The Anti-Social Season (First Responders #2)

Chapter Four

Four

S imon and Thea worked steadily for another few hours after they came back from their lunch, and when Simon finally noted that it was quitting time, she looked positively relieved. Whether it was about ending the workday or the fact that she didn’t have to deal with his grumpy ass anymore, he couldn’t say. But she was quite obviously drained, her face pale and her movements slow as she packed up her gear.

“It’ll get easier,” he said, surprising himself. He wasn’t usually someone who said stuff like that. “When I started out, I really had no idea what I was doing and felt overwhelmed all the time.” Okay, now where was that oversharing coming from?

She shot him a tired grin as she shouldered the strap of her bag. “Thanks. This is the first totally new job I’ve had in ten years, so it...it’s a lot.”

“At least you already know the inner workings of the fire service. That’s got to give you a leg up.”

She nodded. “Yeah. That was the thinking from the powers that be. Either hire someone who knows social media who can learn emergency services, or the other way around. And there I was. They seemed to think that my undergrad degree in communications was going to be valuable, but social media wasn’t a big part of the curriculum when I was in school, and a lot of my class work was theoretical, anyway.” She seemed less than confident about the whole situation, even though it made perfect sense to Simon. Where was this lack of confidence even coming from? She’d latched on to new concepts and ideas very readily and was learning the job at a breakneck clip even on the first day.

He opened the conference room door and said, “Well, for whatever it’s worth, I think it looks like they made the right choice.” When he stepped through, Chloe was in the hallway, her eyes alight with greeting. Oh great. Her teasing was about to go nuclear. She might have even been waiting for him.

Then Thea stepped out and Chloe looked like she was about to fall over from combined mirth and shock. Thea saw her and gave her a tired little smile.

“Are you the new social media person Simon’s training?” Chloe asked, visibly working her face back into an expression that didn’t read as utterly manic.

Thea nodded and the two women introduced themselves, Simon feeling like an utter doorknob standing there in the dingy back hallway of the library. “Anyway, I gotta run,” Thea said, nodding at Simon. “I’ll see you next time. Thanks for everything.”

When she was gone, Chloe gave him a stinging slap on the shoulder that nearly made him drop his laptop. “Oh my god , Si.” Dropping her voice into an artificially low register, she said, “Pretty sure this is a guy from what Amy told me.” Her voice went back to its normal tone. “You got your own firehouse hottie to work with.”

“Shut it,” Simon said, walking toward their cubicles. “She’s a work colleague, same as you.”

“She is totally not the same and you know it. Her status as a colleague, if it even exists, is temporary, and she is a hottie.”

“Keep your voice down,” he whispered as he ducked into his cubicle, Chloe crowding into the small space with him. “You’ll make Mary-Pat all too happy if she thinks I’m doing anything inappropriate on library property.” Or at all. Ever. Anywhere.

Chloe stuck her tongue out. “To hell with that you-know-what. But seriously, Thea is exactly your type and you’re not her supervisor. You have no authority to abuse. As if you ever would in the first place.”

“Since when do I have a type?” Simon regretted the words the instant they left his mouth.

She rolled her eyes. “Oh please. I remember your heart-eyes when Anne Hathaway got a pixie cut. Thea could be her younger sister. And I’ll bet you she has arms like Michelle Obama. Those firefighters work out. She’s walking, talking Simon-bait.”

“Speaking of the gym, I’m out of here,” Simon muttered, jamming his stuff into his bag while Chloe snickered.

“Gotta keep up with your new lady!” she called, flexing a biceps as he headed for the employee entrance.

“Laugh it up, funny gal,” he muttered. But in one way, she was all too right. He had a date with a weight rack and a treadmill at the community center. And maybe a good, hard workout would purge the restless energy from his system.

He could hope, at least.

Thea let herself into her house and let her laptop bag slip from her shoulder with a tired sigh. She forgot how exhausting brainwork could be. Normally, she’d do a bunch of physical things during her workday and wouldn’t be half this weary. In fact, she’d probably be working out with her former squad mates right about now. A wave of sorrow swept through her just as a knock on her door jolted her spine upright.

She opened it to find the smiling face of her neighbor and landlady, who was holding a foil-covered plate. “Mrs. McAnally, I was just going to come over,” she said, feeling guilty. That was the deal. She lived in the “mother-in-law” apartment at Mrs. M’s place for ridiculously low rent and, in exchange, made sure that the elderly widow was okay, did minor maintenance around the property and generally thanked her lucky stars for the most amazing living situation in the greater DC area. “Come on in,” she said, opening the door wider.

Mrs. M did, setting the plate down on the little island that separated the kitchen from the rest of the living space. She gave a little sigh like she always did coming into the converted outbuilding. “Whenever I see how cute you’ve made this place it almost makes me sad I didn’t move into it when Kyle did the renovation.” She took the foil off the plate. “Brownies to celebrate your first day on the new job.”

