The Anti-Social Season (First Responders #2)

Chapter Fourteen

Fourteen

A fter she found him a spare toothbrush and they finished getting cleaned up, he followed her to her bedroom. The cool sheets felt wonderful against his clean, bare skin. His arousal still simmered beneath the surface, but fatigue nibbled at his limbs and made reality feel a little hazy. It had been a long time since he’d gone to bed with anyone, and it surprised him how much it had taken out of him.

Thea turned out the light, then he could hear rustling as she turned. “So you were a Casanova in library school, huh?”

The question, seemingly floating out of nowhere in the darkness, made him laugh. “Heck no. I was just going to do what I did in college—maybe date a little and mostly keep my head down, do the work, get my degree. But I was a lot more visible in graduate school than I was in college.”

“Visible how?” He could almost hear the crease between her brows as she tried to puzzle out what he meant.

He turned to his back, folding his hands behind his head, and took in a deep breath. Let it go. “I was kind of rare in that environment. Straight, cisgender men aren’t exactly common in library programs, you know?”

More rustling and a finger poking him in the sternum. “Sure. That was the only reason. Nothing to do with you being a hottie or anything.” He poked her back for her sarcasm and she laughed. “The women came to you, huh?”

Simon’s face went hot. That was exactly what had happened, and at first, he’d been bewildered. He’d later found out that it had all begun because he’d gone on a single date with a classmate he’d met at orientation. Apparently, the news that he was attracted to women had spread like wildfire through the graduate program. Since he was set on completing his degree in one year, he had a heavy course load and developing a social life hadn’t been a priority.

But one had found him all the same.

“Um. Yeah. I’d had one serious girlfriend in college. She was...very direct, I guess you could say. I learned a lot from her. And when a library classmate offered me a no-strings fling, it seemed like a good way to blow off steam just as I was finally getting the hang of being in graduate school.” He’d learned a lot more from her—like how he couldn’t take for granted that her body wanted the same things as his ex’s had. How to pay attention to subtle signals, to learn when things worked and when they didn’t. He’d always liked learning and experimentation and getting gold stars for doing a good job.

“And a lot of women can really talk , so I’m guessing word got around,” Thea said, her voice soft.

She was perceptive as hell. It should have been almost disturbing. But for once, feeling seen wasn’t scary. He wanted Thea to see him. All of him. “Yeah. When we stopped seeing each other, it was like they were operating off one of those number machines at the deli. It was kind of frightening, honestly. The attention was too much. I kind of shut everything down and went into that first exam period feeling like I was wearing armor the whole time. But when we came back from winter break, there was this woman I sat with in a couple of classes. We became friends and then more. For a while.” It had gone on like that to the end of his jam-packed year of classes. Little micro-relationships that didn’t last, where neither of them even expected it to last. Until it was the last one and she’d thought they were going to continue after they graduated and went on the job market.

And then, Simon had realized he’d been assuming, taking things for granted all over again.

He wasn’t proud of how that had ended. But he didn’t regret that it had. What he had now was far more than what he’d imagined with Thea when they were younger. It was better. And he wasn’t going to screw it up by not paying attention.

Thea listened intently to this stop-and-start story. The faint light of the moon made Simon’s outline barely visible now that her eyes had adjusted to the dimness. “So there were more people you had ‘more for a while’ relationships with?”

He shifted, the sheets sliding against his skin, and she wished she felt confident enough to wrap herself around him as he talked. But she’d long ago learned that intense physical intimacy and intense emotional intimacy could be very different things and confusing the two could lead to explosive problems.

His voice rasped out of the dimness. “Yeah. It was only a year, and trust me, I wasn’t a Casanova at all. It wasn’t messy or anything. The both of us would get really busy working on more than one project or paper at the same time or getting into exams and the connection would just kind of dissolve. Or in one instance, she graduated before I did and moved on. No hard feelings or anything like that.”

“Sounds like there’s a ‘but’ lurking somewhere there.”

He sighed. Shifted. The covers moved down and she tugged them up against the chill. “Yeah. The last woman I dated. I’d gotten used to thinking that nothing was going to come of any of it, you know? We were graduating at the same time and that’s when I learned we had opposite assumptions. She thought we’d look around, find an area of the country that might have good prospects for the both of us and move. I never had any intention of leaving this area.”

