Page 27 of The Problem with Fire
I’ve always loved my job, and I’ve always done my all to be the best at it. Firefighters couldn’t afford to get it wrong, and every second counted when you were playing with fire. The problem with fire was that it was unpredictable. If you didn’t have a connection with it, if you didn’t put in the effort to try to understand it, it could and would turn on you.
What I did was important, and I took the lives I’ve saved and lost seriously. I even cared about saving the damn buildings. Some of those buildings were homes, housed family businesses, or were community businesses that couldn’t be replaced due to sentimental value. A lot of community centers shaped famous athletes or artists.
But being told that Grange High was on fire had hit me on an entirely different level than I’ve ever felt before. From our talks these past few days, I knew Leta attended Granger High School, and I hadn’t been about to be the one to tell Monroe that her baby wasn’t safe. As irrational as that seemed, it was how I had felt riding towards the school.
Luckily, it had been a small fire…well, relatively speaking from experiencing much worse, and everyone had been evacuated accordingly before we had even arrived on the scene. We had all gone to work immediately with the principal approaching Carl first, letting him know what had happened. In all honestly, it could have been way worse with the fire being in a lab class. While there had been some minor explosions as we put the fire out, there hadn’t been anything catastrophic.
And while we were all thankful no one was hurt, I sure as hell hoped the parents of the boys who had started this mess whooped their asses.
Now there was going to be the cleanup phase of this mess. The school was built from block, but there’d still been enough damage to warrant some costly repairs. Not to mention whatever the inside of the lab classrooms looked like.
When I was walking back towards the truck, it was almost like it had been fate. Out of the crowds of students, teachers, and parents littering the front of the school, I had managed to spot Monroe, Leta, and that asshole, Thomas.
With my hat still on my head, I had managed to observed Monroe squeezing Leta to death with Thomas at her back. When Monroe had managed to give Leta some breathing room, they’d had a short exchange before Thomas had pulled Leta into his arms. I had shaken my head and removed my hat as I reached the truck.
It wasn’t that I was jealous of the scene or even about how I disliked Thomas. I expected him to be here. Hell, I would have been pissed if he hadn’t been. Leta was his daughter, and from everything that Monroe’s told me, he was relatively a good one. Apart from breaking up their family, he seemed like a devoted father.
It wasn’t the cozy picture they painted that bothered me. It was that I couldn’t be a part of it. I couldn’t go over there to make sure Leta was okay. I couldn’t go over there to comfort Monroe. I couldn’t go over there and talk to Thomas, man-to-man, to make sure our girls were safe and okay. And when I say our girls, I mean Leta as his daughter and Monroe as just mine.
I couldn’t go over there because we haven’t told Leta about our relationship yet, and I wasn’t even sure when Monroe would be comfortable enough to tell her. Though we had lied to Thomas about the length of our relationship, the rest of it was now real. We didn’t know how Leta would feel about her mother moving on, and it was a tricky situation. Talking and encouraging Monroe to move on was way different from her actually doing it. Monroe was right about the significance in her moving on. Now that Monroe was dating me, Leta would have to really deal with the fact that her parents were over for good. Because I wasn’t in this for the casualness of it. I was with Monroe for the long haul.
This shit was serious.
So, Wednesday sucked for a lot of reasons. But, right now, it sucked because I felt every bit the odd man out.
“Here,” Garrett said, handing me a bottled water. I took it, muttered my thanks, and drank it down. Chief and Leonard were doing a walk through, while the rest of us were about to begin cleanup.
“Hey?”
I turned around, and Monroe was standing before me. “Hey.”
“Are you okay?”
“Is Leta okay?” We both chuckled. “Is Leta okay?”
Monroe smiled. “She’s fine,” she replied. “Luckily, she was in the library tutoring. Good thing the fire didn’t happen during regular school hours.”
I nodded. “The important thing is that everyone who was here is safe.”
“Are all of you okay?” she asked, and I was pretty sure I was falling in love with her in this moment.
“We’re professionals,” I teased and winked at her.
She blushed.
Yeah, pretty sure it was love.
“I have to get back to Leta,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“You going home?” I knew what I sounded like, but I didn’t care. If Monroe was going to date me, she had to know I was a possessive bastard and just deal with it.
“I’ll probably follow Thomas and Leta to his house, get in another good hug, and go home,” she chuckled.
“You and Thomas arrived separately?” I was fishing, and she knew it.
“Thomas was at my house when we got the emergency notifications,” she admitted.
My eyes shot his way, and he was staring right at us. “What was he doing at your place?”
