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

by Brenna Jacobs

  Nick stacked the weight plates in the corner, laughing about how Savanna seemed to hate them all, but for some reason, Fletcher the most. How maybe he reminded her of someone else. “She does seem like she’d happily contract a hit on you,” Nick admitted, “but she’d look gorgeous making that call.”

  On Fletcher’s day off one Tuesday, he took his mom to her doctor’s appointment. He’d been with her at dialysis a couple of times, and he found the process fascinating. The fact that machines existed that could literally remove her blood, clean it, and put it back into her body left his head spinning. He asked questions about the science of it, held his mom’s hand, and read her a book as she lay in the clinic’s bed.

  Today, Rose Gates had other ideas.

  “You’re not coming with me,” she told Fletcher.

  He laughed at his mom and patted her shoulder. “Remember how this is why I came back to town?”

  She playfully swatted his hand away. “You did not come back here to sit around and flirt with nurses in the dialysis clinic.”

  He feigned offense. “How can you say such a thing?” he asked, his hand over his heart. “You’re the only woman for me.”

  Rose raised her eyebrows. “That had better not be true.”

  Fletcher’s shrug was only partly in jest. “Let’s just say that at this moment, you’re my best girl.”

  Fletcher was not completely sure he heard her reply correctly, but he thought she’d said something like, ‘we’ll deal with that.’

  Time for a subject change.

  “If you really don’t want me to come to the clinic with you today, will you at least give me a few more things I can fix for you?” Her honey-do list was keeping his off-hours nights and weekends meaningful, if not actively busy. A lot can fall apart in a thirty-year-old house. She had managed to keep most things in working order since his dad had passed, but there were plenty of small projects that came to her mind as he continued to offer.

  “Sure. How about replacing the chains on the porch swing? They’re starting to rust a little.”

  “No problem. I’ll drive you to the clinic and then head over to Dawson’s and find new chains. What else?”

  Rose shrugged. “Quite a few things have changed on that block of Main Street. Maybe you should wander around and see what’s new.”

  When Fletcher escorted his mom into the clinic and saw her comfortably in a chair, he kissed her on the cheek and headed out the door.

  The sounds and smells of Dawson’s Hardware took him back to his childhood as much as living in his mom’s basement did. He recognized the fresh-cut lumber scent mingling with paint fumes and engine smells from the repair center at the back of the store. He remembered being small enough that the shelves of tools and parts and bolts seemed to rise up into the sky. Now he could recognize that the whole effect might be a little shabby, but he was glad to be there, in a place he’d spent so much time when he was a kid.

  He had no idea when he’d turned into an eighty-year-old man, but all this nostalgia fit him like a button-up sweater.

  He bought a new chain for the porch swing, and wire and nails to hang up an IKEA print he had bought for his living space in the basement. The guy at the counter smiled and thanked him without asking any questions, which was a nice change from his usual interactions in Greensburg. There were a lot of people in town—old friends of his parents and parents of his old friends—who seemed to care what Fletcher was up to.

  He tossed the chains in the bed of his truck and walked the block partially to see what was new in the neighborhood, but mostly because his mom had told him to, and he was just no good at all at disappointing his mom.

  There was a new Mexican restaurant, and he wondered as he always did how their guacamole was. For a guy who didn’t like guacamole, he spent a fair amount of time thinking about how different Mexican places’ guacamole ranked on a scale from “fine” to “outstanding.”

  It was a holdover from the years he dated Hadley. They had eaten uncountable numbers of tacos in those years. And she was somehow rendered unable to eat a taco without an order of chips and guacamole.

  He humored her for a few months, but finally he had to ask her why she insisted on eating something that looked like it was delivered from the back end of a goat.

  She’d gasped. “Take it back. You can’t mean that.”

  “Oh, I can mean that, all right.” He loved the way her eyes crinkled when she was trying not to smile at him.

  “You’re a monster,” she said, looking at him as though she’d never seen him before. They were on school lunch break, and they had to be back at Hilltop High before Mr. Reynolds’s English class started. “Everything those other girls said about you was true. This is so disappointing.”

  She’d shaken her head and scooped a blob of guacamole into her mouth by way of a chip that was no more than a vehicle. With small noises of appreciation that made him want to kiss her, she completely ignored him and focused on her slimy green food.

  He could not take his eyes off her mouth back then.

  And somehow the idea of finding a perfect guacamole had never quite left him. He smiled at the memories of the good years. And they had been good.

  But none of that lasted.

  He shook off thoughts of Mexican food and kissing Hadley’s perfect mouth and pushed open the front door of a bookshop he’d never seen before. Maybe this was where Hadley was working. The window display held a huge cardboard tree, and the piles of books artfully stacked around it evoked fallen leaves in shades of gold, brown, and red leather. Hand-lettering on the glass invited passers-by to “Fall in Love with an Old Favorite.”

  Well that was a coincidence, he thought.

  Fletcher walked inside accompanied by the sound of a cowbell. A high-school-aged girl looked up, gave a half-hearted wave, and refocused her attention on the box in front of her.

