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I’d seen firefighters a few times as a nurse. I remembered the burns a bad fire could give a firefighter, and it wasn’t pretty. I’d never asked about their jobs at the hospitals I’d worked at, but the firefighters I had met who had come to visit their friends after a fire had been simply lovely. A little jaded perhaps, but who wouldn’t be jaded after a career like that?
I’d met policemen who were the same way when coming to visit an officer who had been severely injured in the line of duty. It all depended on what kind of career people were in.
“That would explain why I smelled smoke then, when you came in,” I said. “You’ve been doing the job a while?”
He nodded.
“And you’ve seen a few things?”
“Where are you going with this?” He now looked at me with exasperation. “Jade, I appreciate that you want to get to know me, but this is not the way to do it.”
Okay now I was mad.
He had no right to tell me the “right way” to get to know someone. After all, he obviously wasn’t the expert in the room in terms of friendliness.
I turned back to the oven and began spooning cookie dough with more ferocity than I intended. Jesse was really grating on my nerves. At the hospital, it looked like firefighters enjoyed working on a team and helping others – as doing so gave them the external stimuli to be happy. All the firefighters I’d seen come to the hospital to help their teammates had beenexhausted, but seemed fulfilled with their lives. Jesse didn’t seem to enjoy the teamwork, nor did he seem all that fulfilled in life when he returned.
He just seemed bitter and angry, and I was not about to let this man—a total stranger, really—boss me around when he wasn’t even supposed to be home right now anyway.
I chucked the spoon into the sink and spun back to face him. He was just sitting scrolling on his phone, utterly oblivious to my fury. “I’m just trying to get to know you, Jesse. If we’re going to be living together, even if it’s meant to be something more akin to you just popping in for a night or two as if this was a hotel,” I said, my voice clearly tense. “And I’m not looking for specifics on what you’ve seen if you’re wondering. My time in the nursing industry has taught me never to ask for specifics from a few specific careers. Firefighting is one of them. I’m just trying to make basic conversation and you’re frankly being rude. Iknowyou probably don’t want to talk about the details, but that’s why Ididn’t askabout the details. I’ve seen the burns firefighters can get when their protective gear fails, and I’m not about to ask to see your scars. Geez, I’m just trying to be friendly; the least you could do is not be such a grump.”
I trailed off.
I realized that I might have overstepped, but I glanced at Jesse’s face to see how he took this. His eyes had narrowed. Even if he wasn’t expecting to be entirely friendly with his tenant, a landlord was usually at least amicable with them. It helped to make sure that the tenant would be less likely to destroy things in a rage on the way out, I’d heard from my previous landlord.
But now that I looked at him again, Jesse didn’t seem to care about the money it would take to fix things. He seemed the type to go after me in court if Ididcause more than normal wear and tear that I didn’t own up to and try to put right. There was just something to the stern countenance he wore currently thattold me it would be better to keep to what I had learned from watching previous roommates lose their life savings than try to test him.
In that manner, anyway.
I was beginning to think I should apologize and then hide in my room.
“It is always sad when gear fails, even if it’s not your own,” Jesse finally said, taking me by surprise. “Some of the worst things I’ve smelled have come from failing gear.”
I didn’t need to ask for clarification. Burning flesh was a smell that I’d gotten the occasional whiff of as well as I walked past the emergency room. It wasn’t pretty. Made me want to vomit every time. Thankfully, that was only in the beginning. I had learned to suppress the gag reflex enough to be able to treat those patients with the dignity they deserved.
The oven beeped at us, and I put the first sheet of cookies in before setting a timer.
“Why cookies?”
Jesse’s voice caught me off-guard, but thankfully I was able to keep from hitting the wrong number on the timer.
“I felt like it.” I shrugged. “Why? Do I need a reason to bake cookies?”
“Curiosity.”
I nodded slowly. Single-word answers would get old real fast, but I was glad he was at least sharing anything with me.
“What got you into firefighting if I may ask?” I said. “And you don’t have to give me the full story. If you don’t want to, I mean.”
The way he appeared to be entirely set on making sure I got as little information as possible was interesting, but I was determined to make the most of this conversation.
“I got into firefighting because I wanted to help people. I found that I had a passion for it. Now, I just want to be sure that the fires go out without any injuries. We’re not always that lucky.”
He looked at his lap, and I let the silence settle over the two of us as I continued spooning out cookie dough. It kept me half-occupied, so he was only getting the surface-level questions. I didn’t want to be the reason he had issues sleeping tonight. Memories always needed to be locked away in this kind of work, and I didn’t want to bring them up without meaning to.
I wasn’t even sure what purpose bringing them up would have served, even if Imeantto do that to him. It was one thing to do it without knowing what brought the memories up. It was another entirely to torment him by doing it on purpose and pushing until I found the right questions and issues to raise around him.
“So, what did you forget when you left for the shift at the fire station?” I ventured into some different territory as I finished rolling the last of the cookies out. “You said you forgot something when you arrived.”
