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“You’re thinking of someone, aren’t you?” I smiled back at him. “Someone who stayed around for the show?”
“Two someones, actually,” he replied. “The guys I started Wild Woods HQ with. Damon and Jacob. We all met in high school when I transferred to Virginia from a school out in Ohio. My dad got a job on an oil rig out here so one day I was freaking out about who to go to a dance with in Cincinnati and the next I was on a plane headed for the wilderness.”
“Wild Woods HQ?”
“Right…” Parker paused for a moment, like he was searching for the right words. “Remember when I told you that I came out here to prove something?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s because I’m a co-owner of a wilderness camping experience. Our whole thing is offering people a chance to reconnect with nature, have an authentic time in the woods, really get the whole Virginia wilderness thing for themselves.”
“That sounds like an interesting job,” I replied, with a nod. “Probably never gets boring, right?”
“I’m a big fan of the work, yeah.” Parker grinned before his expression fell for the second time tonight. “Although, it can get a little exhausting feeling like a phony all the time, especially when guests assume I know everything there is to know about the nature side of things?—"
“You’re not a phony, Parker,” I interrupted his moment of self-doubt. “I know I gave you shit about the fire hazards at the cabin but that doesn’t mean you don’t know what you’re doing out here?—”
“It’s not just that.” It was his turn to interrupt. “Like I said, I’m a transplant from Ohio and a big city in Ohio at that. A lot of this stuff never came naturally to me. I try my best to just absorb everything like a sponge but I’m still learning. I guess I just get insecure about it sometimes.”
“I’m sure Damon and Jacob don’t see it that way.”
“They don’t.” Parker let out a small sigh. “And if I even tried to bring this up with them, they’d act like I’d lost my mind. Still. It doesn’t make the feeling go away.”
“Do you know why I’m a firefighter, Parker?”
“Because you hate fire and relish in the idea of making sure there’s less of it in the world?”
“Not exactly.” I subtly chuckled as I shook my head. I leaned against the kitchen island, my mind going back and forth about whether or not I should tell Parker the truth or just a cleaned up version of it that might’ve been easier to hear?—
No.
I wasn’t going to clean it up. Not this time.
I wasn’t going to keep parts of myself all to myself, hidden away out of fear that I’d be judged as broken, discarded as damaged without a second thought. Because some part of me knew that Parker would never see me that way, bruised and no-good. The connection we had was stronger than that…
Or maybe it wasn’t and reality was about to come crashing down hard around me.
Either way, I was ready to go for it. “A long time ago, I got into a really bad fight at a bar.”
“You… fought someone?” Parker’s tone was lined with disbelief.
“More like he fought me,” I corrected. “Honestly, I couldn’t tell you why he started it. I’d just been minding my business, keeping to myself like usual. But I think he saw me as a challenge because I was the biggest guy at the bar that night. That used to happen all the time, assholes seeing me as a challenge instead of someone who just wanted to enjoy their drink in peace.”
I winced away from the memory, a surge of adrenaline threatening to course through my veins just at the thought of that awful night. “Anyway… he swung first. And maybe because I was just so fucking tired of assholes like him trying to start something with me, I swung back. I know I should’ve walked away, and of course, it only got worse from there. He tried to hit me with a fucking glass beer mug, so I just?—”
I took in a sharp breath, images of blood flashing behind my eyes.
“You just what, Nicholas?” Parker murmured, seemingly captivated by the story.
“I punched him. Hard. Twice. Maybe three times,” I replied. “Enough times so that he would get the hint. Enough times that he wouldn’t get up and keep egging me on. There was so much blood, though. His and mine. Mostly his. Turns out, breaking someone’s nose is a pretty bloody affair.”
“So, that’s why you became a firefighter? Because you got into a bad fight at a bar?”
“No, I became a firefighter because I didn’t realize how frustrated I was, how much aggression I had built up from assholes like that trying to provoke me my whole life,” I said. “I’d played rugby before that, so I figured I was getting out all of my aggression that way, but apparently not. And I knew that I never wanted to be in a position like that again, where someone could make me act so outside of my character, where someone could so easily get under my skin.”
I took a calming sip of my apple cider before I went on. “Anyway, firefighting let me get it all out. There was just something about having to focus on the fire, having to tame it. It’s such a force of nature that it blocked everything else out, turned out to be the only thing that could. Of course, I’m a lot less aggressive than I was back then, but it’s still therapeutic to me. Soothing, even, as strange as that might sound.”
I looked over at Parker, then, desperately trying to read the expression on his face, searching for any sign of judgment or rejection…