“Aw, thanks.” Thea took one. Mrs. M did make the best brownies, with just the right combination of crunch and chew. “But you don’t really mean that about this place, right?” She sent up a silent prayer. Please don’t make me give it up. Mrs. M’s property was large, private and quiet, something Thea appreciated after long shifts with a bunch of people just as rowdy and silly as she could be.

“Well, no. I still love my home, even if it is much too big for just me. But this is awfully cute,” she said. Mrs. M’s eldest son had started the renovation behind her back while she was hospitalized after a heart attack. Fully expecting her to be weakened by her illness and surgery, he decided that he needed to move his family into her big house and to shunt her into the smaller space under the guise of “taking care of Mom.” But Mrs. M was made of sterner stuff. She recovered steadily, and when she came back home after a month in a nursing home, she informed her son that his expectation of her decrepitude or demise was premature. And when Thea’s squad was called in to deal with a minor chimney fire in the main house, the older woman had immediately taken a liking to her. After Thea openly admired the apartment, Mrs. M offered her the almost-finished living space and completed the renovations.

It was a very nice place. Kyle had good taste, even if he was an entitled shithead.

“So, tell me all about your first day.” Mrs. M bit into her own brownie while boosting herself onto one of the bar stools at the island.

“I learned a lot,” Thea said. “So much so that my brain feels full. The guy they have me partnered with was kinda weird though.”

“Weird how?”

“He seemed...almost mad at me? I don’t know. He says we went to high school together, but I totally didn’t recognize him.”

Mrs. M nodded sagely. “Ah. Men don’t like that.”

“No, but it seemed more personal than it should have. I mean, our high school was huge. There are literally hundreds of people I wouldn’t remember. I’m sure there are hundreds of people he wouldn’t remember.”

Mrs. M’s pale eyes twinkled with humor, but she didn’t say anything. “What?” Thea asked.

She shrugged. “Maybe he had a little crush on you all those years ago.”

“Me?” Thea pointed at herself for good measure. “This weirdo? I was too loud, too athletic, too much. Nobody had crushes on me in high school. Literally nobody.” She huffed a small, private laugh when she remembered that he’d asked her about how she used the word literally . She wasn’t sure if it was an intensifier in this case or not.

Mrs. M just nodded enigmatically. “Of course, dear.”

Besides, I would have remembered someone as gorgeous as Simon. But she didn’t mention that detail to her landlady.

Simon was just about ready to brush his teeth and take his aching muscles to bed when his phone rang. An incoming video call from his sister. Great. She’d lived for the better part of her life on the East Coast, but she couldn’t remember that she was now three hours behind to save her life. He considered just ignoring the call, putting his phone on do not disturb and going to bed.

But if he ignored her, she’d just get snippy about it when they finally did connect. He answered the request for a video call, hoping they could keep it brief. “Hi, Ash,” he said when his sister’s face appeared on the screen.

His sister, never one for preliminaries, launched right in. “Okay, so you have your tickets to come out to us for Christmas, right?”

He’d never actually said he was going to go to California for Christmas. So, he hedged. “I’ve been keeping an eye on the prices.”

She looked exasperated. “If you wait too long, you know flights’ll get expensive and then Mom and Dad will have to bail you out and it’ll be a whole big thing .”

Simon bristled at the true but unfair assessment. He had chosen a lower-paying but satisfying career, but he hadn’t made the decision to move his family three thousand miles away. It wasn’t his fault that travel was costly. “Fine. But I can’t just book when I want. I have to get the time off first and I haven’t heard from my boss yet.” This year it wasn’t likely that he’d be able to take a lot of time, anyway. He’d taken five days last year—the first year his entire family had been out West—and Mary-Pat had pitched a fit that she wasn’t able to take a week, claiming her seniority wasn’t being properly respected. It wasn’t likely he’d even be able to take five days this year, but he’d keep his powder dry with his sister and not give her the actual number of days until he was sure. With some people, managing their expectations meant you under promised and over delivered. With Ash, if you promised anything less than what she wanted, she’d explode. Then, if a miracle occurred and you were able to give her more, she was never grateful, just blamed you for setting her off. Best to not address it until he had some actual dates to work with.

“Well, get the time off,” his bossy big sister demanded. “Just tell them you need it.”

That’s not how this works , he didn’t tell his sister. Instead, he scrubbed a hand over his face and said, “I’ll do my best.” Arguing with Ashley was pointless. Besides, maybe that miracle would happen and he would get more than a couple of days off.

“Okay, okay ,” Ashley said, directing her words away from the screen and down. Tiny hands reached up into frame. “Noah wants to say hi to Uncle Simon.” She handed the phone off to the toddler and disappeared without another word.

“Hey, buddy,” Simon said, feeling, as he always did, a little out of his depth with his nephew. Part of it was being so far away, he was sure. Part of it was probably that he just never really knew what to do with kids who couldn’t read yet. It was easy to talk to the kids at the library about books. Noah, though? Not so much.

