“Yeah, but comparing mine to his is like comparing Sunny D to orange juice.”
Savannah looked at Hadley and said nothing before changing out of her gym clothes.
“This,” Hadley said, gesturing to her head, “is wiry and coarse and brazenly out of control. His hair is like silky gelato. Melted butter.”
“You going to eat it?” Sav asked, her head reappearing in the neck of her hoodie.
“It feels like baby bird feathers.”
“How would you even know that?” Savanna asked.
This, for reasons she couldn’t have explained, made Hadley start what felt precisely like a laughing fit.
“Uh-oh.” She looked at Savanna and snorted.
“Stop it,” Savanna commanded. “Not again.”
“Looks like yes—again,” she said, doing her best to keep the laughter in control. It didn’t work. Hadley burst into a loud laugh. She tried to stop, but even if she covered her mouth, the laugh kept coming.
Savanna rolled her eyes. “You,” she said, pointing an accusatory finger at Hadley’s chest, “are unhinged. Unstable.”
She pulled her bag out of her locker. “Get me out of here,” Hadley wheezed. “I can’t see.”
Through Hadley’s usual laughter-induced tears, Savanna muttered about never having to drag her other friends out of buildings because they couldn’t stop giggling. Hadley tried to apologize, but the laugh stole all her breath.
“You know, I looked this up on Wikipedia once,” Sav said, as if researching Hadley’s inability to stop laughing was a normal activity for a friend to do.
“What did you find?” Hadley gasped. This seemed so funny that she burst into a new peal of laughter.
“Usually stems from a traumatic brain injury.”
Hadley stopped short. “That isn’t funny at all,” she said.
The two women stared at each other with their mouths open. “It worked,” Savanna said. “You stopped.”
“All you had to do was tell me something totally unfunny?” Hadley started to ask, but before the words were out of her mouth, she began cracking up again. Savanna laughed too, and the two of them pushed out into the chilly evening, arm in arm, howling at the sky.
Making their way to the parking lot, Hadley fully leaning on Savanna’s shoulder, Sav said, “We must look like we’re wasted.”
This, obviously, made Hadley laugh harder. “We’re drunk on workout endorphins.” At least, that was what she tried to say. She didn’t get much past “we’re drunk” when they turned the corner and crashed into a jogger.
Hadley covered her mouth with both hands, but still tried to help the guy they’d run into get up off the curb.
“Sorry,” Hadley laughed into one hand, reaching with the other, tears streaming from her eyes. “Sorry.” More snorting. When her hand made contact with the jogger, she stopped short again, all laughing ended.
Even through her tears, the truth was impossible to miss. The jogger was Fletcher.
Her laugh stopped as though she’d been punched in the stomach (although Savanna had tried that once and it hadn’t stopped the giggles that time). Dropping Fletcher’s hand as though his touch burned her skin, she jumped back.
“Oh,” she said.
Pulling himself off the curb, he gave a half-chuckle, half-sigh. “One of us keeps ending up flat on the sidewalk.”
Neither woman answered. Savanna took a step back from Fletcher.
“You both okay?” he asked.
“Fine.” Hadley’s response held no hint of a laugh now. She turned away.
“Well,” Savanna said to Fletcher over her shoulder, “looks like you’re useful for something after all.”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
Savanna said, “You certainly kill a good mood.”
Hadley felt a tug. She hated to let Savanna have the last word when she acted like this around men; the problem was that Savanna almost always acted like this around guys from the station. Savanna and alpha males repelled each other, and neither looked better for the interaction.
But even while regretting Savanna’s harshness, Hadley wasn’t about to give Fletcher the pleasure of thinking she was happy to see him. She turned and walked toward her car.
Savanna followed after her, muttering imprecations about Fletcher that Hadley didn’t need to try too hard to hear. She’d heard them all before.
Unlocking her car door, Hadley said, “Good news / bad news.”
Leaving the mutter behind, Savanna said, “Go.”
