April Embers_A Second Chance Single Daddy Firefighter Romance

by Chase Jackson

  I knew that he was just trying to be friendly, but I suddenly wished I hadn’t said anything.

  “A few blocks from here,” I told him vaguely.

  “You’re shitting me!”

  I wish I was… I immediately saw the image of my mother’s house burned into my memory, and I flinched involuntarily.

  A few blocks away, but in a completely different world...

  “So what brought you back to Harford?” Walker asked. “Family? Old friends?”

  “This job,” I said flatly. Among other things…

  Maybe Walker could take a hint from the dark expression on my face, or maybe I just looked like a guy who didn’t talk about his past. Either way, he didn’t pry any further. Instead, he slapped his open palm against my back and said:

  “Well in that case, welcome home!” Then he ushered me towards the station. “Come on, I’ll give you the Firehouse 56 grand tour!”

  ***

  “...and here we have the locker room!” Walker announced with a dramatic flourish as he led me into a brightly lit, oversized locker room.

  A long metal mesh bench bisected the room into two halves. On either side, the painted-white cinderblock walls were lined with bright red metal cubbies, each assigned to a member of the crew.

  Thanks to Walker Wright’s educational guided tour of the station, I had already learned that Firehouse 56 had a twelve-man crew. Now, as I stepped through the locker room, I began constructing a mental roster of the names that I saw engraved on metal plates directly above each cubby:

  HUDSON, BRADY

  HUDSON, JOSHUA

  WILLIAMS, DUKE

  HART, TROY

  FORD, LOGAN

  I stopped in my tracks, repeating the name again in my head.

  Logan Ford… why does that name sound so familiar?

  Before I could place the name, I heard Walker whistle from across the room. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that he was nodding towards a cubby on the far end of the opposite wall.

  Unlike the other cubbies -- which were crammed with the standard-issue black nomex turnout gear -- this one was empty, but an engraved name badge had already been affixed directly above the unit:

  MCALISTER, RORY

  “You’ll need to contact the department to custom-order your first set of gear,” Walker explained. “In the meantime, there’s some spare stuff in the closet that you can use…”

  I nodded, inspecting the locker from top to bottom. Then something on the top shelf caught my eye. It looked like a… gift basket?

  “Oh, I almost forgot about that!” Walker grinned, reaching up for the basket. “This is just a little something we put together to say ‘welcome to the family!’”

  He handed me the basket and I turned it around slowly in my hands. It was full of odds and ends: a bottle of Fireball whiskey, a Firehouse 56 t-shirt, a pair of beer mugs from a local bar called Rusty’s Tavern...

  There was something else wedged at the very back: a flat square wrapped in shiny cellophane. I lifted it carefully out of the basket and my eyes narrowed behind my black sunglasses as I tried to make sense of what I was looking at.

  “That right there is a piece of Hartford history,” Walker explained proudly. “That’s the annual Firehouse 56 calendar.”

  “You guys have your own calendar?!” I raised an eyebrow as I inspected the photograph on the front cover of the calendar: twelve shirtless firemen suggestively straddling a bright red engine.

  “Hell yeah, we have our own calendar!” Walker flipped the calendar over in my hands and pointed to the grid of images printed on the back; twelve squares, each offering a miniature preview for the twelve months in the calendar.

  If the front cover was cringeworthy, the preview pictures on the back were downright vomit-inducing. I grimaced as my eyes scanned over the images.

  “Since there are twelve of us on the crew, we each got to pose for our own month in the calendar,” Walker explained. Then, dragging his pointer finger over the cellophane, he proceeded to identify the crew member posing in each of the thumbnails. “That’s Brady Hudson as the month of January. And that’s his younger brother, Josh, as Mr. February.”

  When his finger trailed over the thumbnail for March, I recognized the meathead that I had encountered earlier.

  “You’ve already met Duke Williams,” Walker said dismissively. Then he pointed to the fireman in the next square and said, “And you probably won’t be meeting Mr. April. He quit a few months back. That’s why there was an open position on the crew.”

