Page 46 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

I keep noticing things like that today. Small, involuntary reminders. I see a section of trail with an interesting erosion pattern and think Beck would find it useful to know about fire behavior on slopes. Someone tells a joke, and I glance around looking for his reaction before remembering he isn't here.

At lunch, the group feels different. Smaller. Not just because of the actual numbers.

Reid's absence I know how to handle. I've had years of practice. It's part of the rhythm of every summer I can remember since high school.

Beck's absence doesn't feel the same. I don’t understand entirely why yet. I just know it's different in a way I'm not ready to examine too closely with an audience of five people eating sandwiches in the mud.

Tessa and I end up working the same stretch of drainage a while later, clearing a channel that's completely choked with branches and silt. It's slow, physical work, the kind that makes it easy to talk without really looking at each other.

“So,” Tessa says, dragging a branch clear. “How's day one?”

“Day one of clearing mud?”

“Day one without Beck.”

I give her a look. “He’s only been gone a few hours.”

“That's not nothing.”

“It's also not really something. Yet.”

She resumes working, and for a few minutes we clear debris in comfortable silence.

“You know,” she says eventually, “I called this before you did.”

“You did not.”

“I did. You fell on the man the morning he arrived. Practically threw yourself at him.”

“That was gravity.” I flick a clump of mud in her general direction, which she dodges. We keep working, the conversation drifting into the usual rotation of complaints about mud and mosquitoes. But eventually she straightens, wipes her forehead with the back of her glove, and looks at me a little more seriously.

“You worried?”

“I know how this works. Communication's sporadic. Reid's experienced. They know what they're doing.”

“I wasn't asking about Reid.”

I dig at a stubborn root in the drainage channel, giving myself something to do with my hands while I figure out what to say. “It is different,” I say finally. “I've had years to get used to worrying about Reid. I don't have that with Beck.”

Tessa's quiet for a moment, studying me a little too closely for comfort. “Oh,” she says.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“It's not nothing if you brought it up.”

“I just didn't realize you were this far gone.” She says it gently, not teasing. “I thought this was still the fun, flirty part.”

“It is the fun, flirty part.”

“Is it, though?”

I don't have a good answer for that, so I go back to clearing the channel instead, and Tessa lets me, which is its own kindness.

“He'll be back,” she says after a while.

“I know.”