“Good news: No more giggles. Bad news: I need ice cream now. By which I mean a great deal of ice cream, and right now.” She threw her workout bag into the back seat. It slid to the floor and joined a scattered pile of assorted tin buckets she planned to use to hold flowers in the shop.
“When you say need, do you actually mean that your half-second interaction with”—Savanna wrinkled up her face as if she’d smelled something sour and pointed back over her shoulder—“that guy has created a void in your digestive system? A void that can only be filled with butterfat and processed sugars?”
“If I tell the truth and say yes, will you keep on bugging me about my nutritional shortcomings?” Hadley asked. Savanna had more than a usual interest in Hadley’s dietary intake. Probably because Savanna was forever trying a new diet, whereas Hadley subscribed to the “eat what you want when you feel hungry” food plan.
Savanna’s shrug didn’t convince Hadley this would ever end. “Maybe. Probably. I mean, yes. Definitely.”
Head shaking, Hadley prepared to argue even as she slid into the driver’s seat of her car. “Eating ice cream is not a sign of weakness,” Hadley said. “And I know it’s true, because somewhere in the shop, there’s a needlepointed pillow that says so.”
“Eating ice cream and needing ice cream are fundamentally different things,” Savanna said, but Hadley closed her car door and started the engine so she couldn’t hear any more. She kissed the tips of her fingers and flung the kiss at the window to Savanna, who pretended to catch it and stick it in her pocket. No offense meant, and none taken. Hadley pulled out of the parking lot. If she happened to drive by the market and happened to run inside for a pint of Ben & Jerry’s (or two—one each for Ben and Jerry so as not to leave anyone out), it didn’t mean she was being reactive.
But, she reasoned, if she was being reactive, she had a good excuse to be.
How was it possible to still feel a jolt of electricity when she caught Fletcher’s eye? It had been years. Years of hurt and anger and conscious forgetting. She had worked through her emotions related to Fletcher Gates: with her mom, with her friends, with a reasonably-priced therapist. Her brain knew how to respond to the idea of him. But apparently nobody had told her body how it should respond to the reality of him. The touch of his hand left a tingling in her fingers even now, blocks away. She held her hand to her cheek, allowing herself to remember the feeling of his hands on her face.
But only for a second. Maybe one more second. Three more seconds, tops.
She pulled into the grocery market parking lot, choosing a spot near the cart return instead of the door. Not that she planned to get an entire cartload of ice cream. Nobody ever planned to get an entire cartload of ice cream. Sometimes these things simply happened.
She grabbed a dog-hair-covered hoodie from the back seat, shook it out, and pulled it over her head. Catching the reflection of her post-workout hair situation in the car window made her laugh. Good thing she wasn’t on the hunt because this look was unlikely to impress anyone.
Propelling the cart in front of her, she headed straight for the freezer section. On a more self-respecting day, she’d at least pick up some fruit first. Or put a cut-flower arrangement in the top of the basket. But this wasn’t that kind of day. This was the day she’d had to face her past. In the form of Fletcher Gates. Bigger than life. Smelling like pine woods after a rainstorm.
Hadley gave herself a mental slap. “Snap out of it,” she commanded
herself. Parked in front of the ice cream freezer, she wondered if there was some place on the internet that would analyze her ice cream choices.
She could picture it.
An online quiz: Which of the following best describes your current state of mind?
(a) Chaotic
(b) Depressed
(c) Overstretched
(d) Conflicted because your former boyfriend showed up in your hometown and nobody bothered to warn you that this was coming and you can’t stand the guy, but somehow you also can’t actually take your eyes off him when you accidentally run into him (literally) twice in one day
Key: If you answered a, your ice cream should be fruity. If b, chocolate. The more chocolate, the better. A c answer requires handheld ice cream: something with “bites” in the title because spoons are simply more than you need in your life right now. If you chose d, honey, that’s all of the above. Fill that cart.
