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Jackie, the girl Gabe had been casually dating off and on for the past few months, was practically shaking with excitement at the thought of finally meeting Nicola. She’d been angling to be invited to Sunday lunch at his mother’s house to meet not just Nicola, but Smith, too. The thing was, Gabe just couldn’t see her around his family. She was too young, too eager. Sure, Nicola was young too, but there was a reason she and Marcus fit so well together. Nicola was far more mature than other twenty-five-year-old girls.
Especially Jackie, Gabe thought as she started toward them, stars in her eyes.
Gabe knew he’d strung her along too long. Quickly deciding that he’d break it off with her tonight, he wasn’t looking forward to her tears. She was a crier, which was partly why he hadn’t had the balls to make a clean break these past weeks.
“How the hell did you end up with her again?” Gabe asked Marcus a couple of hours later as they stood to the side and watched Nicola charm the pants off the tightly packed crowd who had paid big bucks to see her do a short acoustic set in the fire station’s parking lot. The money they’d bring in today with her help would go a long way to getting the new equipment that budget cuts were making hard to come by.
Rather than trying to take any credit for it, Marcus simply said, “I’m the luckiest bastard on the planet.” He nodded his head in Jackie’s direction, way up at the front of the group, clearly in awe of every little thing Nicola said or did. “What about her?”
Gabe shook his head. “Just a casual thing that’s run its course.”
Nicola had just finished her set when the station alarm rang and dispatch rang out over the station’s loudspeakers, alerting them to an apartment fire.
Gabe and the rest of the crew immediately moved to put on their turn-outs and headed out, their alarms blaring to clear the busy city traffic.
“Wow, that was intense and they’re not even at the fire yet,” Nicola said a few minutes later when she and Marcus were standing together in a corner of the station. “I don’t know how your mother deals with this so well. I feel like a basket case right now.”
“This is what Gabe does. He’ll be fine,” Marcus reassured her.
But fifteen minutes later, after they’d said their goodbyes to the volunteers who had set up the concert and were about to get into Marcus’s car to head back up to Napa Valley, another station alarm went off.
“All units responding to 1280 Conrad Street, be advised, upgrading to third alarm.”
Nicola looked at Marcus with huge eyes. “That’s the fire Gabe went to. It sounds like it’s gotten worse, not better.”
“My brother is a hell of a firefighter,” Marcus told her. “He’s not the kind of guy who’d ever do something dangerous or stupid.”
Only, as they stood together while the siren continued to blare and dispatch repeated the call, both of them knew there were plenty of other reasons why firefighters got hurt in the line of duty.
And all they could do was hold on to each other and hope that Gabe would be all right.
~ THE END ~
