Page 59 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

“Every year it's somewhere different?”

“Usually.”

“That's been your whole adult life?”

“Pretty much my whole life, period. My dad moved us every couple years growing up. I never really learned to think about staying somewhere. Moving was the default. You get good at it. You stop minding.”

She's quiet for a second, chewing on that. “Do you mind now?”

“I don't know yet.”

That's true. It's also the first time I've admitted, even to myself, the old pattern doesn't feel as automatic as it used to. Fire season ends, I go somewhere new, that's just what happens. Except this year, somewhere new means leaving Ivy. Leaving Reid, and Tessa, and Nolan's disasters, Sunday dinners at the Grangers', and a crew house with a cat who's decided I'm furniture.

Leaving used to be neutral. Now it's a cost, and I'm only starting to add up what it’s going to be.

I don't say any of this out loud. Neither of us has an answer that would make the conversation easier, and I don't want to spend our day together solving a problem that doesn't need solving today.

Ivy takes another chip from my bag, catches me noticing, and grins. “That's how it works.”

For a while we just sit here, not talking, looking out over the burn and the mountains beyond it. I find myself watching her more than the view. She's got her knees pulled up, chin resting on them, looking out at the recovering landscape like she's cataloging every square foot of it.

She catches me looking.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You're staring.”

“I know.”

She doesn't argue with that, just gives me a small, pleased look, like she's decided she doesn't mind being stared at after all.

I lean in. She meets me halfway. The kiss isn't tentative like Silver Bell was, isn't tinged with everything unsaid the way the storm kiss was, isn't relief the way our reunion kiss yesterday was. It's just easy, sitting on a rock on a Saturday, kissing because we can, because there's nowhere else either of us needs or wants to be.

When I pull back, she's smiling.

“No dirt this time,” she says.

“Give me credit.”

We stay up here a long while after that, Ivy leaning back against me, my arm around her, neither of us in any hurry to start the hike back down. My whole life has been organized around getting somewhere and then getting somewhere else. Today there's nowhere I want to be except here.

Eventually we do pack up, and the hike back goes quick and easy, mostly downhill, sunlight coming through the canopy in patches. Ivy stops once more near the trailhead, crouching beside something growing at the base of one of the old snags.

“I thought we were done looking at plants,” I say.

“That's not how this works.”

“I’m learning.”

She explains what she's found, something about how this species tends to show up later in recovery than most people expect. I listen, and I don't mind how long it takes. I've got nowhere I need to be, no truck idling, no assignment waiting. Just Ivy, crouched in the dirt, entirely absorbed, and me, entirely content to wait for her.

She finally stands, brushes dirt off her knees, and holds out her hand for me to pull her back onto the trail.

I take it, and I don't let go once we start walking.

twenty-one