“Hi, Uncle Simon. What’cha doing?”

“Well, I’m about to go brush my teeth.”

“Why?”

“Because I want them to be clean before I go to bed.”

“Why?”

Simon started to feel a lurking sense of foreboding. “Because if they’re clean they’ll stay healthy longer.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t clean them, yucky stuff grows on your teeth and gives you cavities and your teeth will fall out and you don’t want that to happen.”

“Why?”

Foreboding gave way to panic. “What’d you do today at day care?” he asked, hoping to break the endless chain of one-word interrogatories.

Noah beamed and started to chatter about arts and crafts as the phone wobbled with excitement in his little hands, and Simon sighed, relieved, as he pondered the view up his nephew’s nose.

But dammit all to hell, Thea really had known what she was talking about. He’d have to tell her about his successful technique that led to nipping off the endless why? when they saw each other again later that week.

And with that, he realized a part of him was actually looking forward to seeing her again.

His stomach twisted. No. History would not be repeating itself. Maybe the higher-ups would even decide that Thea could just handle the new role on her own earlier than planned. That would be nice.

Not usually superstitious, Simon crossed his fingers.

After dinner, Thea pulled down the extendable ladder that led to the storage area above her living space. Climbing up to the attic, she found the right box and rummaged through it before she unearthed what she was looking for. Back down on the sofa, she opened the stiff pages of her high school yearbook from senior year. She scanned the looping, handwritten “Stay sweet” and “Have a nice summer” messages from a lot of people she barely remembered. None of them were from Simon.

Paging through the book, a wave of weird nostalgia crashed over her. Despite a lot of admittedly good memories of friends and activities and parties, she wouldn’t want to go back to being a teenager for anything, thank you very much. That confusing time, with its cascades of feelings and events that seemed so out of her control, was not something she wanted to revisit.

But guilt lurked in the recesses of her mind as she looked at group photos of clubs and teams. She wouldn’t ever say she was popular. Like she’d told Mrs. M, she was just too much for most people, but she did have a small, tightly-knit group of friends back then. When was the last time she talked to any of them?

Well, she’d run into one of them at the county fair with her kids during her stint at the hug a firefighter booth over the summer. Monica had seemed happy enough to see Thea. And it wasn’t as if she’d tried to keep in touch either. They’d drifted apart the way people did when they grew up. Obviously, they had different priorities and life paths. It was normal, right?

But the thought nagged at Thea. Glancing up, she saw the photo of her with Sean and Felix in front of their old ladder truck and her stomach did a sickening lurch. Oh. That was it.

Was she going to drift away from them too?

Forcing that thought away, she turned another page and part of a face seemed to jump out at her. Thea frowned and looked harder at the slim, youthful boy half-hidden behind someone else. Yes, it was Simon, she was pretty sure. But he’d definitely filled out in the last decade-plus. Thea looked at the caption for the photo. Theater Tech Club .

Ooooh. Yes, she was beginning to remember him now. Other memories tickled at the back of her brain, and she paged back through the alphabetical photographs of clubs. Speech and Debate . There she was, front and center, probably cracking a joke to make everyone laugh for the photographer, from the majority of expressions in the picture.

And there was Simon, one row back and three people over, staring with a sullen expression at the camera. How had she forgotten him? Memory, previously tapping tentatively at the glass, broke through and flooded her.

He was such a pain in the ass . And he’d had such coppery red hair back then. Did he dye it now? No, she decided. Sometimes people’s hair got darker as they got older. That had to be what gave him that—admittedly gorgeous—auburn mop he had today.

But now that she thought of it, she could definitely see the thin-faced, skinny—yeah, kind of cute—younger Simon in this new, older, broader version. She’d kind of avoided him when they were in school. She remembered him as a stickler for rules, a very my-way-or-the-highway kind of person. The moment where she firmly distanced herself from him was in a Speech and Debate club practice, in fact. She’d made a joke as part of her argument and was still riding high on the laugh she’d gotten. He disapproved, lecturing her about how Speech and Debate was about convincing people, not making people laugh.

His disapproval hadn’t just killed her buzz, it had stung her teenage pride. “Too bad we don’t have a comedy club,” she retorted. “I’d kill. You’d be first.”

And then, if she remembered everything correctly, she went back to her friends and had a laugh. Because she’d never been too serious, could never really deal with people who were. And he seemed to have morphed from a very serious teen into a fully-fledged adult grump.

She wished she hadn’t gone down that little cul-de-sac off memory lane. Because she still had to work with the guy through the month of December.

Slamming the book closed, she dropped it on the sofa and went to the kitchen for a beer, closing her eyes as the cool liquid slid down her throat. Just get through the probationary period and you’ll never have to deal with him again. That was all she had to do.

Right.