We stood in her kitchen eating cereal, looking at each other. She ate hers out of a measuring cup because she “likes the handle.” It made me smile.
“Don’t smile at me.” She gave me a warning glare. She’d been feisty from the moment she woke up. It was adorable.
Her hair tumbled wild around her face, still curled a little from the party, and she wore nothing but an oversize sweatshirt that bared one shoulder and the light-blue lace G-string I’d gotten to take off her last night. She was beautiful. So fucking sexy.
“I can’t even smile now?” I grinned at her. My heart was so damn happy. Waking up with her was like Christmas when you see you got everything you wanted. I woke up with a grin on my face, and then she’d gotten up and
jumped me again.
It had been a good morning.
“I need to make sure you’re clear on the rules here,” she said over her cereal. “This is a booty-call situation. That’s it. Friends with benefits.”
Yeah, she’d said that last night—a few times actually. I’d been so focused on the sex part of that statement I hadn’t really processed the rest of it. I’d been a little distracted at the time. Now that we were clothed, and my brain was working properly, I was ready to address this.
“What if I don’t want to be just friends with benefits?” I smiled at her. “Then we’ll only be friends.” Her face was stony.
Wow. Okay.
Was she really bent on this booty-call thing? I’d half thought she was just giving me shit last night with the whole “thanks for the sex, get out now” bullshit. She liked to give me a hard time—it was her thing. I didn’t think she was entirely serious.
I decided to poke her.
“Oh yeah? So we can see other people, then?” I took a bite of my cereal with a smirk.
Something flashed in her eyes. “Of course. Bone whoever you want.” She shrugged, looking away from me.
I studied the side of her face. Her forehead wrinkled the way it did when she was frustrated. It bothered her—I could see it. So if it bothered her, why was she insisting on it?
“Well, we should probably start using condoms, then,” I said casually, calling her bluff.
“Fine. We probably should have used them anyway.” She put her cereal in the sink.
This was not the answer I had hoped for. She didn’t like condoms, so I’d been expecting something snarky along the lines of, “Well, I’m not the one who wants to see other people.”
Now I’d just talked myself into using a condom. Fuck.
I set my cereal down on the counter. “Well, you’re on birth control. And of course, if we agreed to be exclusive, we could keep—”
“Nope. Condoms are fine.”
She walked out of the kitchen, and I watched her go with a wrinkled brow. But I didn’t have time to get further into it with her. I had to be at work in twenty minutes. I’d slept all of two hours last night. I was exhausted and work was going to suck because of it.
It had been worth it.
I washed my bowl and went looking for her. She sat on the couch with Stuntman Mike, her laptop on her lap.
“I gotta go to work,” I said. I’d talk to her about this later.
I put my hand on the back of the couch and leaned down to kiss her, and she jerked her head back. “No. We don’t kiss unless we’re fucking.”
The comment gave me a small, unexpected jab in the heart. “Why?” “Because this is a sex thing, Joshua. It will only ever be a sex thing.
We’re not dating. There are not going to be any public displays of affection
or hand-holding or any of it. If you can’t deal with that, then let’s stop this right now.”
I stared at her, and she looked back at her screen, emotionless. “Okay.” I straightened up. “Well, I’ll see you in a few days. For sex.” “Bye,” she said, talking to her computer.
I gave her one more lingering look. She never raised her eyes.
A wall. An enormous wall had suddenly come up between us. What the hell?
I didn’t understand it. Could she actually be serious about this? She didn’t want to date me? At all? Ever? Why?
This wasn’t some girl I wanted to call at 2:00 in the morning to bang and leave. I liked her. I more than liked her—I wanted to be with her. I’d been hoping this was the start of something between us. If she’d wanted to be exclusive, I would have slapped on the boyfriend title in a second.
Could this be about Tyler? I mean, I guess I just thought by how quickly she’d thrown herself at me that she wasn’t too upset over the breakup.
We hadn’t talked about it—I certainly wasn’t going to bring up Tyler if she wasn’t, and she hadn’t broached the subject. She didn’t really filter, so if he’d been on her mind or the breakup was fucking with her, she’d say it, right?
But the only thing she was saying was that she didn’t want me. It ate at me the whole way to work.
Once I got to the station, Shawn put me through a two-hour list of shitty probie chores. By the time I had a chance to talk to Brandon, he was working out.
The gym was a large gray-carpeted room off the apparatus bay. One treadmill, a bike, and an elliptical that nobody ever used sat in a row facing a mirrored wall. Three weight benches, a punching bag, and a rack of weights lined the other wall with a view of the fire engine through a large window.
I grabbed a cup of water from the watercooler by the door and took a weight bench next to where Brandon sat doing curls. “Hey. Sloan’s car broke down on us last night. Stranded us in a fucking parking lot in Skid Row.” I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees, holding my water cup between my legs. “And I hooked up with Kristen.”
