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“Wait, you farm the trees?”
He nods. “What, you think I just chop down all the trees on the land without any thought on if I’ll ever run out?”
“Well, yeah. That’s how most people work.”
“I ain’t most people. I actually gotta do stuff like run numbers and plan when the trees are best harvestable and how to do this all while keeping it sustainable.”
“That all sounds... very complicated for a job that I basically thought was about wearing flannel and hitting stuff with an ax.”
“It’s the twenty-first century, Char. I got a spreadsheet program and everything to manage it all.”
I giggle. “Just thinking of you huddled over your laptop doing very important business. Maybe you aren’t so different from the people just dressing the part.”
“Hey, I still gotta go out and hack down the trees too. I still lumberjack things.” He puffs himself up proudly.
“Sure you do, Bear. Sure you do.”
He just smirks and shakes his head at my teasing.
We roll up toward Hunter’s cabin, the lovely couple there to meet us, and baby Nate in Hunter's arms as we leave the truck.
“Looks like the two of you are getting along really well,” Savvy says as she approaches, hands on her hips.
“Yeah. Just a bit,” I say, blushing and deciding to stay with understatements for now.
“Shall we get to work?” Bear says, stretching out, declaring his intention to avoid further questions.
Hunter hands the baby off to Savvy, and the two of them head off to the gazebo.
“So, I’m guessing you’re settling in really well with Bear?” Savvy says, a smirk on her face, clearly digging for details.
“Um, yeah, he has lots of space. He helped me set up my own room and everything.” This isn’t a lie. I do have my own room to keep my things and did put a good deal of it away after I woke up in the morning and cleaned myself up. Granted, we had another encounter in the shower and one in the guest room, but I did somehow get my clothes put away.
“Not going to lie, there’s a part of me disappointed you won’t be staying with us, Char.”
“Oh, I would have just gotten in the way. This works out better for both of us, I’m sure.”
“Not about you being in the way. It’d be nice to have you close by for a change. Our friendship has been mostly online for the past year since the city is so far from here.”
“Well, I’m a lot closer. I could literally walk here if I was determined.” It’s about two and a half miles, so it’d be a long walk, but it’s very doable. “Plus I got my own car, and looking at your garage over there, so do you.”
“Gotta be my own woman, Char. Hunter’s always been very supportive of that.”
“Never thought of you as a SUV person though.”
She smirks. “I’m not. I wanted to get some small fuel-efficient sedan, but Hunter pointed out that we do, technically, drive on a lot of dirt roads. I actually need the stuff that most people never use, like the all-wheel drive.”
“Things are different out here, I guess.”
“They are. I think you’ll learn to love it out here, Char. People are friendlier. They remember your name, and you’ll learn to want to help them as much as they want to help you. Everyone needs everyone out here.”
I take a few steps, gazing up into the clear sky and taking in a lungful of the clean country air. “I dunno. There’s a lot of stuff in the city that’s really nice and hard to give up.”
“Such as?”
“I can get a pizza at two a.m. after I spend all night dancing and then be able to call a cab so I don’t risk doing something stupid like driving drunk.”
Savvy laughs. “Yeah, doing that was fun sometimes. And yeah, you can’t do that here. But how often did you really want to do such a thing? How often could you?”