  He grinned up at me and added, “I guess that means you’re our new Mr. April.”

  My eyebrows shot up behind the black plastic frames of my Wayfarers.

  “Yeah right,” I scoffed. I was tempted to point out that I was a fireman, not a fucking male stripper, but I bit my tongue.

  There wasn’t a chance in hell that I was going to make a mockery of myself -- or my profession -- by stripping off my clothes and straddling a firepole for some stupid calendar.

  Besides, a guy like me didn’t belong in a calendar like that. The guys in the calendar were all clean-cut, All-American heroes. My tattoos and dark, brooding eyes didn’t exactly fit the mold; I’d stick out like a hamburger at a hotdog party.

  I might be part of the crew now, but that didn’t make me any less of an outsider at Firehouse 56. My encounter with the Mr. March was proof of that.

  “Anyways--” Walker said, turning back to the calendar. But before he could finish making calendar introductions, he was interrupted by the sound of footsteps shuffling into the locker room behind us.

  I glanced up at the intruder and immediately felt my body go stiff. As soon as I locked eyes on him, I realized why the name ‘Logan Ford’ had sounded so familiar…

  A rash of angry heat prickled up the back of my neck, and my hands balled into fists at my side. I could tell from the dumbstruck look on his face that he recognized me, too.

  “Logan!” Walker piped up. “This is the new crew member--”

  “Rory McAlister,” Logan finished for him.

  Walker looked taken aback, and his eyes flicked back and forth between the two of us.

  “Do you two know each other?”

  “We went to high school together,” Logan said.

  I clenched my jaw, grinding my teeth together. There’s a hell of a lot more to the story than that…

  I had only attended Hartford High School for one year before I moved away to Boston, but thanks to guys like Logan Ford, that year had been a living hell.

  I blinked behind the black lenses of my sunglasses, and when I opened my eyes I wasn’t standing in the Firehouse 56 locker room anymore.

  Instead, I was in the boy’s locker room at Hartford High...

  CHAPTER TWO | DESIREE

  Ask me what the deepest, darkest pit of hell looks like, and I’d draw you a picture of the first day of school at Hartford High.

  It was five minutes til the first period bell, and the cramped hallways were swarming with hundreds of angst-filled teenage bodies still riding the high of summer vacation.

  New shoes scuffed over the old tile floors. Twenty-pound textbooks were crammed carelessly into lockers. Gossip was murmured in hushed whispers, and insults were heckled with haughty laughter.

  You could practically smell the hormones in the air; that unmistakable cocktail of bad body odor masked with AXE cologne. I fought the urge to snort a sinus-cleansing glob of hand sanitizer as I weaved my way through the first-day-of-school chaos.

  A circle of reunited friends swapped vivid accounts of their summer break adventures. Across the hall, a pair of reunited lovers were making out furiously beneath a poster advocating the benefits of safe sex.

  A tribe of bleach-blonde It Girls strutted down the hallway, then paused to take a choreographed sip from their matching Starbucks cups. An incoming freshman scuttled around them anxiously, clutching a printed-out copy of his new class schedule.

  “Do
you need help finding a classroom?” I asked him, trying to sound helpful.

  “I’m not lost!” he insisted in a panicky squeal, then promptly scurried away.

  Before I had a chance to call after him, I felt someone plow into my shoulder.

  “Move your ass, bitch!” a female student snarled as she darted past me impatiently.

  I sighed. Although today marked the beginning of my third year as a member of the teaching staff, I was still routinely mistaken for a student in the hallways of Hartford High School.

  There were a few factors working against me, at twenty-five years old, I was the youngest faculty member on the roster. I was also short -- even in heels, I struggled to reach the 5’5” mark -- and I had never grown into my baby-faced features. Thanks to my oversized brown eyes and my round, dimpled cheeks, I still got carded whenever I tried to buy tickets to an R-rated movie at the local cinema.

