Falling for a Former Flame: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love)

by Brenna Jacobs

  Fletcher grabbed the basketball from Nick and dribbled around him, hooking another left-handed lay-up. “So, what you’re saying is,” Fletcher said, “where have I been all your life and what did you ever do without me?”

  “Yeah, something like that,” Nick said, stealing the ball and effortlessly dunking it, hanging on the rim for a second. “Sometimes I’ll go do group stuff,” Nick said, shrugging as though “group stuff” wasn’t the greatest. “You know. Greensburg singles. Something my mother would set up. But it’s not always lame. Now and then, Hadley and Savanna come along,” he said, a smile creeping onto his face.

  “Did you know I used to date Hadley?” He didn’t know he was going to say it.

  Fletcher watched Nick’s face. He didn’t look shocked. Honestly, he didn’t look affected at all. Fletcher wondered if Nick thought he was being territorial. “That was a long time ago though,” he said, dribbling the ball.

  “Yeah,” Nick said.

  Yeah? What did that mean? Fletcher tossed Nick the ball.

  “Too bad it didn’t work out, I guess,” Nick said, stepping back and launching a perfect three-point shot.

  There was no hint of aggression. Nick didn’t square up. He talked about it like it didn’t mean anything to him at all. Maybe Nick had more confidence even than Fletcher had assumed.

  Chapter 4

  Hadley turned the knob and let herself into her store, Second Glance Books, where the clatter of a cowbell announced her arrival.

  Not that it mattered. Faith, the high school senior that Hadley employed for afternoons and weekends wasn’t listening for the bell. She wouldn’t have been listening for the alarm, either. Faith was charming and hilarious and dependable in the following way: the minute Hadley left her alone, she’d stick her AirPods in her ears and tune out everything not directly in front of her.

  Currently, what was in front of Faith was a huge box of donated books for the used section of the store. Faith sat, legs tucked beneath her, flipping through the collection and making piles: toss it, repair it, sell it, or display it.

  Hadley glanced around the shop. There were a few people sitting in squashy armchairs and a man leafing through old Fodor’s travel books. The autumn light filtering through the shop windows slanted in and warmed the wooden shelves like a soft, cotton blanket. Framed pictures and seasonal knickknacks filled tables stacked high with books both old and new. The air smelled like oiled furniture and cinnamon. Altogether, the place evoked comfort. It never failed to thrill her how perfectly charming her shop was. It was exactly what she had always wanted, and precisely what her family thought was most foolish.

  For all her life, her parents worked in high-tech industries, her mom as a software developer and her dad as an inventor of smart-phone technology. When Hadley was in high school, her parents had finally saved enough to start their own business making apps and software for existing cell phone companies, but soon after, her dad’s new phone landed with a gigantic splash in the market. Her older sister worked for the family company making unheard-of amounts of money, and they thought Hadley’s dream of selling books—paper books, no less—was kind of adorable, but mostly silly.

  It was a lot like the way they all looked at Hadley herself.

  She got it. Really, she understood that to people with a particular viewpoint or filter or bias, books were the opposite of technology. And if it wasn’t strange enough that she wanted to make a business out of going back in time to an outdated product, add in the factor that half of the books she sold were used? Used books. They were baffled.

  “Sweetie,” her mom had said, “nobody is going to spend enough money on used junk to even let you afford storage of your product. There’s simply not a market for what you want to sell.”

  Her mom was wrong, occasionally. Hadley was convinced that this was one of those occasions.

  Her sister wasn’t any more supportive. “Sweetie,” Shae had said, “you have so many creative friends. Why aren’t you setting up an online publishing company and putting new digital books out there into the market? That’s where the customers are. Do you have any idea how many people buy more than one digital book every week?”

  No, in fact, Hadley had no idea. But she was confident that there were also people who would buy one or more books made of paper every month or so.

  Her dad, doubtless her biggest fan in basically every avenue of her life, was not much better. “Sweetie, you have a business degree. I know you’ve learned where to lean for success. This little hobby of yours is mystifying.”

