Page 8 of Unwrapped

“And you want it.”

“I want it.” His eyes come back to mine—clear, honest, pained. “My father left when I was eleven. A note on the kitchen counter. My brother enlisted, deployed, stopped coming back. I’ve spent my whole life being the one who stays.” He looks at the autumn display by the window. “And now I want this. The transfer. And I want you. And I’ve known you for two days, and I have no right to say that, but I’ve been invisible my whole life. You’re the first person who makes me want to be seen, and the timing is⁠—”

“Bad,” I say.

“Yeah.”

I don’t say anything else. The first man who has ever looked at me with real want just told me he’s walking toward fire.

He reads my silence. Nods once. Finds his boots.

“I need to think,” I say.

He stops at the door. Looks back at me—sitting on the marble in the dim light, hair wrecked, sugar on my skin, a ruined pot on the stove.

“Okay,” he says.

The bell chimes behind him. The courtyard swallows his footsteps. I sit in the quiet of my shop, and the sweet girl who is always fine sits alone with the taste of caramel and salt on her tongue and doesn’t smile.

5

WESTON

Igive her the morning.

I don’t text. I don’t walk past the Trading Post. I go to the station, change into my uniform, check the apparatus with Dean, and eat whatever Mack put on the kitchen table and insists is a balanced breakfast. The crew moves around me in the rhythm I’ve memorized over five years—Mack talking, Dean correcting him, Graham checking something twice, Levi quiet on the bench. Normal. Steady. Mine, for now.

Holt is in the kitchen doorway, coffee in hand. His gaze lands on me and stays there. He doesn’t ask. He just waits—shoulder against the frame, unhurried, giving me room to get to it.

“I need to talk to you,” I say.

He nods once and walks toward the office. I follow. He shuts the door and moves to the desk, leaning against it. He’s giving me the space to stand, to pace, to take up room.

“The wildland offer,” I say. “I haven’t signed it.”

“I know.”

“You recommended me.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

Holt sets the coffee down. “Because you’re the best fit we’ve got for backcountry work. Because you’ve been ready for two years and you’ve been too loyal to say it out loud. And because staying in a place you’ve outgrown isn’t loyalty, Weston. It’s fear.”

The words land in the center of my chest. I don’t argue, because he’s right, and he’s Holt, and Holt doesn’t waste words on things that aren’t true.

“I don’t want to be the guy who leaves,” I say.

Holt looks at me for a long time. The gray at his temples. The lines around his eyes that come from years of making calls in the dark and living with every one of them.

“You’ve been on this crew since before I made captain,” he says. “You were here when Drew transferred in. You were here when Mack blew out his shoulder and came back six weeks early because he couldn’t stand his own cooking. You were here for every call, every shift, every morning in this kitchen.” He picks the coffee back up. “You think transferring to a team in the same district is going to erase that?”

“It’s a different crew.”

“It’s the same family. Brotherhood doesn’t have a radius. You’re not leaving us, Weston. You’re in the next bay.”

The next bay. Twenty feet of concrete and a shared kitchen. I’ve been carrying this offer for two weeks, building it into something enormous in my head—a departure, a betrayal, a kitchen-counter note—and Holt just reduced it to twenty feet.