Hadley tossed a few pints into the basket. “One for Ben, one for Jerry, one for me,” she said. And then again. And again.
A voice behind her said, “Do you know how to convert pints to gallons? Because I think you’d save a lot of money, not to mention significant packaging waste, if you went for the jumbo container.”
Hadley felt her face heat up.
“Seriously?” she asked the universe, or at least the flickering flourescent light tubes above her head. She turned to see Fletcher, damp from his run, standing beside her cart. The cart filled with an impressive amount of ice cream.
“Do you actually think I need your help to buy ice cream?” Taking a small step toward him, she poked a finger at his arm. “Do you really think that I don’t know that it’s cheaper to buy in bulk? Did it ever occur to you that there are other considerations? And that I might have enough brains to think of them?” Her face flamed.
He smiled as if she’d said something charming. “Hello, Hadley.”
“Goodbye, Fletcher.”
She spun the cart so it headed toward the registers, which in her mind had been a slick operation but in reality involved more lumbering than she liked. As she trundled away, she heard a sound that could have been a laugh.
Great. First, she fell on her backside in front of him. Then she knocked him flat while appearing to be wasted. Now she ran away, sweaty, frazzled, covered in dog hair and pushing a cart loaded with several thousand calories worth of junk food.
Impressive. Always impressive.
Chapter 3
How had he ever been in love with that woman? Every time Fletcher treated her politely, she made him regret it.
Had she always acted like this? Had she always been so dismissive? If she’d acted this way—spiteful, angry—all the years they were together and he hadn’t noticed, then he was grateful for the distance, both in time and in location, that had separated them and allowed him to see her clearly.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t get the sight of her out of his head. When he closed his eyes, there was Hadley’s face. When he turned every corner, she appeared. Literally. Inside the fire station. On the street. At the market.
Stop thinking about her, he told himself. Groceries. Remember why you’ve come.
He shook his head and tossed a bag of frozen tortellini into his cart. The deal he’d made with his mom was that he’d return to Greensburg and help her out during the course of her treatments, only she’d have to let him cook on dialysis days. It was a sign of how sick she felt that she hadn’t argued with him at all. He still had to take on the fight about having his turn scrubbing bathrooms and doing laundry, but it could wait.
His mom had never questioned the likelihood that he’d get hired at the station. Turned out that she was right: someone who had a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and wildland fire science followed by a stint at Great Basin Smokejumpers and a few years on BLM crews was a good bet.
Chief Grantham had been ready and willing to give him a place. Eager, even. Fletcher knew much of that was due to the memory of his father, a lifer with the Greensburg station. But the fact that his dad fought fires in Greensburg didn’t guarantee Fletcher a place there. He knew he’d earned his spot on the crew, and after only one afternoon in the station, he felt that it was a great fit for him.
Red had asked Fletcher about settling back into an urban station after years of wildland work. Fletcher had attempted to answer him while constantly looking over his shoulder in case Hadley reappeared in the truck bay. She never did, but he’d kept looking.
Unlikely to take Fletcher’s distraction as anything other than first day nerves, Red had let Fletcher off the hook, suggesting that they catch up the next day as soon as Fletcher was ready to immerse himself in the daily details of station life. He’d shown Fletcher to his locker and told him to call it a day.
Fletcher pulled together ingredients for a salad from the produce section, and at the checkout stand he picked up a package of wrapped flowers for his mom. The woman who rang up his groceries flirted harmlessly, telling him he’d have to come back next week and try the store-made lasagna that would be on sale.
“Oh, you bet I’ll be back,” Fletcher said, and watched the woman smile to herself. A perfect volley—low-stakes return flirting, but no overt gestures from either side. Fletcher sighed in relief, realizing, as he did, that he’d been worried about reentering not only Greensburg life, but populated areas in general.
