Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
OSCAR
“You doing scutwork now?” Ryan asks as he strolls into the firehouse kitchen, a shit-eating grin on his face.
God damn it.
I knew that this was going to be a problem as soon as I picked up the flyer. Ryan moved here a year ago from Texas and as our Probationary Firefighter, he usually gets stuck with the menial tasks that nobody else can be bothered with. Including leafleting.
“Fuck off, Garcia,” I grumble.
“You should have told me you were gonna help out with the flyers. I wouldn’t have stepped on your toes.”
“Thought you were just doing the diner?” I lean against the counter I’m cooking at. I know I should just leave it, tell him to fuck off and be done with the conversation. But, for whatever reason, I need to know every detail of their interaction.
He shrugs. “Yeah, I saw the store across the street, figured I’d swing by.”
“That it?”
“Huh?”
“That’s all you did, you didn’t bother her?” Ryan’s a good guy, I know he’d never be an ass on purpose, but he doesn’t always think before he speaks. There’s something about Freya, like she’s full of soft spots that’d bruise as soon as anyone touched them.
“Jesus man, chill,” he says, holding his hands up. “How would I bother her?”
“I know what you’re like.” He’d better not have been flirting with her. He’s got a reputation as kind of a ladies’ man around town.
“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter what I’m like, since she was already spoken for.” There’s a glint in his eye that has me ready to throw a pan of cold water at him.
“Christ, you make it sound like I pissed on her porch,” I scoff.
“Didn’t you?”
“For fuck’s sake. I was in there doing my mom a favor. A knitting favor.” It’s a lie, but Ryan doesn’t need to know that.
The truth is, I wanted an excuse to see her. What my mom said got to me, and the thought of her sitting alone in the store all day kinda broke my heart.
He chuckles. “If you say so.”
“I do say so,” I reply sternly, trying my best to end the conversation.
“She’s cute, though.”
“Don’t you have anything better to do? You need me to find something for you?” I ask, sounding an awful lot like my dad.
“Sure, sure,” he says, still fucking laughing. Does this kid never have an off day? “See you at dinner, man.”
I’m scraping the leftover pasta off my plate when a firm hand claps me on the back. I don’t need to turn to see who it belongs to.
“Dinner was great, Murph.” Mack’s voice comes from behind me.
“Thanks, man.”
“Can you come help me with something?”
I drop my plate by the sink and follow after him as we head to one of the storage rooms. He’s been wanting to sort through this for a while. Nobody ever comes in here because it’s become a random assortment of shit that hardly gets used.
“Come on, man, it’s seven at night.”
“Yeah,” he says with a shrug, “and we’re gonna be here until seven in the morning.”
“Fine.” I knew someone was gonna get roped into this at some point. I was just hoping it wouldn’t be me.
I head to the rack of RTC kits. We keep the main ones on the trucks for whenever we respond to road accidents, so these are just backups, but they still need going through. I pull them off one by one and check they’ve got everything inside before placing them back in a neat row.
I’m trying to wait Mack out. I’m not stupid, he’s obviously got something he wants to talk to me about, but I’m not gonna be the one to break.
“So…” He tries to sound casual. Got him. “You talk to that lady?”
I frown. Is he serious? He dragged me in here just to gossip? I guess there’s something in the water.
“I did,” I deadpan.
“And?”
I round the shelves stacked with line bags, raising an eyebrow at him. “And I apologized.”
“What’s going on there? You seem…” he trails off, waving a hand towards me. “Weird about her.”
I thought I had a better poker face than that. “I knew her in school.”
Mack grew up here too, but he’s seven years older so we didn’t overlap much. He probably never really came across Freya back then. “I didn’t realize you guys were friends.”
“I wouldn’t call us friends.” I scoff. “It was a little more one sided than that.”
“Oh yeah?” Mack asks, his face lighting up with curiosity.
I rub at the spot between my eyebrows. I really didn’t want to get into this, but this is Mack, right? He’s one of my closest friends. “If I tell you, you gotta keep it to yourself.” I don’t need this getting around to everyone.
“Of course.”
“I kind of had a thing for her when we were younger.”
He chews the inside of his cheek. “What kind of a thing?”
I sigh, thinking back on just how down bad I was back then. “I was a little obsessed.” I see him trying to suppress his laughter and I have to turn my back. “I know, I know, it’s pathetic.”
He chuckles. “No, no, it’s nice. But when you say obsessed...”
I sigh. “I used to watch her a lot.”
“Jesus.”
I wince. “I’m making it sound worse than it is. I was just a really shy kid, and she was always doing her own thing.”
“Did you ever talk to her?”
“Once.”
“How’d it go?”
“She told me she was busy with her dominoes.” I cringe. I’d tucked my tail between my legs and never tried again.
“Fuck.” He gives me a pat on the arm. “That’s rough, man.”
“Did you really pull me in here to talk about a girl?”
He tips his head to the side, caught. “I actually wanted to talk some more about the captain thing.”
I groan, scrubbing a hand down my face. “Jesus Christ, when are you going to drop it?”
“When you start taking it seriously!”
“I have. You’re just not accepting my answer.”
“I’ll accept it when I know you’ve really thought about it.”
I hang my head. “Fine.” I tell him what he wants to hear.
“Good man.” He claps me on the back as he walks past me. “Come find me when you finish up.”