Firefighter's Virgin

“Sure,” I said. “Absolutely. Whatever you need. If you want to take a couple days off, you can. I’ll still pay you.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I know, but I want to.”

She nodded, considering my offer. “Well, maybe I’ll take you up on that. I’m not sure. But for now, I just need some time to think about all of this. Because I am more confused now than I think I’ve ever been. Thank you for talking to me, but I think it’d be best for me to go now.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “I’m really sorry, Daisy.”

She didn’t say anything else, and I watched her walk away. And it was true—I couldn’t remember ever feeling sorrier about a situation than I did right now.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Daisy

I didn’t know what I was supposed to think.

I went for a walk, hoping that some exercise would help, or at least clear my brain from thinking any thoughts. Really, that should’ve made everything clear. It should’ve put everything in a crystalline perspective: No way was I going to get involved with a guy who was going to have a baby with someone else! That was too much. I didn’t want to be a stepmom. I didn’t want to be with someone who was going to have the responsibility of a child with another woman.

But there was another part of me that was trying to argue it wasn’t such a big deal; people did it all the time. I myself had a stepmother, technically, even though we didn’t really have any sort of relationship.

My phone started to ring, and I pulled it out, telling myself that if it was Ian, I wasn’t going to answer it. Hadn’t he just said that he’d give me time to think about everything? But it wasn’t him; or at least, it wasn’t a number that I recognized. Normally I would’ve ignored it, but I decided to pick it up.

It turned out to be Carl, my mother’s colleague. He thanked me for getting in touch with him and asked if I wanted to get together on Saturday morning, if I was still interested in being part of the project.

“I do have plans Saturday afternoon,” I said, “but I could do Saturday morning.”

“That would be great,” he said. He had a very calm, mild voice that made me feel at ease, even though we’d only been on the phone for about a minute. “I’ve done a number of interviews already, and some have been fairly quick. Others have been longer, but we can make sure that you’re done in time to get to your next engagement.”

He told me where his office was located, and I agreed to meet him there at ten o’clock. When we got off the phone, I circled back toward the office, hoping that Ian would have left by then, or at the very least, I wouldn’t run into him when I was getting into my car.

Of course, at the very moment I was pulling my keys out of my purse, the door to the office building swung open, and he strode out. I could tell he wasn’t expecting to see me right there, and that it had actually taken him by surprise. He started to smile and say something, but then he stopped, as though remembering the last conversation that we’d had. There were about twenty feet between us, and we both just stood there, looking at each other, neither one saying anything. That’s when I realized he was going to wait for me to say something first, but I didn’t know what to say. And I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, so I just got into my car and drove away.

“Thank you for meeting with me,” Carl said. I was sitting on the couch in his office, which was a big, bright room lined with bookshelves. He was seated in an armchair that was next to the couch, and he turned the voice memo on his iPhone on and placed it on the coffee table, so the microphone was facing me. “Has your mother told you anything about the project?”

“Not really,” I said. “Just that you were writing a book about the quarter-life crisis.”

He smiled and nodded. He reminded me of a teddy bear, or one of those animal characters in a children’s fiction book, with a light sweater vest pulled

on over a collared short-sleeve shirt with light blue checkers. He had a sandy colored beard and slightly disheveled hair. He was also wearing Birkenstocks. “Correct. And that’s good she didn’t give you too many details; I think that’s better for the subjects that I’m interviewing. Though ‘interviewing’ is perhaps too rigid of a term—this is really more of a conversation. I’d like to hear about your experience so far. I’ll ask you a few basic questions to get us started.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sounds good.”

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“And did you graduate from college?”

“Yes, with a B.A. in creative writing.”

“And what has your experience been like since you graduated?”

“My experience . . .” I paused and took a deep breath. “My experience has honestly been nothing like what I thought it would be. I can remember being a teenager and being so excited to get to graduate high school and go off to college because I was certain that was when my ‘real life’ was going to start. And I spent a good part of my teenage years just waiting for this real life to start, thinking that I’d know when it happened because I’d feel like an adult. I would know that I had arrived because I would feel different. But I don’t feel different. I feel exactly the same—only maybe worse, because now it seems like something is wrong with me. It seems like I somehow missed the turnoff for the road to adulthood, because I feel like I’m just playing pretend.”

Carl nodded. “What sorts of things have happened that made you feel this way?”

“The jobs I’ve had since graduating have nothing to do with what I went to school for. Though I realize that a creative writing major might not have been the most practical thing—my mother was always very fond of telling me that. But I thought she, of all people, would have encouraged me to pursue my passion, not just what might have made sense financially. So I haven’t had much success with my writing, but that’s really because I haven’t been doing any writing.”