Page 55 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

“No.”

The landscape starts looking familiar a while before we reach Blackpine. Ridgelines I recognize, a turnoff I could probably find blind now. My exhaustion doesn't go anywhere. Days of fire work don't just evaporate because I'm almost home. But something underneath it sharpens instead, focuses, counts down the last miles with more attention than I've given anything in days.

Nobody's out at the trailhead when we pass it. No crew vehicles lined up outside the Ranger station. The road curves through the trees, and then the crew house comes into view.

Six weeks ago, it was just a place I'd been assigned to stay.

Now, it’s the place I've been counting the miles back to.

nineteen

Ivy

We pull into the crew house lot Friday afternoon, everyone tired and dusty and talking about pizza for dinner. As we pile out of the vehicle, Tessa mentions Beck and Reid probably won't be back for a few more hours.

I'm trying very hard not to count hours. I've counted enough hours over the last eleven days. A few more shouldn't matter. Then I see the truck.

It takes my brain a full second to process what I'm looking at, because that truck isn't supposed to be here yet. I stop walking, suddenly enough Tessa nearly runs into the back of me.

“What—”

I don't hear the rest of whatever she says.

Beck's on the porch.

The moment our eyes meet, he smiles, and every rational thought I had about hours and patience and dignity leaves my body. I drop the tools I'm carrying. I don't even check where they land. Then I'm running.

I don't think about the crew watching. I don't think about Reid standing somewhere nearby, probably grinning. I don't think about anything except closing the distance between us as fast as I can. Beck sees me coming and braces, catching me as I launch myself at him, my feet actually leaving the ground for a second before his arms lock around me and hold on. He’s solid and real and here. I bury my face in his neck, taking in the scent of him I haven't had in eleven days.

“I missed you,” he says, quiet, right against my ear.

“I missed you too.”

We stay like that longer than a normal hello requires. Eventually I pull back, just far enough to see his face. He looks tired, the kind of tired that doesn't wash off in one shower, but he's looking at me like I'm the only thing he's been thinking about.

He brushes a strand of hair off my face.

Then he kisses me, slow and warm, nothing frantic about it. The eleven days without him disappear.

“Good to see you too, Ivy,” Reid says, from somewhere behind me.

I laugh against Beck's mouth and finally turn around. “Hi, Reid. Welcome back.”

“We missed you,” Tessa says to Reid, coming up to hug him properly, which softens the blow.

Reid looks pleased with himself. “The trash has really been piling up without me.”

“Nobody's touched it,” Nolan confirms. “We just let it grow.”

Mabel appears from somewhere inside, trots straight past me and Beck, and winds herself around Reid's ankles, rubbing against his legs with what looks like genuine enthusiasm.

Reid looks around at everyone, triumphant. “See? Somebody missed me.”

“She does that when she wants food,” Tessa says.

Everyone laughs. Reid looks personally wounded but doesn't argue, mostly because he can't.

Once the initial chaos settles, I ask how they're already here. “You weren't supposed to be back until tonight.”