“Yep. I know how to do everything in my business and took care of it myself before I left since they were busy. Who are you to give me shit when your wife does it all for you?”
“If I had to handle it, it’d be pizza,” Justin said.
Every shift did its own thing, but he appreciated the one he was on rotated meals for their twenty-four shifts. Just their dinner, the rest of the time they were on their own.
“Nothing wrong with that,” he said.
They drove back to the firehouse, removed their gear and made their way back to the table. A couple of the guys stuck their plates in the microwave. There were a few around. He’d turned the oven on and thrown the rest of the food in the foil pan back in for now. There was enough for a few helpings and it’d be warm by the time they got to the second one.
“Who was the chick you were staring at?” Rick asked.
“When and where? Be more specific.”
“At the call just now. Your gaze was locked in as if you were going to launch a missile,” Rick said.
He laughed. He hadn’t realized he was that obvious. “Just looking around.”
“A place like that has some fancy women in it,” Justin said. “You’d have to do more than bring some pub food from your kitchen over to her.”
“Who says you need to feed a woman to spend the night with her?”
People expected comments like that from him. He’d built that reputation early in life. But the truth was, he’d scaled back the nights out over the past few years.
It was too hard with his job at the firehouse, then add in the pub. He’d always worked more than one job. Always hustled to make something of himself.
He’d like to think he was getting there. He wouldn’t say he had a set plan or goal for his life, nothing more than to be successful and take care of his grandmother.
Guess it was better than nothing and a hell of a lot more than he’d thought he’d make of himself when he was a teen.
“The right woman,” Rick said.
“Chance always cares about the woman right now,” Justin said. “And as we know, it works for him.”
He wasn’t so sure why they thought that since he didn’t talk too much about his dating life. Could be they just saw him in the pub flirting more than anything and assumed more than it was.
“You gotta do what you do to get through the day.”
Something he’d lived by most of his life. It’d be nice not to always feel as if he was flying by the seat of his pants though.
5
NOT TO PLAN
The minute Jocelyn pulled her comfy black athletic shorts on two days later, the damn fire alarms went off again.Are you freaking kidding me!?
What the hell was going on in the building?
She grabbed her white T-shirt that said McCarthy Construction on it and quickly pulled her work shirt over her head and swapped it for the T-shirt. No way she was going outside half in her workout gear and the other half a nice shirt.
Her feet were bare, thankfully, so she slipped them into a pair of slides in her room, ran to get her purse and phone and went out the door toward the stairs.
It was the third alarm in seven days, and she was getting fed up with this. Someone had to learn to cook.
She got to the stairwell and was running down it faster than other tenants. Sorry, it was probably a false alarm, but she played by the rules and passed a few who were just chatting and bitching about this happening again.
“I hear you, sister,” she mumbled, but passed the woman just the same.
Once she was outside, she just found a spot in the parking lot and stood there. She hoped it was something quick like last time because it looked as if it was going to rain.