Brandon finished his set. “Well, I can’t say either thing really surprises
me.” He pivoted to face me and grinned, bouncing his eyebrows.
I took another swallow of my water. “She broke up with her boyfriend last night.”
“Good.” He started doing curls on his other arm. “Sloan’ll be happy.” “Well, I’m glad someone’s getting what they want out of it. She doesn’t
want to date me. Sex only.”
“Okay. What’s the problem?” He set his weight down with a thump. “I thought you didn’t want to date. Didn’t you blow off that yoga instructor?”
“This is different. I like Kristen. A lot. And we get along. We get along fucking great. And the weird thing is I know she likes me too—I can tell. Something doesn’t feel right.” I finished my water and crushed the cup, tossing it into the trash can by the towels.
“Hmm. How was the sex?” he asked.
I scoffed. “Fuck, it was the best sex I’ve ever had. Not even kidding.”
She’d pounced me like a hungry tiger that escaped its cage. The way she smelled, the way she tasted—even thinking about it made my dick twitch.
Shawn came through the door and tossed a gym towel onto the weight rack. “What up, fellas?”
Brandon and I nodded at him.
“Just ask her what her deal is,” Brandon said. “It’s probably because she just broke up with what’s-his-face. Kristen’s pretty blunt. I don’t imagine her not telling you exactly what she’s thinking if you asked.”
Shawn sat on the other bench next to Brandon. “You talking about Kristen? Sloan’s friend? She’s single now? She’s hot as fuck. I’d hit it.” He lay down and scooted under the weight bar.
I grabbed his towel and threw it at him. “Hey, asshole, she’s taken.” Shawn laughed, dragging the towel off his face. “Not by you.” “Yes, by me.” Sort of.
He paused with his hands on his barbell and looked over at me. “Damn!
You’re crushing that? She’s gone slumming, bro!” I gave him the finger.
Brandon chuckled. “Do you want me to ask Sloan?”
“No.” Kristen and Sloan would see that shit a mile away. “Don’t ask.
Don’t tell her what I said, yeah?”
He picked his weight up and started doing curls again. “Just see how it goes. Give it a few weeks.”
Shawn grinned. “Can’t nail that shit down, huh?”
I ignored him and stood up to grab weights for my barbell. I wasn’t getting into this with him. Relationship advice from Shawn was the last thing I fucking needed. He’d had his car egged by girls so many times we’d had to start locking the gate to the fire station parking lot.
Shawn grunted through his set and put the bar back on the rack with a clang. “She probably wants to get back with the ex.”
“He reenlisted. It’s why they broke up,” I said, wanting to put that theory to bed. “He’s not coming back.”
Brandon spoke up. “Her idea to break up or his?”
“Hers. Or maybe his. I’m not sure.” He reenlisted knowing she’d leave him if he did.
I hadn’t thought of that. Even if she’d broken up with him, her hand had been forced. So in a way, he’d done the leaving.
Shit, maybe that changed things.
Shawn sat there catching his breath. “He’s gonna miss those care packages and titty pics and come begging. Trust me, dude. And in the meantime she’s gonna revenge fuck her way through her contacts list.” He reached down and grabbed his water bottle, taking a drink. “Looks like she just got to the j’s.”
Jealousy surged at the thought of Tyler trying to get her back. Now I wished I had brought him up earlier so I knew how she felt about it all.
Brandon chuckled and switched arms. “She probably just needs time, bud.”
Shawn snickered, scooting back under his bar. “She probably just needs the d, and not just yours.”
“Fuck you,” I said, tightening my weight on the bar.
Brandon laughed. “Come on, it’s been what? Twelve hours since they broke up? You can’t expect her to just dive right into another relationship, no matter how amazing you might be.”
Brandon had a point. But maybe Shawn did too. She’d been tied down for two years. Maybe she was happy to be single and wanted to see what else was out there.
I didn’t like that. At all. I didn’t like anything Shawn was pointing out. Suddenly my forty-eight-hour shift felt too long.
The red lights flashed through the gym. We had a call. All three of us
were up in an instant.
The voice of the dispatcher came over the loudspeaker. “Person down. Engine ten respond to sick person at four thirty-seven Palm Drive with medic unit six hundred seventy-four.”
We streamed out of the gym into the apparatus bay and climbed into the engine as Javier came out of the crew quarters.
“I almost got to eat a sandwich,” Javier said, getting into the front seat with the laptop.
I climbed into the driver’s seat. Shawn sat behind me next to Brandon and put on his headset. “Hey, Javier, Josh’s fucking Kristen.”