  I had tried everything to make myself appear older -- from wearing a pair of non-prescription glasses, to investing in a new wardrobe of ‘teacher friendly’ cardigans and ankle pants from Ann Taylor LOFT. Nothing seemed to work.

  No matter what I did -- or what I wore -- it seemed like I was just destined to be jostled and heckled in the hallways, the same way I had been years ago, when I walked the same halls as a student.

  I took a deep breath, then flung myself back into the current of foot traffic that shuffled down the long hallway.

  Up ahead, I spotted a cluster of jocks in matching leather Varsity jackets blocking the main stairwell. Impervious to the students that were trying to squeeze around them to get up and down the stairs, the jocks were sprawled out on the steps like sunbathers on a beach. They ogled girls walking by in the hallway, then took turns muttering innuendos and exchanging high-fives.

  When a curvy girl attempted to climb up the steps around them, they erupted into a chorus of cow sounds.

  “Moooooo!” one of them huffed loudly, while the others stomped their ‘hooves’ on the stairs.

  The girl’s face turned bright red, and she turned on her heel and darted in the opposite direction.

  Oh, hell no…

  My jaw dropped so fast that it must have hit the floor. My pulse surged from zero to sixty, and red-hot rage flooded my veins. I knew that I had to say something -- I knew that I had to put a stop to this! -- but my mind was drawing a blank.

  I stood there, speechless, as I tried to form some sort of intelligible, expletive-free disciplinary statement out of the angry sludge that was surging through my head.

  That span of a few silent seconds was all it took for the ringleader to glance up and lock eyes on his next target, me.

  “What are you staring at?” he asked me as he rolled forward on the steps, resting the leather elbows of his Varsity jacket on his knees.

  I froze. All of the rage immediately drained from my body, along with any sense of power or authority. In that split second, I wasn’t a twenty-five-year-old teacher on my way to my first period English class. In that split second, I was fifteen years old all over again...

  “Hey!” he shouted impatiently. “I’m talking to you!”

  He thrust himself up onto his feet and sauntered towards me, grinning menacingly.

  What is wrong with you?! The voice inside my head was screaming. Say something! Do something! Speak up for yourself! You’re the teacher… you’re in control! You have the power, not him!

  If the voice inside my head could speak out loud, she’d have the strength to move mountains. Unfortunately, there had always been a fatal disconnect between my brain and my tongue.

  I had never been great at dealing with confrontation or speaking up for myself. When I was in high school, I had the same self-defense mechanism as a turtle, whenever I sensed danger, I would recede into my shell and hide.

  As the jock stomped towards me, I found myself reverting to that same old strategy...

  “Yoo-hoo,” he whistled in a condescending voice, waving his hand in front of my face. “Anybody home in there?”

  “Maybe she’s deaf,” one of the minions back on the stairwell suggested.

  The ringleader grinned, then he cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted straight into my face, “HEY BITCH, ARE YOU DEAF?!”

  I flinched, and my entire body went tense.

  You have to do something! You can’t let them get away with this!

  “I know you can hear me,” the ringleader narrowed his eyes and cocked his head. “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?”

  “Meeeoowwww!” one of the minions squealed from the steps.

  “You know what they say about quiet chicks, don’t you boys?” the ringleader glanced over his shoulder at his posse on the stairwell, then he rolled his head slowly back towards me. He grinned, leaning even closer, and hissed, “They’re always the loudest in bed!”

  On cue, the minions on the stairwell immediately erupted into a dramatic chorus of sex sounds; moans and grunts and squeals.

  Luckily their sounds were quickly drowned out by the harsh ringing sound of the first period bell, echoing through the now-empty hallways.

  The ringleader backed away slowly, shooting me a wink before he spun around on his heel and disappeared down the hallway.

  I was left standing on my own in the empty, silent hallway. My knees were rattling and my stomach was still spinning in circles.

  I felt weak and enraged all at the same time. Part of me felt like curling up into a ball right there on the spot and crying my eyes out. Another part of me wanted to chase after the jock and drive my fist into that stupid, smug grin until his face looked like a plate of cafeteria lasagna.

