Page 4 of Burning Up with the Mountain Man Firefighter

“Can I show you something?” she asks.

I should say no. Instead, I look at her and say, “Yeah.”

She goes to the shelf behind the register and comes back with a small amber bottle, unlabeled. She uncaps it and holds it up between us. The scent reaches me before I’m ready for it. Dark, warm, layered. Something that opens slowly and keeps arriving.

“This is the blend I was pouring when you walked in yesterday,” she says. “I’ve been working on it for weeks, and I can’t figure out what’s missing. I know what I think about it. I want to know what you feel.”

“What I feel?”

“When you smell it. What happens in your body. Not your opinion. Your reaction.”

I look at the bottle in her hand. This is not part of any procedure I know. There’s no protocol for a woman holding an open bottle of fragrance oil and asking me to describe what it does to my body.

But she’s waiting with the same steady patience she had yesterday while I cataloged her violations. She’s not being playful. She’s not teasing. She’s asking a real question, and she wants a real answer.

She has no idea what she’s asking me to do.

I lean closer. The scent fills my next breath.

“Warm,” I say. “Heavy. It builds.”

“Where?”

“My throat first. Then lower.”

She nods, and her eyes hold mine. She’s not surprised by the answer. She’s listening to it with the same focus I give a pressure gauge—waiting for a reading she can use.

“The base note is raw honey,” she says. “It opens warm, but it doesn’t land. It keeps floating. I think it needs something to pull it down.”

“Smoke,” I say.

The word comes out of my mouth before I can think about it, and it sits between us in her workshop full of wax and flame and everything I’ve spent my life trying to contain. She looks at me, and something in her expression shifts. Opens.

“Smoke,” she repeats. Quiet. “Yeah. That might be it.”

I leave. The bell rings behind me, and the courtyard hits me all at once. Tourists cutting between the shops, voices bouncing off the stone walls, someone laughing near Lea’s coffee shop door. Everything is loud and open after the close, quiet world of her workshop.

I’m three steps past the coffee shop when I stop. The door. I don’t know if I pulled it shut behind me.

I always know. Locks, stove knobs, smoke detectors, cabinet latches, car doors, the bay after every shift. I catalog every closure, every latch, every point where inside meets outside. It’s automatic. I’ve never had to think about it because the part of me that tracks it never turns off.

The last sixty seconds are gone. Her voice saying smoke, her eyes holding mine, the scent still sitting in my throat. I walked out of her workshop, and I don’t know if the door is open or closed.

I don’t go back to check.

I put my hands in my pockets and walk to the station. For four blocks, I don’t know if I left her door open, and the not-knowing itches against every instinct I have until I’m grinding my teeth.

3

NEVE

He comes back Wednesday afternoon.

The bell rings at two o’clock, and I know it’s him before I turn around because nobody else enters my shop without saying something first. Tourists call out hello from the doorway. Lea leans in and announces herself with whatever she’s carrying. Millie sings. Iris hums.

Graham Trent opens the door and waits.

I’m at the melting station, heating a fresh batch of beeswax for a wholesale order the resort placed last week. Twenty-four candles, all cedar and vanilla, the signature scent I sell more of than anything else. The wax is at one hundred and forty degrees and climbing, and I have ten minutes before it hits the pour window, so I turn around and face him.