Page 10 of The Fireman and the Flirt

I sat in my desk chair and wheeled over to her in one big whoosh. I spun myself around, too. I was on a little bit of a high, still buzzing from my conversation with Derek last night.

“I have a meeting today with a potential client. He’s a widower with a daughter. They just moved back to Sourwood, and they need a house.”

“Okay. Sounds great. Why are you freaking out?”

“Because this isn’t just anyone. This is Derek Hogan.”

“Who’s that?”

Oh, right. Hannah wasn’t a mindreader.

“I had the biggest crush on him in high school. Bigger than James Van Der Beek. Bigger than Heath Ledger. RIP. And now he’s back, and he needs a house, and he called me last night, and I tried my best to sound like a functional human, but I don’t know how well I managed.”

Hannah chuckled. She understood. There was no judgment in her eyes. Before she met her husband, she would come to me with dating horror stories all the time.

“I’m sure you sounded fine. And hey, he’s single.” She shrugged a shoulder.

“He’s straight. And a widower. He’s in mourning. He probably sleeps under a blanket made of his dead wife’s hair.”

“Ew.”

“Sorry. That was kind of graphic.” I took a gulp of iced coffee until the caffeine willed itself into my bloodstream. “But the point is, I need to get my shit together.”

“We all get a little flustered around old crushes when we first reconnect with them. But once you see him, you’ll remember that he’s just a regular guy, probably with a beer gut, and high school was forever ago.”

“Right, right.” Somehow, in the recesses of my soul, I doubted I would ever see Derek as a regular guy. And per the photos circulating on Cal’s social media, he had a slight beer gut, but it was drowned out by the wall of muscle in his chest and shoulders.

“It won’t be awkward unless you make it awkward.”

“Also right.” I twisted the straw around in my drink, letting it make squeaky noises. “Um, so it might be awkward. Definitely awkward.”

I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree, but I did have a PhD in awkward.

She quirked an eyebrow, her face flashing with curiosity. “Did something happen between you two?”

“Sorta.”

“What do you mean sorta?” She wheeled closer to me, cornering me against my desk.

Here it came. The Big Awkward Thing. The Huge Disaster. I had to purge this from my system. I hadn’t told a soul about the note. I locked it away in the part of my brain where I stored all embarrassing moments, which I then thought about for no reason at three in the morning.

I gripped my iced coffee until the frigid plastic seared my hand.

“I had the biggest crush on Derek,” I started.

“This has already been established.”

“But he never noticed me. Even though I was friends with his little brother, and I would hang out at his house afterschool, I was invisible to him. We never had a conversation or any kind of inside jokes. That wasn’t all his fault, though. I was too nervous to talk to him.”

“You? Too nervous to talk?”

I tipped my head, just as surprised as her. “One time, we were in his kitchen together, and he asked me to pass him a paper towel, and I handed him the pepper shaker like an idiot. Then I promptly left the kitchen without saying a word.”

I needed a pillow to bury my head in. The embarrassment was as fresh as ever. I’d forgotten just how awkward I was as a teenager. It was a miracle I had any social skills at all. (Though in my slight defense, “paper” in Derek’s sexy mumble sounded like “pepper.”)

“That’s the something that happened between you two?” Hannah deflated slightly, unaware that we were only getting started.

I shook my head no. “I’d had a sneaking suspicion that he might’ve been gay, or at least bi. Sometimes, I’d catch him checking out a guy in the hall.”

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