Page 5 of Burning Up with the Mountain Man Firefighter

He’s not in the district polo today. Plain gray T-shirt, jeans, boots. Off duty. He’s holding nothing. No clipboard, no hardware, no tools.

“Checking progress,” he says.

“Progress on what?”

“The violations.”

I lean against the workbench and cross my arms. The emergency exit is clear. I moved the pallets and crates yesterday morning, restacking them against the side wall where they don’t block anything. The ventilation fan is on order. The fragrance oil storage cabinet is on order. The Class B extinguisher he bought me is mounted exactly where he put it, and I haven’t touched it because the placement was already precise.

“The exit is clear,” I say. “You can check.”

He walks to the back of the workshop. I hear the push bar click, the door swing open, the August air rolling in for a second before he pulls it shut. He comes back, and something in his shoulders has loosened by a fraction so small, I wouldn’t catch it if I weren’t looking for it.

I’m looking for it.

“The other items?” he asks.

“Fan and cabinet are on order. Should be here Thursday.”

He nods. The inspection update is complete. Every question has been answered and every item accounted for, and he’s still standing in my workshop with his hands at his sides and no reason to stay.

“What are you making?” he asks.

I turn back to the melting station. “Cedar and vanilla. Resort order. Twenty-four units, eight-ounce jars, cotton wicks.”

“Why cotton?”

The question surprises me. Most people ask what a candle smells like or how long it burns. Nobody asks about the wick.

“Cotton burns clean,” I say. “Consistent flame height, minimal soot, even melt pool. Wood wicks are popular right now because of the crackle, but they’re unpredictable. The flame height varies depending on the grain, and you get hot spots in the wax that throw off the fragrance release.”

“Hot spots.”

“Uneven melting. One side of the candle liquefies faster than the other, and the fragrance concentrates there instead of distributing evenly across the surface. The scent throw gets lopsided. You smell it strong for ten minutes, then it fades, then it surges again.”

He takes a step closer to the melting station. “And cotton eliminates that.”

“Cotton gives me control over the burn.”

Control. The word sits in the air between us. I didn’t plan it, and I watch him hear it, watch his eyes meet mine for a beat longer than the sentence required. Control. His word, showing up in my mouth, and both of us aware of it.

The wax is at one-fifty-five. I check the thermometer and adjust the flame underneath, dropping it half a turn. He watches my hand on the dial.

“What temperature do you pour at?” he asks.

“Depends on the wax. This blend, I pour between one-seventy and one-seventy-five. Soy is lower, around one-thirty-five. Beeswax has a higher melting point, so it needs more heat to hold the fragrance, but if you go past one-eighty, the honey note in the wax starts to cook off and you lose the warmth.”

“How do you know when it’s right?”

“The thermometer gets me close. The rest is feel. The surface changes when the wax is ready. It loosens, almost softens, and there’s a moment where the whole batch seems to exhale. That’s when I pour.”

He’s quiet for a second. Processing. I can see it happening behind his eyes, each piece of information being sorted and stored, and I realize he listens the way he reads a room. Thoroughly, missing nothing.

“You said yesterday that you want to know what things feel,” he says. “Not what people think about them.”

“Yes.”

“Is that how you build all of them? By feel?”