  Honestly, if one more person in her world called her “sweetie,” she would bare her teeth and bite them on the nose.

  Her family couldn’t see the value of her endeavor because they valued different things (constant technology upgrades and lots and lots of money) than she did (textiles, relationships, and a cluttered, bright, warm shop full of dusty, beautiful books).

  Hadley walked over and tapped Faith’s head.

  “Oh, hey,” Faith said, pulling the AirPod out of one ear.

  The fact that she never felt the need to apologize for tuning out the world kind of made Hadley like her even more. At least as long as there were no customers who needed her attention.

  She held a red leather-bound book with gilt page edges up to Hadley’s face. “Fun fact—people who smoke cigars in their houses donate books that smell like cigar smoke. And who, I ask you, wouldn’t like that?”

  Faith’s ironic tone perplexed some of the elderly customers who came into Second Glance, but Hadley loved the girl’s sarcasm.

  Breathing in, Hadley wrinkled up her nose. Faith was right. Stale and dank-smelling, the book dropped in value right before her nose.

  “The whole box?” Hadley asked.

  “Nah. Just the really pretty ones. There’s some great stuff in here, though, even if it stinks.” She handed over a Flannery O’Connor first edition and a set of the collected works of Jane Austen.

  Hadley clapped her hands like a child being handed cookies.

  “Want to see the poets?”

  Hadley gasped. “He sent poets?”

  The box had come from an estate sales agent named Niles that Hadley had met in school. After the sales he oversaw, he’d send her the leftovers. But, as he put it, because Hadley was such a nice human, sometimes he’d pick out a few winners before the sale, giving her first pick and a great deal. Most of the secondhand books she sold went for a couple of dollars, but now and then, particularly now, there was a handful of gems that could bring her shop some real money.

  Ignoring the smell of stale smoke, Hadley kissed the spines of the Jane Austen set and placed them on a counter. She’d have to remember to pick up some British-looking flowers to display with Jane. The right customer would notice.

  “So,” Faith asked, “how did the donation delivery go the other day? Are you winning?”

  “I got dropped to the floor by a fireman.”

  Faith’s eyebrows rose high on her forehead. “This is already a better story than anything I could have imagined. You went to take in a bunch of blankets and ended up on the floor with a fireman.” Faith held up her finger in a wait-a-minute gesture and looked into the middle distance as if trying to picture it happening.

  Hadley gave Faith’s shoulder a mock shove. “Stop it. Gross. No, I mean literally, a guy knocked into me and I went sprawling in all my elegant glory.” A part of Hadley wanted to laugh, remembering how ridiculous she must have looked, and certainly felt. But the thought of Fletch, of all people, standing there looking down on her, lifting her up off the floor…

  Touching her again. Holding on to her, even if at a polite distance. Stop it, she told herself. That’s ancient history.

  Faith laughed. “Was it that Nick guy who comes in here? I’ve been wondering how long it would take him to literally sweep you off your feet. That guy would try anything to get his hands on you.”

  Nick had spent some time lingering in the bookshop. Occasionally he’d buy sma
ll trinkets and gifts, but if he was giving them to someone, it wasn’t to Hadley. She understood what Faith meant, but the truth was, Nick was a complete gentleman. He would do nothing like “anything” to get his hands on her. He would be present. And he would wait. Smiling.

  Hadley shook her head but didn’t say anything. She didn’t know how to convince Faith that she simply wasn’t into Nick Baxter. Come to think of it, she didn’t have any idea how to convince Nick, either. He’d been working at the station for a couple of years, and in a place like Greensburg it was easy to know everyone her own age. She’d seen him here and there, gone out in groups a few times, but lately, when she’d gone to visit Savanna at work at the station, he’d been more obviously present.

  Like an eager puppy.

