Page 5 of Framed By the Mountain Man Firefighter

She comes out from behind the counter. Leans against the edge of it with her arms crossed, watching me. Not interrupting.

“I didn’t want anyone to know because the second somebody sees a guy my size doing something delicate, they turn it into a story. The gentle giant. The big softie. Another version of me that somebody else made up.” I look at my hands. They’re resting at my sides, loose, and I’m aware of how large they are in this room full of delicate things. “I’d rather people think there’s nothing under the surface than watch them invent something that isn’t there.”

She’s quiet for a long time. Then she uncrosses her arms and walks back behind the counter. My stomach sinks. I’ve said too much, gone too far, been too honest with a woman I’ve known for less than two days. But she doesn’t close the conversation.

The sketchbook comes out. She sets it on the counter between us, her fingers resting on the cover, and I can see her deciding. The same calculation I make every time someone gets close to the carvings. How much to show. How much it will cost.

She opens it.

The first portrait stops me.

It’s Lea. Lea Monroe from the coffee shop, drawn in charcoal, cradling a ceramic mug. The likeness is perfect, but that’s not what gets me. It’s the look on Lea’s face—a private, unguarded moment of someone holding something warm and thinking about something far away. Iris caught her between the version of Lea that greets customers and the version that exists when nobody’s looking.

I turn the page. Laurelle, bending over a bucket of wildflowers, her fingers deep in the stems. Neve behind the bar at the brewpub, eyes closed, head tipped back, a half second of exhaustion she’d never let anyone see. Millie laughing. Kendall mid-sentence, caught in the middle of a word, her whole face alive with whatever she was saying.

Page after page. The Trading Post shop owners, tourists I don’t recognize, a few locals I do. An older man asleep on the courtyard bench with his hat over his eyes. A kid crouched in front of the ceramics shop, poking a stick into the cobblestones. Each one drawn with a tenderness that makes my throat tight, because every single one captures something its subject would never willingly show.

“These are incredible,” I say.

“They’re just sketches.”

I look up at her. She’s watching me page through the book with her arms crossed again, protective, her fingers gripping her own elbows. The deflection is so familiar it almost makes me laugh. It’s just something I do. It’s not anything.

“Iris.”

“They’re practice. They keep my hand sharp for framing and matting work.”

“Iris.”

She stops. My voice is quiet, but she hears something in it that makes her go still.

“These belong on the walls.”

“They’re not…”

She trails off. Looks at the sketchbook in my hands, then at the gallery walls covered in other people’s art, and I can see the sentence she won’t finish. They’re not good enough. She can spot extraordinary in a stranger’s carving thirty seconds after holding it, but she can’t see it in her own work.

“Why won’t you let me show your work?” she asks.

Turning it back on me. I know the move because I made the same one this morning.

“Why won’t you show yours?”

The question sits between us. Neither of us picks it up because the answer is the same for both of us. We both know it now, and saying it out loud would make it real.

I set the sketchbook on the counter. My fingers brush hers as she reaches to take it back, and the contact goes through me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Her hand is small and warm, charcoal dust still on her fingertips, and I can feel the faint grit of it against my skin. My hand could close around both of hers with room to spare.

She doesn’t pull away. I don’t either. We stay like that for a beat too long, her fingers under mine, the sketchbook forgotten between us.

The gallery is quiet. Late afternoon light coming through the windows, hitting the carved cobblestones in the window display at the angle I designed them for. She’s looking up at me, and I’m looking down at her, and the space between us has been shrinking without either of us deciding to close it.

“Stay,” she says. “I close at five. Stay until then.”

I stay.

She goes back to work. Adjusting a frame on the east wall, answering an email, wrapping a small ceramic piece for a customer who comes in at 4:30. I sit on the bench near the window and watch her move through the space she built, and I understand something about her that I didn’t have words for this morning. She made this gallery the way I make a carving. Every piece placed with intention, every frame chosen to show the work at its best, the lighting and the spacing and the flow from wall to wall. The gallery is her art. She just won’t call it that.

At five, she locks the front door and turns the sign. The courtyard outside is going golden, the last of the September sun catching the old mining-era stonework and the iron railings. She switches off the track lighting, and the gallery goes soft—just the window light and the glow from the courtyard.