Page 45 of The Fireman and the Flirt

“Courage? Yeah, I should’ve gotten the purple heart for this one. I don’t know what I was thinking. I hadn’t slept well that night, and my teenage self needed nine hours of solid sleep to function.”

Cary put his hands on his hips and looked out the dining room windows. “I was very lonely in high school. All the straight kids around me were hooking up and having sex and talking about having sex. And I couldn’t do any of that because I was in the closet. I was just as horny as they were. I wanted to do all those things, too. So these thoughts kept building and building in me. But I couldn’t do a thing about it. And I would see you in the halls everyday, and it would only make them build up more. It was like water in a dam.”

“And then one day, the dam broke,” I said.

“But the dam couldn’t break like it could for other kids. I assumed you were straight. Well, mostly straight. It was before bisexuality was accepted. The turn of the millennium was a very binary time.”

“You suspected I might be gay. You said ‘I have a feeling deep down that this letter will resonate with a side of you the rest of South Rock doesn’t get to see.’”

“Oh God. You’re quoting the letter.”

“It was very well-written. You’re a good writer,” I said, as if that would help make things more comfortable.

“It doesn’t matter.” Cary shifted his body ever so slightly, as if he were going to face me but remained staring out the window. “Even if you were openly gay or bi, you wouldn’t have wanted your brother’s awkward, skinny friend.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know how the social hierarchy of high school works.”

Perhaps he had a point, but I still chose to believe my teenage self would’ve been open to hooking up with him. Maybe we could’ve gone to the movies together. What could have been.

“If you believe all that, then why did you give me the letter?”

“I don’t know. I guess I wanted to call your bluff.”

“Do you…” I struggled to find the nerves to ask what I really wanted to know. “Do you still feel that way?”

He finally turned to me and looked me straight in the eye. “Derek, I promise you whatever crush I had is firmly in the past. It’s gone the way of landlines. You don’t need to worry about that.”

Cary waltzed into the kitchen before I could respond, leaving me with a sinking sense of defeat. At least I had a moment alone to regain myself.

“Derek, you have to check out this kitchen! You are going to freak out over all this counter space!” Cary called from the other room.

I kinda missed landlines and the awkward conversations I had to have with my friends’ parents before I could speak to them. Funny how that worked.

14

CARY

That was close.

What the fuck was I talking about? That was a disaster.

A barely mitigated disaster. But a barely mitigated disaster was still a disaster because you were flirting with disaster.

I pressed my hands on the cool, marble countertops as I sucked in a deep breath. Breathing was supposed to help calm us, right? I’d already dropped my professional demeanor today by spouting off enough “Oh my God” exclamations to join the clergy. I had to regain control and forget about the fact that Derek had read my written desire to be his human sex doll. It was difficult telling him that I had zero crush on him, but it had to be done for the sake of my reputation and this business relationship.

There was a part of me that thought he actually liked the letter, that he seemed a little…turned on? Wouldn’t a normal person have run away screaming if they’d discovered such a letter? When I glanced down at his crotch (another habit I needed to break), the pants area looked a smidge tight.

But I couldn’t take the chance to find out. What if I admitted that I was attracted to him, and he didn’t feel the same? Just because the guy was bisexual, a little flirty in text messages, and not horrified at getting propositioned via twenty-year-old letter, didn’t mean I had a greenlight. Life had worked out for me in many areas. Not in the romantic realm, though. My batting average was low, so low I was reduced to using sports metaphors apparently.

“You’re right. There’s tons of counter space.” Derek sidled up next to me and smoothed his large hands across the marble. I was jealous of said marble, but I kept it in my pants.

There was a reason why I was in the running to be the top real estate agent in the region. I was damn good at my job, and I didn’t let myself get distracted by crushes or cute clients or awkward situations.

“I know you’d said you wanted to do more cooking with Jolene. This is a perfect kitchen for that.” I knocked on the marble twice.

“Nice and hard,” he said.

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