  Looking around, Fletcher saw a dozen danger signs. He knew this building; it had been here forever as one thing or another, and so he knew it had a second exit door at the back, but in an emergency, nobody would be able to get to it. The shelving units weren’t actually teetering, but he wondered how stable they were, plus they were much too close together. Not to mention the fire hazard of so many old books. If someone so much as wore a wool sweater in here, the sparks from the static could take the place down.

  Not that he couldn’t see its charms. It looked like the kind of place his mom would shop at with its knick-knacks and eclectic offerings. He loved a bookstore as much as the next guy. More, maybe. In the five years he had been fighting fires in the Rocky Mountains, his mom had sent him a book every couple of months. He’d created a library in the BLM barracks with those books. That little library had been a refuge for him. There was always plenty of work to do, and in some seasons, he barely had time to sleep between calls to work the forest fires but knowing that those books waited for him gave him something other than destruction to focus on.

  He wandered through the shop, looking up at tilting shelves crammed with old paperbacks, antique magazines stuffed into wooden apple crates, and around a corner to the children’s section, where new books stood side by side with stories he’d loved as a kid. It was charming. And the wiring behind the shelves looked ancient. Big trouble.

  Fletcher bent down to inspect an electrical outlet on the wall next to an overstuffed chair. As he was folded over, he heard a quiet voice, inviting but not intruding. “Help you find anything?” He stood, turning, his head full of the dangers of the little shop, and found himself face to face with Hadley.

  Again.

  So this was where she worked.

  As soon as she saw it was him, the smile slid off her face, and without waiting for his reply, she turned and walked away.

  “Hadley, wait.”

  She stopped walking but did not turn back to face him.

  “Who’s in charge here?” he asked. His voice sounded sterner than he’d meant it to, and louder.

  “You’r
e looking at her,” she said.

  “You’re the manager?” he asked, aware that he sounded surprised. He tried to cover. “Cool.”

  She nodded, then shook her head. “Owner, manager, bookkeeper, custodian, maintenance crew, you name it.”

  “This is yours?” he asked. His voice had taken his surprise and turned it to shock. He hesitated. Hadley’s role as bookshop owner made his mission slightly more complicated. She wasn’t going to like what he had to say, but she was going to like it even less because it was him saying it. Still, fire safety was his job. He couldn’t say nothing just because he didn’t want to make his ex-girlfriend uncomfortable.

  “Hadley, this place is a disaster waiting to happen. You can’t have wooden crates full of paperback books that close to a radiator. And your light fixtures look like they’re ready to blow.”

  Her face held just about every negative reaction.

  She must not have understood him. He went on. “Your wiring must be close to a hundred years old, and there are no sprinklers in the ceiling. Do you even have extinguishers? Because I can’t see one. The aisles are way too crowded and close together. And I can’t even imagine what you’ve got going on behind those walls,” he said, pointing to the left.

  “No,” she said. “You can’t.” With a forced smile and a brittle sound in her voice, she added, “Make yourself comfortable,” and stepped around a shelf that hid everything but her hair. He watched her stand there, her back to him, and tug at her red curls the way she always had when she was feeling overwhelmed.

  Well, of course she felt that way. There was so much to rebuild and repair.

  It wasn’t his fault. He was only the messenger. Anyone who knew what he knew would have delivered the same message.

  Didn’t she know he was only trying to help?

  He could fix this. He could make it right and bring everything up to standards.

  He followed her around the shelf and saw that she stood there with her back against a stack of books, eyes closed and mouthing words to herself without making a sound. Her hands tugged at her hair until she threatened to do some actual damage.

  Fletcher reached out and touched her elbow.

  “Hadley?” he said, his voice quiet. “You okay?”

  She dropped her arms to her side and straightened up, putting on a polite if disinterested face. “Are you really asking me that? I’m fine.”

  She appeared less than fine when she bumped a shelf with her elbow and a stack of books came crashing down to the floor, burying her feet and ankles in a pile of paperbacks.

  The Hadley he had known years ago might have reacted to that moment with a maniacal laugh, as though she wanted to take credit for the small act of destruction by the power of her will; like she could knock things down by merely thinking about it. Her laugh might have turned to a fit of uncontrollable giggles, something that became a recurring event during college. Or she might mutter curses under her breath. He had learned enough to wait for her response before allowing himself to show any reaction.

  He simply waited, saying nothing, withholding any change in his expression. For a sliver of a moment, her face released its mask of cold politeness. She didn’t look angry. She didn’t look annoyed. Her expression softened for a breath of vulnerability. For the first time in many years, Fletcher saw Hadley exposed in a way she never allowed herself to be and his heart pounded in response.

  It lasted only long enough for him to realize he wanted the moment to play out forever, then Hadley quirked one eyebrow, shrugged, and squatted down among the cascade of books at her feet. “I better clean this up before it spontaneously combusts.”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  She shook her head. “You can’t be serious.”

  He didn’t understand. “I guess I’ve turned into a serious guy,” he said, trying not to hear her annoyed sigh.