Javier paused mid–seat belt and looked at me. “Really? Isn’t she engaged?”
I turned on the ignition and the engine rumbled to life. “No. She broke up with him last night. She doesn’t want to date me though. And I’m not fucking her. I like her, asshole,” I said over my shoulder.
Shawn snorted. “Naw, she’s fucking you. Hey, man, for real though—if you’re a dick in a jar, you better not rock the boat.”
I put on my headset. “What?” I hit the button to open the bay doors and turned on the lights.
“You’re a dick in a jar. Chris Rock? ‘Break in case of emergencies.’ She had an emergency, dude,” Shawn said. “If you start getting all stage-five clinger, she’s gonna replace your ass and get a new jar.”
Brandon laughed. “I think what he’s saying is to give her space.”
Javier opened up the laptop. “Normally I’d disagree with any and everything Shawn says, but as an old married guy with two grown daughters, I have to agree with him. It’s too soon. Let things happen naturally.”
Javier looked at the laptop and got the specifics for the call. Vague. Sick person, possibly unconscious.
More bullshit.
A toothache. Drunks. So, so many drunks. Hell, this call was probably a drunk. “Sick person” was the universal code for “no idea, but probably someone shit-faced.”
I closed the bay door behind us and fired up the sirens.
Shawn didn’t drop it. “Hey, maybe she’ll get a brown jar next. I got a jar she might like.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, turning onto Victory. “They make jars that small?”
The guys laughed and Javier talked to his screen. “I met the love of my life at nineteen. Never got to play the field. Kind of wish I did. Be single. Date around in the meantime.”
“I’ve dated around,” I mumbled.
Nobody was like Kristen. Witty, beautiful. Smart. She made me laugh. I loved talking to her, loved seeing what she thought about things. Over these last few weeks, she’d become my other best friend. And dating around wasn’t an option—it was a waste of time.
We pulled up to a tired apartment complex. When we got inside, I was right. More bullshit. A lady pretending to be unconscious after a fight with her husband. She wanted him to think he’d given her a heart attack. A nice little guilt trip.
These theatrics seemed to be a relatively common affliction here. I’d gone on five calls like this since I’d gotten to California. Someone pretending to have a medical emergency to get attention. A waste of time and resources.
We didn’t get calls like this in small-town South Dakota. We got a fraction of the calls they did here, but when we did get them, they were legitimate. People didn’t call 911 unless they needed to fucking call. They didn’t use us as props for their dramas. Small-town people had pride.
I couldn’t wait to tell Kristen about this shit. She loved hearing about my calls. It was the first thing we caught up on when I would come back over after a shift. She’d have something hilarious to say for sure. Last week I’d single-handedly wrangled three drunks into the back of an ambulance, and she’d called me the Idiot Whisperer.
On the way back to the engine with the crew, I spoke low to Brandon. “How do you stay so fucking patient with these people?”
Brandon shrugged. “It’s just the job. You do your best to educate them when you can.”
“Does it work?”
“No,” Shawn said with a laugh, and Javier chuckled behind him.
I shook my head. “You know, I considered the Forest Service before the move. I’m starting to think I should have looked more into that.”
Shawn snickered. “What? You wanna be a fucking gardener?”
“The Forest Service isn’t that bad,” Brandon said, loading his gear back
into the engine.
“Not having to deal with people?” I said. “Being outside, in nature?
What’s not to like?”
Shawn climbed into the engine. “You’re just fucking clearing brush.
Smokey the Bear shit.”
“And that’s worse than this?” I asked. “We just revived a woman who wasn’t unconscious. At least I’d be actually accomplishing something.”
I climbed back into my seat and put on my headset. Javier had snagged someone from the complex about the trash in front of the fire hydrant, so we all sat and waited.
Fuck. What was I doing with my life? Did I really want to do this shit for the next twenty years? I didn’t know if I had the patience. Sure, I got to go on some cool calls sometimes. I delivered a baby last week, and I put out a car fire. But most of it was crap like this. And the probation made it worse.
I could have applied for the Forest Service. Maybe tried Northern California. Lived near wine country and the redwoods where I could have hunted and owned some land.
But then there was Kristen.
If I’d moved somewhere else and come here for Brandon’s wedding and met Kristen then, I would have wished I lived here by the time the night was done. I knew I would. She was special. She wasn’t just some girl. I think I’d known that the day I met her.
I pulled out my cell phone and scrolled to her name, looking at the blinking line, waiting for me to type a text. And tell her what? She wouldn’t even let me kiss her goodbye this morning. Why would she want to hear from me?
My whole life was one big probationary period at the moment. I was in limbo, waiting to see if things got better.
There was only one way to get through it. Put my head down. Do a good job. And do what I’d been told.
I’d just have to bide my time.
