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

by Brenna Jacobs

  Fletcher didn’t seem to notice that she’d avoided giggle-borne humiliation as he consulted whatever thesaurus he kept in his head. He pointed at her again. “Incite.” When he was rewarded with a particularly drippy lick to the ear, he said, “Aw, come on. That was a good one. Okay, try this one.” He lowered his voice to a dangerous whisper. Hadley was glad it was directed to Edison’s ear instead of hers, especially when she heard him say, “Inflame.”

  Inflame, indeed. She was laughing now, but without hysteria. “Stop it. You’re going to confuse him,” she said, pushing her hair out of her face. “Honestly, it doesn’t take much to confuse him.”

  Edison, under some canine delusion that he was a lap dog, settled himself over Fletcher’s legs.

  “I sure hope you don’t have to be anywhere,” Hadley said. “He might decide to stay there for hours.”

  The look in Fletcher’s eyes called up memories she was trying to suppress. He didn’t make it any easier with his reply. “I don’t. There’s not any place I’d rather be.”

  Was it getting hotter? Or was it only Fletcher? Hadley cleared her throat. “I think Edison has decided we should stay, but you have to promise to stop trying to make him kill me.”

  “Just one more time?” Fletcher asked. “Edison, impale.”

  Hadley picked a stalk of grass from beside her leg, tied it in a knot, and slipped it over her finger. “You are greatly overestimating my dog’s vocabulary, Fletch.”

  He looked up. Something glinted in his eye. “Nobody calls me Fletch.”

  “Sorry,” she said, embarrassed at the small act of intimacy. “Old habits and all that.” She shredded the stalk of grass and threw it away to her side to keep from meeting his eye, surprised how silly she felt. She often thought of him as “Fletch,” but she hadn’t called him that in years. What had made her speak with that kind of familiarity?

  When he answered, his voice was low. “No, I mean, I’ve missed it. It sounds good to me, you know, when you say it.”

  The stammering? It was kind of endearing.

  A flood of memories of nervous teenage Fletcher flowed through Hadley’s mind. The way he would pull at the back of his hair. How he used to seem terrified that he might run into her parents when he brought her home. How everything felt like an occasion, and so many of his lines seemed rehearsed, but in a cute way, like he wanted so much for her to be pleased.

  Shaking off the trip down memory lane, Hadley asked, “How’s life at the fire station these days?”

  She expected him to tell stories about big adventures, but he said, “It’s a good job and I’m grateful to have it.”

  She could tell there was something he wasn’t saying.

  “But?” she prompted.

  He shrugged and picked up a sycamore leaf from the grass. “I kind of miss the BLM.”

  Hadley pointed vaguely west. “Living out there in the wilderness?” She couldn’t believe he meant it.

  “It’s not like we never saw civilization,” he countered.

  “Right. The civilization of Wyoming.”

  “Montana.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?” She laughed. She was pretty sure he knew she was kidding. Mostly.

  “Okay,” she said. “Tell me. What’s there to miss? Seriously. I want to know. What did you have there that you can’t have here?”

  “Besides being called a fireman, there’s nearly nothing about my job here that’s the same as my job there.”

  Hadley’s face must have shown that she didn’t get it. “You put out fires.” How complicated could it be?

  He put his arms behind him and leaned back on his hands, and the line of his triceps, that little triangle at the back of his arm that made her squirm, stretched the sleeves of his shirt. She sat on her hands. Edison resettled himself on Fletcher’s lap. “City station jobs are busy because we get a lot of calls, but they’re not usually about fires. Emergency crews answer all kinds of calls. Moms with new babies too nervous to drive to the hospital. Older people who need all kinds of help.”

  She nodded. “Right. Climbing trees to retrieve cats. I’ve seen movies.”

  He laughed and scratched Edison behind his ears. “We do that more than you’d think,” he said. “But the forest fires were something else completely. The hugeness of the destructive power, the total devastation that would lead, after a few years, to acres and acres of fertile new growth…” He stopped. “This is boring you.”

