumped water from rivers or lakes, but mostly we used chemical retardant—that stuff that looks like red mud.”
“I know that stuff,” she said, nodding. She’d seen the movies. “So you parachuted. Out of planes.”
He made a rotating gesture.
“Oh, right. Helicopters. And crushed flames with your bare hands.”
He shook his head again.
Hadley stopped him. “Don’t deny me the details of my little fantasy, because, I’m just saying, if it was anyone but you out there, the way I’m imagining it, this smokejumper gig is a very sexy business.”
Fletcher did a modest, dismissive motion. “Well, I wouldn’t say so, but the guys did make a calendar out of pictures of me.”
She was almost sure he was joking. “I would very much like to see this calendar.”
“Impossible,” he said.
“Nothing is actually impossible,” Hadley shot back.
“Except stapling Jell-O to a tree.”
“Granted.”
“Or dividing by zero.”
“Nerd.”
“If the shoe fits,” he said, grinning at her.
“You’re changing the subject, and don’t think I didn’t notice.”
Fletcher pulled out his phone and pressed a button. “Make a note: Hadley noticed that I changed the subject.” He stuck his phone back in his pocket and nodded at her. “Noted.”
Hadley felt a sigh escape her. “We grew up,” she said.
He took a visible second to follow her into that new line of thinking. “In the last few seconds?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Come on, you know what I mean.” In case he actually didn’t, she said, “Look at us, here in the same park where we used to spend hours making out.”
“And fighting,” he cut in.
“And fighting,” she conceded. “And now we’re sitting several feet apart and neither kissing nor fighting. I mean, when is the last time we just sat here and had a conversation?”
Without even a pause, Fletcher said, “Spring break, sophomore year in college.”
She thought about it for a second and knew he was right. There was something endearing and sad about how quickly he answered, as if he’d been thinking about the end of them, too.
“But that was a long time ago,” he said. “And we’ve both changed.”
At the same time, they each pointed at the other and said, “Mostly you.”
Hadley laughed and shook her head. “I’m exactly the same as I always was,” she said. “I’m still way too likel
y to fight first and ask questions later. I’m still completely unlikely to do traditional girlfriend stuff like leave cute notes in your car or make you a sandwich.” She shrugged, aware that these shortcomings might have bothered him when they were kids, but he’d never complained.
“I never asked you to make me a sandwich.” Fletcher’s brow creased, and he looked slightly offended.
“No, but you would have liked it if I had.”
“Is it so bad to want your girlfriend to make you a sandwich? I would have made you one if you’d needed me to.” Fletcher’s voice trailed off. He folded the edge of his napkin and pressed a crease in it.
If Hadley didn’t know better, she would have thought they were talking about something more than sandwiches. Maybe they were. Either way, she felt weird talking about herself as his girlfriend, so she shifted the conversation a little. “If I seem different to you it’s only because your own changes give you a different perspective. You’ve had this whole other life. Your adventures were big. I only got a degree and bought a dog.”
Fletcher pointed to the gigantic pile of fur currently snoring on his legs. “You mean this?” He shook his head. “This alone is a very big change. Not to mention starting a business. I mean, come on. You’re real, Hadley.”
Surprise made her gasp.
Fletcher misinterpreted her reaction. “I didn’t mean you were somehow fake before,” he said. “I just mean, look what you’ve made for yourself. You should be so proud.”
Hadley shook her head as she fought back tears.
Of all the people who told her regularly how she should be living her life, none of them, not one, ever seemed to see her as real. To her family, she was an adorable anomaly. She was this sweet little thing that made charming choices and would soon need to be rescued from certain financial ruin. And someone would definitely need to save her from what was possibly long-term emotional disturbance that led people to fish dented metal furnishings out of dumpsters and paint them pink in order to display ratty paperback books on them.
Always You: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Collection Books 5-8) Page 25