She knew what he was thinking: he was wondering how he could swat away her help and still get his mug to the lounge whilst on crutches. ‘Just let me take it for you.’
‘Fine.’ He reluctantly let her pick up his coffee as well as hers.
‘Sometimes, you’ve got to accept a little help.’
They settled in the lounge and he thanked her for staying. ‘Company other than my mother’s makes me feel semi-normal.’
‘I see my mother often, she doesn’t live that far away, but having a parent living with you must be a whole different ball game. How long is she staying for?’
‘Not sure yet.’ He took a tentative sip of hot coffee. ‘Come on, give me some work talk.’
‘You sound desperate.’
‘I am, believe me. And you might be a critical care paramedic rather than a firefighter, but I’ll take it. I need action talk. I want to hear about emergency scenarios, jobs, anything. The closest I’ve come to that is watching TV shows.’
Bess ran through today’s emergency, the one where firefighters were on the scene. She gave her best descriptions; he was engaged, asked questions, and at the end, he leaned back against the soft sofa with a big smile.
‘That better?’ she asked, watching him close his eyes, satisfied with some shop talk. He was a handsome man with a chiselled jaw and a physique that was hard to look away from.
‘Man, I miss the job.’ He opened his eyes, looked at his leg.
‘I’m not really cheering you up, am I? Maybe we should talk about something else.’
‘You’re doing better than you think you are.’ When he locked eyes with her, she shifted a little. It was that same look he’d given her time and time again when they met at an emergency or when he showed up at the air ambulance base in support of TheSkylarks’ fundraising events. The emergency services all tended to do that for each other – equally, she’d been to open days at the fire station and watched him do his demonstrations or talk about his job. The best times were when he had a group of kids to talk to. To look at him, you’d think he had no appeal to the younger audience but he came alive in a different way when kids showed up, as if he understood them and knew just how to get on their wavelength.
‘Does the knee still hurt?’ she asked.
‘Only when I move it too much. And the brace helps, stops me twisting it the wrong way or knocking it.’
‘And the walk before, when I picked you up, was that too much?’
‘More on my arms using those crutches than anything else.’
His arms looked strong enough from where she was sitting, and she noticed his biceps, the way the sleeves of his T-shirt hugged them.
‘Are you doing all the exercises they give you?’
‘Religiously.’
‘That’s good.’ And now she’d run out of things to say, aware that here she was sitting in close proximity to Gio and it felt different to all the times they’d done this before. They were still friends but her feelings had begun to spill over into more when they absolutely couldn’t, not if she wanted to avoid making even more of a mess of her life than she already had. Gio wasn’t the sort of man you went out with if you wanted a serious, stable future. He was fun, a right here, right now kind of guy, and she had enough recklessness with her finances. She didn’t need to add it in to her personal life too.
‘Bess—’
‘This coffee is good.’ She didn’t want him to say anything that would make things between them complicated.
‘I’m glad you like it. Could do with one of those brownies Nadia made to go with it.’
‘Me too, they were good.’
‘How about dinner?’
‘Dinner?’ She set her mug down on the coffee table. ‘Now?’
‘Not now, no. But dinner some time, me and you. We haven’t met up for ages, not properly.’
‘We’re meeting up now.’
‘We used to go for lunch frequently; we haven’t done that in weeks.’
