Page 10 of Sparked By the Mountain Man Hotshot

For two days, somebody did. I felt full for the first time in my life and didn’t even notice it was him doing it. Now he’s on a highway going south, I’m standing here holding the one thing I always wanted, and I’d trade it in a heartbeat for the nerve I didn’t have two hours ago.

Marchetti’s still talking—something about the line, about me proving him wrong. I say thank you. I say all the right things. Then I tie my apron and go stand at my station—the permanent one, finally mine—and pick up my knife to break down the fish for a service I get to keep.

My hands know the work. They do it without me. And somewhere south of here, a truck full of men gets smaller on a map I can’t read, carrying the only person who ever bet on me before I did. I let him go, because letting go first is the one thing I’ve always been good at.

Efficient to the end.

6

REID

Forty minutes south of Copper Peak, I stop being able to feel the road.

The convoy’s doing seventy down the canyon, my crew strung out behind me and everything I’m supposed to want, and I’m in the lead seat staring at a map I’ve read a thousand times and not seeing a line of it. All I see is her across a cold street this morning, arms folded, handing me the door with both hands.

Last night was good. Go be a hero. I’ll be fine.

She’s not fine. I knew it while she said it. I stood there and watched a woman take herself apart on purpose so I couldn’t do it for her, and I let her, because leaving is what I’m built for and she made it easy. Easy is a coward’s favorite word.

Here’s what I know, forty minutes too late. I told myself eleven years ago that I’d already spent my one shot at an ordinary life, that the job won, that I don’t get to keep things. And I’ve spent every year since making it true—volunteering for the far detail, the assignment nobody else wants, so I’d never have to find out whether somebody would stay. You can’t lose the ordinary life if you never let yourself have one.

She loses first so nobody can take it from her. I leave first so nobody can leave me. We’re the same animal. She calls hers efficient. I call mine the job.

There was a woman once who asked me to pick a wedding date and I picked a fire season instead, and when she left, I called the relief proof I wasn’t built for staying. I’ve told myself that story so many times, it wore a groove.

It was never the truth. The truth is I’ve always been more scared of staying than of any burn I ever walked into, because a fire I know how to survive. A person who might not leave—that one I never had a plan for.

And this morning, the first person I’ve ever wanted to stay for held out an exit. I took it, because taking it proved the thing I’ve told myself for a decade. See. This is what I get.

I don’t want to be right anymore. I want her.

“Noah.” I key the radio. My voice comes out level, which is a small miracle. “Pull it over at the next wide spot.”

The convoy slows, gravel under the tires. It’s only Noah and me up in the lead truck, the rest of them back in the convoy. He looks across the cab at me, because in eleven years I’ve never once stopped a roll for anything smaller than a downed tree.

“You’re taking them the rest of the way,” I tell him. “Acting super on this detail. You’ve been ready two seasons. I’ve just been too selfish to hand it over.”

“Reid—”

“The crew’s covered. I’ll square it with the district. I have eleven years of leave I’ve never touched and one thing in Copper Peak I should’ve fought for this morning instead of letting her wave me off.”

Noah looks at me for a long second. Then something breaks across his face, and it isn’t surprise. It’s relief. He’s been waiting the whole drive for me to catch up to what the rest of them already knew.

“Took you long enough.” He shoulders the door open and drops down to the gravel, headed back to ride with the crew. “Go. We’ve got it. Go get her.”

I turn the truck around on the empty shoulder and point it north, the canyon throwing the early gold I’ve spent eleven years driving away from. I break every speed law Colorado has to get back before the morning’s half gone.

And then I don’t go to her.

Because showing up with a speech is the easy version, and easy is the thing we’re both trying to quit. A man who means to stay doesn’t just say so between fires.

So I spend the day making it true. I sit in the district office and tell them to pull me off the far rotations. There’s a deposit down by noon on a place by Prospect—a real lease, not the month-to-month I’ve kept packed and ready for eleven years. The whole unromantic paperwork of a life that stays put, all of it, before I let myself anywhere near her. And I don’t plant my flag in the middle of her shift on the night she finds out whether the spot’s finally hers, because I’m done being one more thing that makes her come second.

All day, I argue with the version of her that lives in my head. She’ll have decided I’m a story she tells now—the firefighter who blew through for two days. She’ll have her armor back on and her jokes loaded. She waved me off once already, and she’s had all day to get good at it. I don’t have a speech. I have a truck pointed the right way for once and eleven years of being wrong, and I’m going to hand her both and pray it’s enough.

By the time the sun’s down and the windows glow at Prospect House, I’m ready. I don’t go in the front. I go around to the patio, because that’s ours, and I wait in the dark and find out what it’s like to be the one hoping.

She comes out at close with a bag of trash and her apron still on, and she stops dead when she sees me. For a second, neither of us breathes.