Page 7 of Burning Up with the Mountain Man Firefighter

“You should.”

He leaves. The bell rings, and the workshop settles around me, and the wax is ready. Everything is exactly where it was ten minutes ago except that a man I’ve known for two days just heard the worst thing about my family and responded by asking about my work.

Nobody has ever done that. Everyone I’ve told has treated my parents as a problem to react to. He treated them as context. Background information for the thing that actually matters, which is what I do with my hands and my heat and my instincts every day in this room.

I pick up the stir stick. Twenty rotations, clockwise, even pressure.

He’s coming back. I don’t know when and I don’t know why. I know I should be more careful about how certain I am.

I’m certain anyway.

4

GRAHAM

The workshop is compliant.

Every item on the violations list, corrected. The ventilated storage cabinet is mounted on the far wall, fragrance oils organized by flash point. I came by Thursday morning to help her anchor it into the stone, and she organized the oils herself while I wired the exhaust fan above the melting station. It hums now, steady and correct. The emergency exit is clear, the path unobstructed, the push bar functioning. The Class B extinguisher I mounted two days ago is exactly where I left it, inspection tag facing out.

I check everything twice. Then I check it again, because checking things is what I do when I don’t want to think about why I’m still standing here.

I sign the compliance form and tear off her copy. “You’re clear.”

She takes the paper. “Thank you.”

The transaction is complete. The file is closed. There is no professional reason for me to be in this workshop again, and we both know it. That knowledge fills the space between us with a silence that isn’t uncomfortable. It’s a dare.

“Stay,” she says.

I should go. But instead, I look at her face and set the clipboard on the workbench. I reach behind me and turn the deadbolt without looking away from her.

She pours me tea from a kettle I didn’t notice on the back shelf. Something herbal, dark, no sugar. I hold the mug in both hands and stand in her workshop surrounded by wax and flame. She waits. She doesn’t push. She just gives me the quiet and lets me decide what to do with it.

“I was eight,” I say.

She goes still.

“House fire. Electrical, in the walls. Middle of the night. My parents got me and my sister out. Nobody died.” I take a breath. “Everyone says that. Nobody died. You were lucky. And we were. But the house was gone. Everything in it, gone. And the rebuilding broke my parents apart in a way the fire didn’t. Insurance, temporary housing, the fighting. My dad left two years later. My mom held it together, but holding it together was all she had left.”

The mug is warm in my hands. The pilot flame on her melting station is burning low and blue, and I’m telling a woman I’ve known for three days the thing I’ve never said out loud to anyone.

“I became a firefighter because I needed to be the person who stops it. The chaos. The moment where everything changes and nobody can control it. I needed to be the one who controls it.”

“And you walk into my workshop,” she says quietly, “and fire is everywhere, and I’m standing in the middle of it treating it as ordinary.”

“Yes.”

“And that terrifies you.”

“Yes.”

She sets her mug on the workbench. She steps forward, close enough that I can smell the beeswax on her skin and the smoke in her hair, and she puts her hand flat against my sternum. Her palm is warm. Her fingers are steady. She’s touching the place where I hold everything, and she’s not trying to fix it or open it or take it from me.

She’s just resting her hand there. Letting me feel the weight of someone choosing to be this close.

I don’t pull away.

I lean in first, drawn by the steady warmth of her palm against my chest. Our lips meet—soft at the start, then deeper, hungrier. The taste of herbal tea lingers on her tongue, and for a moment, the world narrows to the give of her mouth, the faint tremble in her breath, and the way her fingers curl into my shirt like she’s afraid I’ll disappear.