Years of living in barracks like a soldier and parachuting out of planes and helicopters into forest fires had dulled his social edge. To put it bluntly, Fletcher was no longer certain that he had game. His truly awful interactions with Hadley today, not to mention the utter disdain he’d received from Savanna at the station, had only highlighted his awkwardness. But he could still flirt with strangers he would probably never see again.
“Way to aim high,” he told himself as he drove the four blocks back to his parents’ home. His mom’s house.
In none of his plans for adult life had he allowed for the possibility of moving back to his hometown. He was pretty sure that wasn’t his mom’s plan for him, either. But neither was her illness.
Fletcher was self-aware enough to understand that there was an appeal to his sense of heroism in this move. His mom was the strongest woman he knew, but she needed him. And Fletcher loved to be needed. Nobody became a fireman because he didn’t want to rescue people.
Tonight, he’d rescue his mom with a dish of tortellini alfredo.
And he’d attempt to forget that he’d managed to injure, annoy, or offend Hadley Booth three times in one day.
“As if I didn’t see her enough today, now she’s moving into my head,” he said to himself, pulling his truck into his mom’s driveway.
He let himself in the garage door, and from the mudroom he could see his mom curled up on the couch, covered with a blanket.
“Mom?” he whispered.
She didn’t answer, so he came in quietly and boiled water for the pasta. He placed the flowers in a glass vase and set them on the table where his mom would see them when she got up. After putting the meal together and placing hers on a plate in the fridge, he checked again to see that she was still sleeping. Seeing that she was, he wolfed down his dinner.
A few minutes later, he slipped out the door, got back in the truck, and drove around town for a while, checking out the expansion on the west side, where forests had been left to grow wild all through his growing-up years.
Now, only pockets of trees remained between blocks of lookalike houses on square-grid roads. The difference between these new cookie-cutter neighborhoods and his parents’ charming, winding, treelined street made him wonder if the city planner had any regrets.
Surprised to find himself mourning the loss of his woods, the woods where he used to ride his bike, where he played adventure games with his buddies, where he camped in a leaky tent, where he kissed Hadley for the first time.… He hadn’t thought about that in years. But now that it had entered his mind, it was tough to erase the images.
October of their sophomore year in high school, walking through the woods, he’d finally been brave enough to hold her hand. She wore a puffy coat that made a swishing sound as her arm swung with his. Curls escaping from the confines of her green beanie, she’d looked like some kind of mystical fantasy creature. A fairy. A pixie. A figment of his imagination.
She’d walked and talked about everything and nothing, swinging his hand as if she did this every day. He could still remember the dreamlike way he kept sneaking glances at her face to see if she was real. When she’d stopped him and stood on the stump of a fallen tree, beckoning him to stand in front of her, he couldn’t believe she’d given him such an easy excuse to stare directly at her face.
“Did your boys give you a bad time?” she’d asked, her hand on the shoulder of his jacket. The closeness evaporated any eloquence he might have been able to muster at fifteen.
“Huh?”
She grabbed a handful of the fabric of his jacket. “You know,” she said. “I heard Sebastian and Joey in history yesterday. They said they made bets that you’d chicken out of kissing me last night after the football game.”
He remembered perfectly the combination of his feelings in that moment. ‘I’m going to kill those idiots’ battled with ‘She is so close to me and she is smiling.’ And flowing around and through it all was the feeling that he had to defend himself. If he’d never felt a good old-fashioned dose of machismo before, he’d felt it right then.
“I didn’t chicken out.” How he’d wished his voice had come out sounding more solid, more deep. Not quite so squeaky.
She’d laughed, loud and free with her head thrown back. Crooking her finger at him, she motioned him to come closer before he had a chance to become offended. He could still feel how his heart had pounded from his temples to the pit of his stomach. “Yeah,” she whispered, her mouth crooking into a perfect smile, “maybe you didn’t chicken out exactly, but you didn’t kiss me, either.” Her words came out with tiny puffs of steam from her breath in the cold, evening air.
Always You: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Collection Books 5-8) Page 20