  It wasn’t a question, but it also wasn’t true.

  “No, I’m not bored.” Hadley lay on her side on the grass and propped her head on her arm. “Tell.”

  “The smokejumpers,” he started, but she stopped him, holding out her hand as if she were trying to push the words back.

  “Wait.” She shook her head. “It sounded like you said ‘smokejumpers,’ but surely if there was such a thing, I would have heard of it.”

  Fletcher sat up and attempted to shove Edison off his lap. “Are you telling me that you saw my mother just about every week, literally for years, and she never told you what my job was?”

  “Okay, first of all,” Hadley said, her eyes snapping, “there are plenty of things for two intelligent women to discuss over lunch, even over several years, without needing to talk about men.”

  He put up his hands in surrender. “Okay, got it; that’s good. Really, great.”

  Hadley looked at the grass by her knees. “And maybe I told her I didn’t want to talk about you.”

  He didn’t say anything to that, but when she looked, he was watching her.

  He nodded, and she gave him a small smile. “I’m over that now. But barely. We agreed to keep our conversations to relevant discussions of books, food, and local gossip. It worked for us.”

  If Fletcher could hear the pain she was hiding, he didn’t mention it.

  She bumped his leg. “So, the wilderness,” she prompted.

  He cleared his throat. “I had this cool job. I mean, I think it was cool. I was a smokejumper, which is actually a thing. I wore many pounds of Kevlar and parachute fabric and jumped out of helicopters into the burn zone.”

  Hadley shook her head. “You did not.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “Nope. Not buying it.”

  “Which part?”

  “Your job in the wilderness of that one state I can’t actually remember the name of was to leap out of helicopters into burning forests and put out fires?” She honestly couldn’t tell if he was messing with her.

  He answered by counting off on his fingers. “One: Montana. Two: Only to the edges of burning forests. Three: Yeah, kind of.”

  “Where did you connect the hoses?”

  She watched Fletcher’s face light up in a carefree laugh. “No hoses. Sometimes we pumped water from rivers or lakes, but mostly we used chemical retardant—that stuff that looks like red mud.”

  “I know that stuff,” she said, nodding. She’d seen the movies. “So you parachuted. Out of planes.”

  He made a rotating gesture.

  “Oh, right. Helicopters. And crushed flames with your bare hands.”

  He shook his head again.

  Hadley stopped him. “Don’t deny me the details of my little fantasy, because, I’m just saying, if it was anyone but you out there, the way I’m imagining it, this smokejumper gig is a very sexy business.”

  Fletcher did a modest, dismissive motion. “Well, I wouldn’t say so, but the guys did make a calendar out of pictures of me.”

  She was almost sure he was joking. “I would very much like to see this calendar.”

  “Impossible,” he said.

  “Nothing is actually impossible,” Hadley shot back.

  “Except stapling Jell-O to a tree.”

  “Granted.”

  “Or dividing by zero.”

  “Nerd.”

  “If the shoe fits,” he said, grinning at her.

  “You’re changing the subject, and don’t think I didn’t notice.”

&nb
sp; Fletcher pulled out his phone and pressed a button. “Make a note: Hadley noticed that I changed the subject.” He stuck his phone back in his pocket and nodded at her. “Noted.”

  Hadley felt a sigh escape her. “We grew up,” she said.

  He took a visible second to follow her into that new line of thinking. “In the last few seconds?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Come on, you know what I mean.” In case he actually didn’t, she said, “Look at us, here in the same park where we used to spend hours making out.”

  “And fighting,” he cut in.

  “And fighting,” she conceded. “And now we’re sitting several feet apart and neither kissing nor fighting. I mean, when is the last time we just sat here and had a conversation?”

  Without even a pause, Fletcher said, “Spring break, sophomore year in college.”

