Firefighter's Virgin

The girls headed upstairs. I grimaced. Ryder doubled over laughing.

“Good luck, man.” He shot me his shit-eating grin and stumbled back to his bedroom. No doubt he was going back to sleep.

“Fuck you, asshole,” I growled. I grabbed my leather jacket and stalked out the door before they’d even made it upstairs. I didn’t need that shit. I needed to get to Harper.

Chapter Two

Gabrielle

“There is a special place reserved in hell for whoever came up with all these stupid ass principles for the validity of a damn contract,” Heather groaned from what used to be her dining room table.

We hadn’t been able to see the table in weeks, let alone eat at it. It was covered with piles of textbooks, notes, mind maps, and files. Scraps of paper lay strewn all over the floor of her usually neat apartment, and diagrams on everything from business entities to wills and estates covered the walls.

Ah, the life of a law school graduate. After three years of busting ass in school, we figured we’d be ready for the dreaded bar exam. It had taken me one practice exam to realize I didn’t know a damn thing. Those years of law school seemed like a waste of time now. What was the point if I still had to study other test prep materials to pass this test? Why did I go $100,000 in debt if school didn’t prepare me to get my license?

“You could always skip it with me,” I said.

Heather’s answering sigh followed me all the way to her kitchen, which was not all that far away in her tiny apartment. “No, I can’t. And you shouldn’t be skipping it either.” She huffed, finally looking up at me.

I’d been trying to talk to her for the last half hour, but she’d quite obviously been so caught up in her studies that she hadn’t heard a word I’d been saying.

I rummaged around her kitchen, searching for two clean mugs. In the end, I gave up and just washed a couple.

“Maybe not, but maybe I like being a rebel without a cause.” I could feel her eyes on me, silently questioning.

I fixed our coffee the way we’d been taking it since we met back when I was in my freshman year of undergrad. Heather, a senior at the time, had been a tutor but quickly became my best friend.

I placed her steaming mug on top of a pile of discarded notes, the summaries before the final set. Then I cleared a space on her couch, which masqueraded as a pile of dirty laundry. I wriggled my nose. This was getting ridiculous. It would be time for an intervention soon.

Heather looked me over for a long moment, her sharp brown eyes rimmed with red. Sleep deprivation was an old friend of ours. “I know why you don’t want to take the bar. I just think you should take it anyway. Once you pass it, no one can ever take it away from you. It doesn’t mean that you have to start practicing right away.”

“That’s the thing, though. Why take it at all if I never want to practice? This was all my father’s dream. Not mine. It’s not my fault he’s trying to live vicariously through me. I’m only 24. I just want to be young, for once. Live my life on my own terms and figure out what I actually want to do with it. If that really is taking the bar, I can take it then.”

I could tell she thought it was a shitty argument, but it happened to be completely true. School had always come easy for me. My father recognized that early on and started pushing me toward law school and the bar before I’d had the chance to explore any other options.

He started prepping me right away. As soon as I started preschool. By the time I was getting ready to start 6th grade, I tested out and was bumped up two years. They wanted to move me directly on to high school, but my father thought I needed some sort of social life. He didn’t want me to be too young in high school. Then, my senior year of high school was almost fully spent on a college campus. I had almost a full year’s worth of credits when I actually started college.

“Yeah, yeah.” Heather rolled her eyes good-naturedly and pulled out the pencil that had been holding her hair in a bun, shaking her long locks free. “You could take it later, but then you wouldn’t be taking it with me.”

Despite her obvious exhaustion, she started to look more like herself as the study haze cleared from her eyes. It encouraged me to keep the conversation going. Clearly, she needed a break.

“I know,” I said. “It would suck to have to study for it by myself. I would have to turn my own apartment into a hermit’s nest, like you have.”

That earned me a chuckle. Her eyes scanned the apartment as if seeing it for the first time, and she shuddered a little. Heather had come from no money, and she’d had to work hard for everything she had.

Understandably, she took pride in her achievements and in being able to afford an apartment in the nicer part of town, even if it was tiny. She displayed that pride by keeping her apartment, and herself, spotless and in great shape. When she wasn’t prepping for the bar, anyway.

“Let’s get one thing clear,” she said. “You would never have to study this hard. Not all of us are prodigies who just understand everything,” she snapped her fingers for emphasis, “like that. Secondly, maybe if you were taking it with me, you could do the cleaning while I studied.”

“I’m flattered that you think that I can clean as well as I can study. For the record, I’m awesome at Febrezing the shit out of stuff. But sadly, that’s where my talent ends.”

“Good to know there are a few things I’m still better at than you,” she teased. “Maybe not all of us are ready and able to take the bar at 24, but at least I can do my own laundry.”

I gestured at the monstrous pile of dirty clothes I’d swept from the couch and raised an eyebrow. “Is that a fact? You could’ve fooled me.”

She had the good sense to look contrite. For a second, anyway. Then she flipped me off with a smirk. “It is a fact. If I wasn’t studying all the damn time, or if, you know, I had my study buddy with me, I might have time to get to it.”

I sighed. I’d let her down when I told her I didn’t plan on taking the bar with her anymore. Our friendship had surprised people at first, given that Heather was four years older than I was, but she got me. And I got her.