  Fletcher knelt beside her and began returning books to a semblance of order, but he realized within seconds that he had no idea what that order might be. In his hands he held a dog-training manual, a science fiction novel from the sixties about space travel, and a brief history of bow ties in western Europe. His knee partly obscured a title that suggested ways to win any man, and one about beekeeping. A tattered copy of a romance novel with a shirtless fireman, complete with helmet in hand, made him blush.

  Hadley said nothing as she created orderly piles, but he could see her beginning to giggle. She powered past it, though, breathing slowly and sliding one book between others, organizing them into a system that Fletcher could only guess at.

  He wanted to do something helpful, but he had no idea what method he was supposed to use. Shelve by author? Subject? Level of disrepair?

  “What section are we in?” he ventured.

  Hadley met his eye for a brief moment before answering, “Yellow.”

  Obviously. The answer was so completely his old Hadley that Fletcher laughed. “Have lunch with me?” he surprised himself by asking.

  Her eyebrows flew up, but instead of looking offended, she looked surprised. “I can’t actually think of a reason not to,” she said, and her smile softened her words into a sweeter acceptance than he might have expected.

  Chapter 6

  Hadley told herself that the hardest part was now over. Fletcher had seen the shop. He’d reacted exactly as she’d expected him to. He’d been condescending, patronizing, and belittling. He’d treated her like a child, and she’d survived.

  Obviously, she’d been right all along. She was fine without him. Better than fine.

  No matter what her traitorous body had been trying to tell her by being drawn to him, it simply didn’t matter. They’d been finished for years, and they could and would and certainly should stay finished. She was glad this part was over, and now she looked forward to starting over, to being Fletcher’s friend.

  As long as he never came back to her shop.

  Or told her how to run it.

  Hadley smothered the smile that kept trying to surface as she stacked the remaining yellow books back on the shelf and attempted not to notice that Fletcher was watching her. She felt unreasonably proud that she had squashed down the laugh that had tried to explode from her. It showed she was in control of something.

  She wedged a fat fantasy novel, complete with swords and dwarfs on the cover, into the remaining space on the shelf and brushed her hands down her skirt.

  Pitching her voice so it wouldn’t come out squeaky, she turned to face Fletcher. “Done. Lunch?” She hoped he read the appropriate distance in her friendly tone. Or at least that he didn’t hear how much breath accompanied her words. Come on, she thought. Pull it together.

  She led him around a half-wall and back toward the break room, in which she never took breaks, but that title had a better ring to it than the tape-books-back-together room.

  “Let me grab my purse,” she said, and stepped through the door. Closing it behind her, she leaned against the door and shut her eyes, allowing herself to notice the blood rushing through her entire body. She could feel her pulse in her neck and wrists and the backs of her knees. Fletcher’s presence, even when he was acting superior and annoyingly heroic, still made her heartbeat quicken.

  She willed her body to knock it off already.

  With her eyes closed, she could picture Fletcher’s face, his broad, defined shoulders, those hands that used to hold her so gently. An image she’d conjured so many times over the years…

  When she felt a smile creeping across her face, she opened her eyes and shook her head to clear it. “Fantasy Fletcher not necessary,” she reminded herself in an undertone. “Real thing, right outside the door.”

  Pulling her purse off the hook on the wall, she reminded herself that he’d dumped her. That she resented him. That it didn’t matter how tall and broad and chiseled he was, he was still the same guy. The same guy that could walk into her shop and point out everything he didn’t like, everything of which he didn’t approve. The same guy who could sound so pat
ronizing with his talk about substandard wiring. The same sweet, attentive, tender guy… Stop it, she told herself. He broke your heart. You were all wrong for each other then, and you’re all wrong for each other now. This is only lunch.

  She checked herself in the mirror on the wall. Her overpriced, non-stop lipstick was holding up as advertised. Even right on her front tooth. Great. How long had that been there? She scrubbed at the spot with her finger, glanced at her crazy pile of hair, and shrugged.

  She did adore the flowy, vintage blouse she wore, paired with a charcoal pencil skirt. Discovering that she loved to dress to match the shop had been a surprise—a little bit of old, a little bit of new, a little bit of something surprising. Faith told her she was a brand. She could get behind that.

  When she reemerged from the break room, Fletcher was standing in profile, head bent over a book in his hands. He was smiling at whatever he was reading, his lips slightly parted. Hadley, looking at his smile, remembered how he’d looked in his braces when they’d first met, and how different it had felt to kiss him the day those braces came off.

  Her hands were sweating. “Stop being so shallow,” she whispered to herself.

  Not hearing her, Fletcher kept reading, completely unaware that she was reliving the glory days a few feet away. She stepped over to him and pulled the book out of his hands. “No more free samples,” she said.

  He had to know she was kidding, since every patron of the shop was currently standing in front of a shelf or sitting in a chair, nose in a book. He didn’t argue, and the leftovers of his smile still crinkled his eyes.

  “Food.” She turned and strode toward the door, certain that he would keep up.

  When they passed the front desk, she called out to Faith. “Grabbing lunch. I’ll be back in an hour.”

  “Turkey with lettuce and tomato on wheat, please,” Faith called back.

  Hadley waved her hand to show she’d heard, and the cowbell clanked as Fletcher reached around her to hold the door as she walked through.