  She thought about it for a second and knew he was right. There was something endearing and sad about how quickly he answered, as if he’d been thinking about the end of them, too.

  “But that was a long time ago,” he said. “And we’ve both changed.”

  At the same time, they each pointed at the other and said, “Mostly you.”

  Hadley laughed and shook her head. “I’m exactly the same as I always was,” she said. “I’m still way too likely to fight first and ask questions later. I’m still completely unlikely to do traditional girlfriend stuff like leave cute notes in your car or make you a sandwich.” She shrugged, aware that these shortcomings might have bothered him when they were kids, but he’d never complained.

  “I never asked you to make me a sandwich.” Fletcher’s brow creased, and he looked slightly offended.

  “No, but you would have liked it if I had.”

  “Is it so bad to want your girlfriend to make you a sandwich? I would have made you one if you’d needed me to.” Fletcher’s voice trailed off. He folded the edge of his napkin and pressed a crease in it.

  If Hadley didn’t know better, she would have thought they were talking about something more than sandwiches. Maybe they were. Either way, she felt weird talking about herself as his girlfriend, so she shifted the conversation a little. “If I seem different to you it’s only because your own changes give you a different perspective. You’ve had this whole other life. Your adventures were big. I only got a degree and bought a dog.”

  Fletcher pointed to the gigantic pile of fur currently snoring on his legs. “You mean this?” He shook his head. “This alone is a very big change. Not to mention starting a business. I mean, come on. You’re real, Hadley.”

  Surprise made her gasp.

  Fletcher misinterpreted her reaction. “I didn’t mean you were somehow fake before,” he said. “I just mean, look what you’ve made for yourself. You should be so proud.”

  Hadley shook her head as she fought back tears.

  Of all the people who told her regularly how she should be living her life, none of them, not one, ever seemed to see her as real. To her family, she was an adorable anomaly. She was this sweet little thing that made charming choices and would soon need to be rescued from certain financial ruin. And someone would definitely need to save her from what was possibly long-term emotional disturbance that led people to fish dented metal furnishings out of dumpsters and paint them pink in order to display ratty paperback books on them.

  And here was Fletcher Gates, of all the people in the entire world the one most likely to try to rescue her, telling her, after a manner of speaking, that she might not need to be rescued at all.

  Chapter 9

  “We’re friends,” Fletcher said, laying down a three of clubs on the discard pile.

  Red snatched it up and made a sound of disbelief.

  “What?” Fletcher asked, even though he knew exactly what Red was going to say.

  “You don’t fall out of love with a woman like that. She’s the kind that’s impossible to shake.”

  Fletcher shook his head and said nothing as Nick drew his card, slid it between two others in his hand, and grinned. Nick Baxter had the worst poker face in the world, even when they were playing gin rummy. But he didn’t seem bothered to hear Red talking about Fletcher and Hadley as a former couple.

  Fletcher wondered if Red was blind to the fact that Nick was crazy about Hadley, or if the old guy’s attempts to get Fletcher to fall in love with her again were some kind of nudge that Nick should find someone else. Either way, it felt awkward to talk about her in front of Nick.

  “It’s been a long time since we were together,” Fletcher reminded Red. “And in all those years, I’ve gotten over her. Trust me. And she has definitely moved on from me.”

  Nick gave Fletcher a nod of support, or maybe he was telling Fletcher that it was his turn.

  Sitting around this metal-legged table playing cards in the station still felt like cheating to Fletcher. They were at work, so they should be working, not playing gin. At least checking hoses or working out to stay strong. This “relaxing” put Fletcher on edge. At the BLM there was a different kind of downtime. It was called winter.

  But Red assured him this was good for them. “We’re building our team,” Red said. “Connecting. You can’t lift weights and wash the engine all day.”

  In truth, Fletcher itched for action. His month in Greensburg had included only three fire calls, two of which were located in other towns and by the time his team had arrived on the scenes, only cleanup remained.