She did some mental math. “Plus, you were young.”

“Yeah. Twenty-three. In hindsight I wasn’t in any position to be playing house with anyone. I had so much learning and growing to do.” He paused and she could almost hear him thinking. “But at the time, it was just confusing. She’d been so sure that I wanted what she wanted.”

Thea considered his personality: the stern, almost dour side. The playful side. But even in both of those extremes and in between, he’d told her a few things. He wasn’t entirely shut off. And presumably he’d known that other woman longer. “Had you talked about it?”

There was a bit of silence, then he said, “She said we had. But we hadn’t said, ‘Let’s make plans.’ It was more she said things like, ‘Have you ever thought about living somewhere else?’ and I’d say that sure I had, because who hasn’t considered such a thing? But she never continued the conversation, so I thought it was just filling dead air.” Another silence. “I learned later that there’s a strong passive-aggressive streak in the librarian community.”

“Huh.” Passive-aggressive could get you injured or dead in an emergency services squad, but those kinds of stakes weren’t as high in most other jobs. Still, Thea found herself judging this unknown woman a little even as she empathized with her. “Do you know where she ended up?”

“Last I knew, she moved to Arizona. We’re not in touch.”

“Sounds like she might have gotten what she wanted.”

“Hope so. She wasn’t a bad person, just, well—like I said, we were both young. I didn’t necessarily know what I wanted, but I knew I didn’t want to settle down just yet.”

“Do you know what you want now?”

More sounds of him shifting and she felt him coming closer. Then a light touch on her arm, as if he wasn’t sure where she was in the dark, moving to slide up and around the back of her neck. “Not completely, but a heck of a lot more than I did at twenty-three. What about you?”

It was nice, that warm hand cradling her neck. More than nice. This guarded man, this human vault had opened himself up to her.

She took a deep breath, settling herself. “I think I’m kind of the same. Especially with the whole career change and all that. It’s unsettling, you know? But this is really nice.”

He moved his hand down her back, tugging her closer, and she rolled so she was spooned up against his front, body heat radiating into her back. “Yeah. It really is.”

When Simon woke up, it took him a few moments to get oriented. The ceiling was too high, the morning light came from the wrong side. The view outside the window wasn’t of another building and three floors up. It was ground level and looked out on a dormant winter garden with trees in the distance.

Memories of last night flooded through him. Thea. Rolling over, he found her curled up facing him, her face looking impossibly young and relaxed in sleep. He resisted the urge to trace a fingertip over one rounded cheekbone or brush aside the hair falling across her closed eyes. Carefully, he eased himself out of bed, finding yesterday’s clothes and slipping them on. The air in her little house was chilly, but not unpleasant once he was dressed.

Not to mention he had no desire to wander around her place naked if Mrs. M was going to show up unannounced again.

Padding in socks to her little kitchen, he located her coffee and filters and made a pot, finding cups in the cabinet above. While he waited for it to brew, he wandered over to the shelves that made up the walls to her bedroom. Not quite reaching the ceiling, they were nonetheless built-ins, not afterthoughts. Closer to the kitchen, they mostly contained a few cookbooks and larger items that he guessed didn’t fit into the little kitchen’s cupboards. There was one hand-thrown bowl that looked like it might be a piece of art or might be useful. Maybe both.

The rest of the shelves making up the longer side of her bedroom were almost entirely taken up with books. Fiction in a variety of genres. Biographies and a few histories. At the far end of the bottom shelf was a set of training manuals for emergency first responders. Scattered among all this literature were a few framed photographs, mostly older shots of Thea and what had to be her older sister and her parents. There were a few newer photos of her with two little boys: the monster nephews, he guessed.

And then there was a single photo in a simple frame of Thea that had to have been taken within the last couple of years. She was standing in front of a gleaming red fire truck in bright sunlight, grinning maniacally and dressed in what looked like a firefighter’s uniform: navy shirt and trousers, a logo over her breast. To one side of her was a Black man a few inches taller than her, and on the other side was an enormous guy who looked like a model from a Brawny paper towel ad. Both of them were dressed identically to her, and they all had that indefinable ease of close colleagues or even found family. Friends.

Some of her old firefighting squad.

