It was sort of the end and it sort of wasn’t. I was definitely not ready to talk about it at the time because I was pretty upset and I didn’t want to broadcast that all over Tumblr, especially given I wasn’t necessarily in a space to be fair about her perspective. Long story super short, I wouldn’t kiss her because I had just been in close proximity to someone who had been exposed to COVID, and remember this is waaaay before our fledgling vaccine rollout. She was initially cool about it but later called me a coward. We got into a pretty big fight outside of my work and I told her not to contact me again. So.
We did talk again a few months later when the fires in California were really bad because I was worried about her and I don’t know how to let sleeping dogs lie. We chatted on and off for a few weeks. I was at that time training to take the CPAT and hoping to get into a fire academy myself, which had *nothing* to do with her, but she really didn’t like it. Said a lot of crappy things about how I’d never be good enough to land an interview at a real department, and then changed her tune to say she couldn’t live with it because it’s a dangerous job and she wouldn’t be able to protect me. She said she would never date another firefighter, but maybe if I got into a small department somewhere out of the way that didn’t see much action she could learn to be okay with it.
I think a possessive/protective partner is attractive af... if they know how to handle themselves and rein that in when it’s not appropriate. She didn’t know how to do that, and I blocked her shortly thereafter. Folks from her station still drop by for lunch once in a while and I’ve heard through the grapevine that she’s since moved to another state to take care of a family member who fell ill. And that, Anon, is how that story actually ended.
