Page 21 of His Virgin Romance Series

I laughed. “Are you speaking from experience?”

“Maybe,” he said with a little twinkle in his eye.

“Thanks for the advice, Sarge,” I said.

“My door is always open.” He nodded before heading back out to his office.

I thought long and hard about what Sarge had told me. It was good advice, but it still didn’t make my decision any easier. Sometimes I wished I had a family to talk to, but everyone from my childhood had scattered, and we had all taken different paths, some by choice and others by force. I thought about my father and the nights he would stumble home drunk and angry, looking for a fight. He had been buried for ten years now, and I still couldn’t find it in me to miss him even a little.

I thought about my mother and the sad expressions she wore at different times of the day. She had been a beautiful woman, but she lost her beauty there towards the end. She had been so consumed with her disappointing life that it had eaten away at her. I think she must have finally realized that it was either her or us—and she chose herself. There were still days when I was hurt by her choice…but a part of me understood it, too.

I thought about my fearless older brother. He had all the courage and conviction that I had lacked growing up. When I was five, my goal in life was to grow up to be like Paul. And then I got older and realized that my superhero of a brother was nothing more than a juvenile delinquent who was just as lost as the rest of us. He put on a better act than most, but it was an act all the same.

I could see the broken threads of the family I had once had, and it hurt to think that we were no longer even that. I realized suddenly that we had never truly been a family. We were just separate people, brought together by a combination of bad choices and DNA that wasn’t really strong enough to hold us together for long.

After I had been initiated as a firefighter and when I was out on different calls, I would come across families. They were all in different situations in various degrees of stress and emergency, but the one thing they had in common was fear of losing a loved one. Once the crisis had been averted, they came to us with wide eyes and tears of joy and thanked us.

If I was ever in that position, I knew I would have no one to worry about me. I would have no one to pray for me. I would have no one. Period.

It was a sad reality, but it was my reality, and I had made my peace with it. At least, I thought I had. But these last few weeks talking to Rachel had made me realize that I missed having a shoulder to lean on. I missed having someone I could confide in. I while I hadn’t actually confided anything too personal to Rachel, I realized was that I felt comfortable enough to want to—and that worried me. Or maybe it scared me; I couldn’t really tell the difference sometimes.

Once I was done cleaning out the supplies, I walked back into the day room and contemplating calling Rachel to check in. She had been abrupt the last time we had spoken, and I didn’t want to overstep, but I was started to realize that I was growing dependent on our conversations. They helped me sleep at night. She helped me sleep at night.

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