  I couldn’t even decide who I actually hated more, the jock, for being a menacing asshole? Or myself, for letting him get away with it?

  I was already late for my first period class, but I knew that I had to pull my shit together before I faced a classroom full of students. I pushed myself into a nearby bathroom and hovered over the sinks.

  Without glancing up at the mirror, I cupped my hands under the sink faucet and let my palms fill up with cool tap water. I splashed the water over my face, and the tingling chill immediately soothed the heat that had spread over my cheeks.

  I patted my face dry with some crunchy brown paper towels, then I slowly glanced up at my reflection.

  I half expected to see fifteen-year old Desiree Leduc staring back at me. Instead, I saw a fifteen-year old girl trapped inside a twenty-five-year-old woman’s body.

  Sure, I was dressed the part, I was wearing a navy-blue blazer, crisp white chinos, and a pair of conservative gold stud earrings. My dark brown hair was pulled into a neat knot at the base of my neck. I had even completed the ‘English teacher’ ensemble with a Hartford High School lanyard around my neck.

  But when I stared at my reflection, I realized that I was wearing the outfit like it was a Halloween costume. It was no wonder my Ann Taylor LOFT wardrobe hadn’t fooled anybody. Regardless of what I was wearing, I still had the vacant, lost eyes of my sad little high school self.

  I’m not that girl anymore, I told myself.

  My mind flashed back to the hallway, and I flinched as the jock’s cruel words replayed in my head.

  “I’m not that girl anymore,” I said it out loud this time.

  I graduated from this hell hole a long time ago. I grew the fuck up. I worked my ass off and got a college degree…

  “I’m not that girl anymore!”

  The words bounced off of the tiled walls and echoed around me. I felt a chill rattle down my spine when I heard the strength and conviction in my own voice. I slowly raised my chin and pressed my shoulders back. With the right posture, the blazer suddenly didn’t look so bad.

  I smiled at my own reflection, and the eyes blinking back at me in the mirror looked a little less lost than they had before. I straightened the lapels on my blazer and took a deep breath, then I walked to my first period English class.

  I managed to maintain my confident str
ide all the way to my classroom. Then I strolled through the door and spotted the leather Varsity jacket occupying a desk in the front row, and I felt my shoulders deflate faster than a balloon in a room full of needles.

  Wooooooosh.

  “Well look who it is,” the jock grinned, leaning forward in his desk.

  My shoulders were already starting to recede into my blazer as my body slipped automatically into turtle-mode.

  STOP! I commanded myself. I’M NOT THAT GIRL ANYMORE!

  With a sudden surge of strength, I forced my shoulders back and held my head up high.

  “What’s your name?” I demanded, glaring straight at him.

  “Why do you wanna know?” he wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. “Are you trying to slide into my DMs or something?”

  There were a few snickers throughout the classroom, but I ignored them.

  “Something like that,” I winked.

  Enticed, he slid back into his metal chair and propped his feet up on top of his desk.

  “Well aren’t you just full of surprises,” he grinned, weaving his hands behind his head.

  “Just you wait and see...” I countered suggestively. This time there were a few wolf whistles, but again I ignored them.

  Instead of taking a seat behind my desk at the front of the classroom, I slid into an empty metal desk at the edge of the classroom. I pulled my canvas work bag into my lap and discreetly slipped out my pad of detention slips.

  My hands were shaking, but I forced myself to take a deep breath.

  You can do this, I told myself.

  Gleefully unaware of the shit sandwich I was preparing for him, the jock lounged back in his metal desk chair as he smugly spelled out his name for me,

  “Cody -- that’s C-O-D-Y--”

  “Uh-huh,” I nodded attentively as I neatly transcribed the name onto the first detention slip in my stack.

  “Last name, Wyatt. W-Y-A-T-T.”

  “Perfect,” I said slowly. I finished transcribing his name, then I began filling out the remainder of the form.

  Some of the other students had already caught on, and I heard them whispering softly and giggling. Cody, however, remained completely oblivious.