  He was always bringing them things (a bottle of juice, a pastry from the rec room). And he had this way of looking at her that left all nuance behind. Unfeigned adoration. Puppylike. But somehow less appealing than the affection she got from her actual canine dog.

  Which, she knew, was an unfair comparison and not a very nice thing to say. So she didn’t say it out loud. Even if, in her mind, Baxter had become the perfect name for a Labrador.

  “No. It was the new guy. Fletcher Gates.” It was still strange to taste his name in her mouth again after all this time.

  Faith replied from inside a huge box of paperbacks. “He sounds like a law firm.”

  Hadley laughed. “Yeah, but he’s not. Just a regular guy.” A regular guy with a whole lot of history, a striking profile, and all the expected flexings and ripplings that came with his job. She tried to scrub from her mind the memory of how good he’d looked the other day.

  How good he’d looked at the station. And running. And in the store.

  Good enough that she’d had to remind herself how patronizing he’d been, telling her how she ought to buy ice cream and assuming she needed his help to stand up. Some things never changed.

  “Firemen are not regular guys,” Faith said. “Accountants and car salesmen are regular guys. Tile workers are regular guys. My chemistry teacher is a regular guy. Firemen are the actual opposite of regular guys.”

  Hadley knew better than to delve into this topic with Faith. Mainly because Faith was a kid, and Hadley had a few scruples when it came to sharing too much information with minors. Instead, she made a vague sound of disagreement, suggesting there was not a healthy middle ground for them to come to and they might as well move on.

  “So?” Faith asked. “Was he hot?”

  Annoyed by the answer that immediately came to her mind, she put on her Older and Wiser Person voice. “Faith, you know very well that there are about a hundred things more important about a person than his physical attractiveness.”

  A breath of annoyance preceded Faith’s reply. “Here we go.”

  “I mean it,” Hadley said, almost keeping a straight face. “I wish you’d asked me if he was thoughtful or if he was genuine.”

  Faith shook her head and ripped open another cardboard box. “Give me a break. You were only gone for half an hour. How thoughtful or genuine could he have been? You didn’t have time to notice anything like that. All you could do is look, and you didn’t even do that. You’re no fun at all.”

  Hadley laughed. “Maybe I looked.”

  “And?” prompted Faith. “Come on. Just give it to me on a scale from one to ten.”

  Shaking her head, Hadley picked up a stack of decades-old National Geographic magazines, wrinkled at the edges with water stains. “Not that I was counting,” she said, turning toward the storage room, “but twelve and a half.”

  Chapter 5

  Fletcher found settling in at the station easier than he would have imagined. His experience with the BLM had prepared him for plenty of posturing, alpha-male-ing, and territory disputes, and those were all elements of the city fire station. He knew it was cliché, but there were valid reasons that firemen had stereotypes.

  People expected these guys to be tough. They were, without exception, tough. People assumed they were aggressive. The men defined aggression. But outsiders did not necessarily understand the brotherhood that formed between men who worked together in this sort of career.

  Within a few weeks, Fletcher knew the men at the station as well as he knew anyone, how they worked together, how they spoke and stayed silent, and how they responded to any situation.

  He picked Chief Grantham early on as the intellectual. The chief had a respectable library in glass-fronted bookcases in his office, which was a nice PR move, but Fletcher could tell the difference between a library for show and one that was used. Chief Grantham read his books.

  It was no surprise that the “mom” of the group was Red. Fletcher’s own childhood experiences had shown him Red’s nurturing, caretaking side in lots of ways. Years ago, Red had always been up for playing a game of catch or chess during a slow shift, or later, helping with homework or listening to Fletcher’s stories about classes and girls. Red loved to bake, and had, on many occasions, shown up for work with a tray of pastries he’d created. Fletcher was delighted that this still seemed to be one of Red’s talents.