  He’d visited four elementary schools to give presentations about fire safety. After the first one, the chief had determined that Fletcher was the point guy for these things. Kids loved him, teachers swooned, and the pictures in the local paper made good PR.

  But PR didn’t flush his body with adrenaline. Not like gearing up and fighting a fire did.

  Fletcher found himself composing jokes about starting dumpster fires just to have something to put out, but he never said anything like that aloud. You didn’t joke about those kinds of things. People worried.

  So he spent hours polishing the engine and lifting weights and beating Red and Nick at cards.

  If he occasionally found himself stopping into Second Glance to look for a gift for his mom, there was nothing to read into that. It didn’t mean anything other than Hadley’s shop had the best gifts. And that there were uncharted possibilities for how things could go badly wrong in that building. Whatever he felt when he was with her was different than that missing adrenaline surge. Very different, he told himself. Totally different.

  But how, he now wondered, was it possible that he wouldn’t have known she’d still live in town? How could he never have asked about her? How had he avoided hearing stories about her for the years he’d been gone? How had his mother never mentioned her own friendship with Hadley?

  How could she have come back into his life as a surprise?

  Fletcher was rarely surprised. He wasn’t sure how to handle it, to be honest.

  Hadley continued to treat him with careful friendliness. Careful in the way she avoided seeing him in her shop until he stepped directly in front of the register, careful to avoid touching him, as if she knew exactly what the feel of her hands on his skin did to him. Careful to never be alone with him. Careful to make it clear that she could be polite, occasionally even friendly to him now, but she was uninterested in reigniting any past flames.

  The old Hadley had made it clear when she was interested in him. Subtlety was not part of her toolkit. Her current pleasantness told him what he needed to know: he was welcome to play with her dog in the park and he was welcome to spend a few dollars in her shop now and then, but she had no intention of returning to the past.

  Unfortunately, the past never left Fletcher. It parked somewhere between his brain and his heart and hovered there, reminding him daily, hourly, how it had felt to be Hadley’s guy, how his years with her had been his best years. Not in the vaguely pathetic “glory days” way of some guys who linger in the receding glow of high school stadium lights, but in the fac
t that when he was with her, he had become the best version of himself. He had learned to work hard, to open his mind to new ideas, and to think of someone else (maybe a specific someone else) before himself. Fletcher had liked himself best when he’d been Hadley’s.

  So where did that leave him now?

  Oh. Right. Losing at cards.

  He sat up straighter in his chair and refocused on the game. Red and Nick rehashed details of a baseball playoff game that Fletcher tried for a second to care about. Within a few minutes, he was back in control of both his wandering mind and the hand of gin rummy.

  When the alarm bell rang, Fletcher leaped to his feet, feeling every missing part of him come crashing back into place.

  As if they did it every day, the team surged to the engine, took their places, and headed out into the autumn afternoon.

  Fletcher, behind the wheel, switched on the lights and siren. He felt his focus tighten on the street, the next turn, the step directly ahead. Beside him, Nick handled the extra-vehicular communications, and in the back of the engine, men passed gear, checked connectors, and gave complete concentration to the work they all trained for.

  The GPS led Fletcher to a farmhouse at the edge of town, but the men could see and smell the smoke several minutes before they arrived on the scene. A generations-old wooden barn engulfed in flame steamed, smoked and crackled, with a stubbled field to the east and a series of outbuildings to the west.

  Each movement of the team, directed by Red, led the men to careful, precise efforts. A line of men unwound the hoses on the preconnects, allowing several of the guys to start attacking the outside of the structure as soon as they parked the truck.

  Red mastered the deluge gun, pointing a heavy stream of water toward the front wall of the barn. On his signal, Fletcher kicked in the steaming door and ran inside. Every training instinct accompanied him. Every drill, every test, every simulation cleared Fletcher’s mind of all but the burning barn surrounding him. His legs propelled him forward, and from inside his helmet, he scanned the interior of the barn for people or animals.