A pang went through his chest when he realized he hadn’t really heard her talk about them. She’d talked a bit about the job, but if these two men were the only nonfamily members sitting on her shelves in the same pride of place as her family, they must mean something to her.

Not that he’d been super forthcoming about any of his own stuff. But he wondered if the fact that she didn’t talk about them had anything to do with her anxiety.

The coffeepot burbled to an end at that point, so he wandered back into the kitchen to pour himself a cup. Taking it over to the sofa, he pulled out his phone, intending to check his email, but his attention was arrested by a half-familiar book cover on the coffee table. He leaned forward, putting the cup down and picking up her copy of their high school senior yearbook.

“Yeah. I went down memory lane.” Thea stood on the threshold of her bedroom in a short bathrobe, scratching the back of one calf with the toes of her other foot, a blush flooding her cheeks. “I don’t usually keep that out. It lives in the storage space up there.” She pointed at the ceiling.

Simon patted the sofa cushion next to him. “Well, let’s come have a walk down memory lane together, then.”

She’d been lured out by the smell of coffee, so she detoured to the kitchen to pour herself a cup before she walked to the living space. Curling up next to Simon, she grabbed the supremely ugly afghan of crocheted granny squares her nonna had made for her when she went to college. It was hideous, but it was also warm. She tucked half around her lap and feet and offered the other side to Simon, who smiled and draped it over his knees.

“Do you want me to turn the heat up?” she asked.

He turned a tiny, wicked smile her way. “Not if keeping it chilly will make you cuddle with me.”

Well. She didn’t need any more encouragement. She liked this side of Simon, unexpected as it was. Scooting closer, she rested her head on his shoulder, and he wrapped an arm around hers, heat flowing from his body. “Where should we start? Which end of memory lane? The end with the flowers or the weeds?”

He flipped the cover open, revealing all the handwritten notes expanding out from corners, etched in sturdy blocks in the middle of the page, or in one case, spiraling out from a center letter and making the reader turn the book around and around to read the message. “My adolescence was pretty much all weeds, but it looks like you had a few more flowers,” he said.

“Oh, mine had plenty of weeds. I just had some creative friends. I guess they were flowers, now that you mention it.”

His finger traced the spiral of well wishes that someone he didn’t know had inscribed and he nodded. “Yeah. That might’ve helped. If I’d let it.”

She captured his finger, then wrapped her hand around his. “Adolescence isn’t fun for anyone. It wasn’t fun for me, though I had some moments of joy. I think maybe you’re mourning something that wasn’t really possible. Except maybe for the truly popular kids. And it seems to me that if someone truly enjoys adolescence and it isn’t an illusion or an act, they usually end up peaking young. I wouldn’t trade.”

He turned his hand in hers, squeezing. “I just guess I never let myself be young when I was young. I mean, I was never good at it—letting go, being spontaneous, any of it. I didn’t try anything creative when I could just... I don’t know. Do stuff. Try stuff.”

She thought about what she knew about him. And what she didn’t. “Your job now has a certain amount of creativity. Does that help?”

He nodded, shifting a little as he closed the yearbook and put it on the coffee table. “Yeah. It does. I just wish things had been different back in the day. Maybe I’d be better at my job now.”

She sat up a little, indignant. “You’re awesome at your job. I wouldn’t have thought of half the things you do to make everything run smoothly that you’ve taught me.”

He tugged her close again, tucking her head under his chin. “You’re talking about admin stuff, process stuff. I’m talking about creativity. Reaching people. Because process helps grease the wheels, but it isn’t what really connects with people. I worry sometimes that I’m too cut off, too rules based.”

She cringed internally, remembering that had been exactly her impression of him. “But there’s another side of you,” she almost whispered. “I saw it last night, but I’ve seen it before too. Your focus is so strong, you pay such attention. You’re so good with kids.”

He barked a laugh. “You should have seen me panic when Noah busted out all the why questions and I realized you were right.”

She poked him in the ribs just enough to make him squirm a little. “Yeah, but everyone panics when they get that fire hose of why? I saw you with those kids at the library. You see them as people. That matters.”

“They are people though.” He seemed puzzled.

She sipped her coffee, suppressing a smile. “You’d be surprised at how many adults don’t seem to remember that though.”