Page 22 of The Fireman and the Flirt

“Bill’s looking at recruiting guys our age, so we can commiserate together. What do you say?”

“I’ll think about it.” The chance to get back on the ice was tempting. “When does it start up?”

“January.”

I wondered where I would be by then. Hopefully in a house and enjoying my job as fireman.

Mitch grabbed us waters from his mini fridge. “So what was this blast from the past story?” he asked.

“Remember when you tossed your cookies outside that party in high school? And then Leo pointed and said matter-of-factly, ‘You puked in a bush.’” A laugh ripped through me as the memory came back to life. When I said it aloud, it didn’t sound that funny, but you had to be there. I’d forgotten how stupid we could be as teenagers and how freeing that feeling was.

“Not my finest hour.”

“The house is for sale.” I kicked my legs up on the coffee table. “Cary is being very diligent.”

“He seems good,” Mitch said.

“Have you been hanging out with him?”

“He and Cal are friends, so we see each other from time to time.”

“What’s he like?”

“What do you mean?” Mitch shrugged. “He’s nice. A little weird.”

“But a good kind of weird. That gearhead story was kinda funny.” There was something sexy about buttoned-up people who let their freak flag fly from time to time. Why was I thinking something sexy about Cary? “He seems like a fun guy. Odd, but fun.”

Mitch gave me serious side eye. Why was I trying to get nuggets of info about Cary out of him?

He might’ve given me more information on present-day Cary had the sound of shattering glass not distracted us.

“My bad. I thought those were prop glasses.” Lucien’s voice floated up from the bar. “Allison, where’s the film set medic? I cut my pinky.”

Mitch clamped his eyes shut and grumbled.

Before I droveto pick up Jolene from school, I stopped by the storage facility, an anonymous-looking building situated off the highway. My storage locker was at the end of a long, quiet hallway bathed in depressing fluorescent lights. Here was everything to my name, everything that had made it from Alaska.

When our parents passed away and Cal sold the house, he rented a huge locker to hold all of our old crap. I wasn’t one for holding onto things. Cal was. He didn’t like letting things go, just in case there was the tiniest bit of sentimental value to be found.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. It was kind of nice being around my old belongings from Alaska, a reminder that my life was currently on pause until I found a new home. Boxes of pictures and clothes were stacked against the wall.

I opened boxes on Cal’s side of the locker, burrowing further and further into my past until I found my high school yearbook. I looked like such a handsome schmuck in my senior picture, the gauzy blue background glittering behind me, thinking that I was god’s gift to the world with my unearned cockiness. “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” was my quote. How original.

I flipped to the sophomores section, then to the P’s, and finally to Cary Perkowski. The underclassmen pictures were small squares in black-and-white. His angular face had a trio of pimples dotting his chin, and oppressive amounts of gel reflected in his hair.

He was practically begging to be shoved into a locker.

And yet…he was cute in his awkward way. His wide, eager smile hadn’t changed. There was a sweetness to his picture, and I hoped that my high school self had stopped him from getting shoved into his locker. Were kids actually shoved into lockers or was that just a cliché from the movies? From what I remembered, the lockers at South Rock weren’t full-length. They were stacked in two rows. It would’ve been impossible to contort someone into one of them.

There I went…I was sounding like Cary.

I winked at Cary’s picture. He’d grown up into a successful, good looking guy. He hadn’t let past setbacks keep him down. High School Cary would be happy to know where he ended up.

“You done good,” I said to his picture.

The next day,I met Cary to look at my first house, and I quickly learned that photographs in a real estate listing rarely matched reality.

“The front yard looks smaller,” I said. Overgrown hedges and eroded mulch bunched up by the walkway, a stark contrast to the neatly trimmed yard in the pictures.

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