Page 3 of Sparked By the Mountain Man Hotshot

My turn—the bus that stops one block early—idles at the curb.

I fire the next trout like my life depends on it. On some level I’m not ready to look at yet, I think it might.

2

REID

The stick breaks clean when I bend it, and that tells me everything I don’t want to know.

Green wood folds. Dry wood snaps. This snaps because it wants to, the whole ridge holding its breath since June, waiting for a reason.

I crouch at the tree line above the north bowl with a fistful of dead needles going to dust in my palm and do the calculation I’ve been running all summer. Fuel moisture in the single digits. Humidity that never climbs back overnight.

We roll out Thursday. Detail down south, two weeks on the board, longer than that if I’m right about the season. The crew’s known about the roll-out for weeks—that part’s just the calendar. What they don’t have is what those numbers add up to in my head. Two weeks is the hopeful version, and the whole state’s a struck match waiting on a wind. That part I keep to myself. A man who hands his people his worst-case in September only buys them nights of lying awake over a dry spell they can’t do a thing about tonight.

That’s the job. You keep the worst of it quiet.

I let the needles fall and stand and look down at the town lit gold for leaf season, and I think about brown butter. Sage and apple. Because it’s September, and she has feelings about it.

Hell.

I’ve spent eleven years training myself not to want anything I can’t keep on a schedule, and a seasonal sous chef undid a decade of it in the time it took to eat a trout. There’s no slot for this. My whole life runs on rotation and radio traffic, on being wherever the fire is by the time it’s big enough to have a name. No version of me gets to drive down a mountain because he can’t stop thinking about a woman who put her feelings about September into the brown butter and then looked sorry she’d admitted it.

I drive down the mountain anyway.

The soft open starts at six. I’m on the patio at 5:40—early to dinner, which I’ve never once been. A server crossing the patio to light the table candles clocks me with a look that says he knows exactly what I’m doing and is decent enough not to say it.

“Crew’s not here yet,” he says.

“I’m aware.”

“Bar’s not pouring.”

“I’ll wait.”

“You want the trout.”

His tone is neutral—just a man confirming an order. I don’t dignify it with a response. He grins and disappears through the swinging door.

Thirty seconds later, she comes out, wiping her hands on a towel. Her hair is coming loose at the temple, and her expression is fighting itself the whole way across the patio.

“Twice in two nights,” Reagan says. “People are going to talk.”

“Let them.”

“You’re early. Nobody’s early to a place that isn’t charging yet. That’s a red flag. Are you a red flag?”

“Depends who’s reading.”

“I’m reading. I read all the flags. It’s my whole thing.” She stops across the little iron table, close enough that I catch flour and something green off her—sage maybe, a smear of it on her wrist that she hasn’t noticed. “Let me guess. You came back for the September feelings.”

“I came back for the trout.”

“That’s what they all say.” She drops into the chair across from me, which she shouldn’t while working, and I watch her surprise herself by sitting. “You get four minutes. Marchetti times my bathroom breaks with that clipboard. Gone too long, and he assumes I’ve defected.”

“To where?”

“Anywhere that’d have me.”