  What he hadn’t expected was that Nick Baxter would be the friendliest of all the firefighters. After their basketball game, and the weekly games that followed, Nick approached Fletcher regularly with sincere respect and a desire to be friends. At first, Fletcher assumed Nick was feeling him out to assess the Hadley situation, to see where Fletcher stood and what kind of obstacle or threat he might pose. But it soon became clear that Nick was just a genuinely nice guy who happened to be flat-out crazy for Fletcher’s ex. It was so obvious that nobody ever needed to mention it.

  The closest anyone came to talking about it was Nick himself, who would bug Savanna in the reception room, asking her about Hadley’s donations, wondering if Hadley was coming by the station, repeating something funny Hadley had said.

  When Fletcher and Nick had talked about the social scene in town, Fletcher hadn’t been too surprised to find it was scant. Before coming back to Greensburg, Fletcher had wondered how many of his old high school friends were still around. There were a few, but most of those who stayed in town had already married their high school sweetheart and settled into a life that was way outside Fletcher’s experience. He didn’t seem to be reconnecting with anyone he’d been close to in years past. He wasn’t eager to spend every night sitting alone in his apartment by the river while his mom slept off her treatments, so he decided to take Nick up on his offers to play ball and see a couple of movies. There was no real reason not to like him. After all, the only thing the poor guy was actually guilty of was good taste in women. Nick invited, and Fletcher accepted. Before too many weeks, Fletcher considered Nick a good friend.

  Then there was Savanna.

  Fletcher thought that he could become friends with Savanna and thereby learn about Hadley’s new life without having to actually speak to Hadley again. Ever.

  No such luck.

  Savanna was clearly biased against him by Hadley, because in all his years, he’d never naturally ticked off a woman like he seemed to consistently, continuously do to Savanna. She was practically allergic to him. Every time he walked through the station lobby, she glared at him then looked away. As she shuffled paperwork, he always got the worst assignments. Deliveries that came for him would mysteriously get shoved in the back of a pile.

  She made no secret of her contempt, rolling her eyes at every charming and clever comment he made in the station. She refused to be impressed.

  Fletcher knew he was not imagining this animosity, because it was the delight of the entire crew.

  Red watched Savanna deliver an assignment to Fletcher one day, and by the time she’d finished, Red was flushed from hairline to neck trying not to laugh. “Boy, whatever you did to ruffle that one, you ruffled her good. She’s usually a real nice girl, but whenever you come onto the scene, her claws come right out.”

  Fletcher shook his head. “That was mild. I wo
ndered if she’d given up her crusade to make my life miserable. I actually thought that was her being nice to me.”

  Fletcher and Nick were spotting each other in the weight room one evening, and Savanna called in on the intercom to let Fletcher know he was needed in the chief’s office. Her tone was icy, to put it mildly.

  Nick asked, “Is it possible that you said something to offend her?”

  “I inhale and exhale daily, and she seems to find that inexcusable.”

  Laughing, Nick pressed the bar up to full extension. “Okay, but maybe you did something you don’t even know you did.”

  Fletcher stood at Nick’s head, spotting him as he lifted. “I don’t know, man. Some people hate tomatoes. Some people hate curry. Savanna Deveraux hates me. Even though I’m obviously the human equivalent to tomatoes and curry.”

  “Ice cream,” Nick grunted as he placed the bar in the bar holder.

  “What?” Fletcher asked.

  “When you do that analogy, you should be ice cream. Instead of tomatoes or curry. Everyone loves ice cream.” He reached for a towel and wiped it over his hair and face.

  “Right. Okay. But I think the point is that I wouldn’t really care that Savanna hates me if we didn’t work together. I mean, if she worked anywhere else, she could hate me in her own space and life would carry on without any problem. But here, with her watching me like she’s trying to see if there’s anything she can report back to a friend…it’s creepy.”

  Fletcher stopped talking, because as soon as he said those words, he realized that what he meant was that Savanna could report back to Hadley. They were obviously close. And with just an ounce of introspection, Fletcher realized he didn’t want Savanna to tell Hadley his flaws, whether they were real or figments of her overactive, vengeful imagination.