Page 4 of Sparked By the Mountain Man Hotshot

It’s a joke, but there it is again, the flinch under the banter. She’s already sure she’ll lose, so she jokes to get out ahead of it.

I know that flinch. I have one of my own. Mine just doesn’t talk as much.

“So what do you do,” she asks, “when you’re not inspecting fish?”

“Wildland crew. I run it.”

“Run it how far up? Are you the guy, or a guy?”

“The guy.” I don’t say superintendent. Out loud in front of her, it would sound like more than it is, and it’s already too much—a crew and a radio that doesn’t care what I want. “We go where it burns.”

“That sounds—” She edits the sentence mid-air. “That sounds like a job you don’t come home from at a decent hour.”

“I don’t come home at a decent hour. Some years, not a decent month.”

“Wife wait up?”

She tosses it at the pumpkins, casual, and it’s the least casual question anybody’s put to me in a year. Instead of deflecting, I hear myself tell her the truth, because a woman with sage on her wrist has apparently opened something in me.

“No wife. There was somebody, a while back. She wanted a man who was home.” I give the fork on the table a quarter turn. “I wasn’t him. I kept picking the job over her, same as I always had, until she stopped waiting. When it ended, I felt lighter, and that’s the part nobody warns you about. That sometimes a thing ending is a window opening.” I look up. “I told myself that was my one shot at the regular life. That I’d had my turn, wasn’t built for it. Made my peace. Clean.”

“Clean,” Reagan repeats.

“Clean,” I say, and it lands wrong, because I’m looking at her while I say it. Clean is the last word for what’s happening in my gut.

Then Noah’s boots hit the patio steps with the rest of the crew behind him, loud and starving, and she’s up and gone before I get another word out, back through the swinging door with the towel over her shoulder. I spend the next two hours eating food I barely taste while the men I’d walk into a burn for talk over each other, and Noah watches me not watch the kitchen.

“You’re quiet,” he says.

“I’m always quiet.”

“You’re quiet like there’s a reason.” He tips his chin at the pass, where she’s plating with her whole body, fast and sure, owning a room she’s already decided she’s going to lose. “She’s young, Reid.”

“I know.”

“You know how old you are?”

“Eat your dinner.”

He eats his dinner. He isn’t wrong. I don’t need him to be right out loud, though.

By ten, the patio’s empty. The crew rolls out to the trucks, string lights buzzing, Prospect Street goes dark, window by window, down the block. I have a ridge drier than it was yesterday and a Thursday with my name on it. I should be in the truck.

I stay.

She finds me still there when she comes out to kill the patio heaters, apron gone, and she stops when she sees me. For a second, neither of us runs the bit.

“You’re still here,” she says.

“I’m still here.”

“That’s not a trout thing.”

“No.”

She crosses the patio and stops closer than the table can hide her, tired and lit up under the strings. She’s already braced for the part where I turn out to be one more good thing that leaves.

My girl, I think, before I can stop myself. My girl.