Page 57 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

“Apparently everybody did.”

“Don't get cocky.”

He looks down at Mabel. “At least this time I'm not trapped under both of you.”

I laugh, and it feels like the first real laugh I've had in days. I shift closer. Beck's arm comes around me, and I lean into his shoulder. The night the storm rolled in, both of us were bracing for a separation neither of us had control over. The separation helped me understand something I hadn't quite let myself name before now.

I love him.

I think it clearly, sitting here in the quiet, his thumb moving absently against my shoulder. I don't tell him. Not because I'm scared, and not because I doubt it. But I've only just found the words myself. Tonight doesn't need to carry that too.

Tonight just needs to be this. Beck's arm around me. A sleeping cat. Crickets in the grass. This, more than the running or the kiss or any of the excitement of an hour ago, is what I think I've been missing most. On the porch with Beck, quiet, small unremarkable moments that don't need an audience or an occasion.

I know none of this is settled. Fire season isn't over. Beck will likely rejoin his smokejumper crew eventually. Neither of our futures are certain.

But tonight he’s here.

And for right now, it’s enough.

twenty

Beck

“You understand we're basically hiking three miles so I can look at plants,” she says.

“I've been warned.”

“This isn't exactly thrilling.”

“Who's going?”

She looks at me again. “Me.”

“Sounds promising.”

That earns me an eye roll, but she's smiling when she does it, and I decide I got the better end of the exchange.

We leave the crew house a few minutes later, and head into the trees. Ivy’s a few yards ahead of me on the trail, daypack riding high on her shoulders, wearing shorts because this is a day off, and nobody's requiring her to protect her shins from brush today.

I'm not complaining.

I've had opinions about Ivy's legs since the moment I met her, opinions I used to keep carefully filed away as an inconvenient fact about my best friend's sister. I don't have to file anything away anymore. Which somehow makes the problem worse, not better.

She glances back and catches me looking. “You okay back there?”

“Doing great.”

She squints at me like she suspects there's a joke she's missing, then keeps walking, deciding not to push it. Good call on her part. Some things are better left uninvestigated.

This burn is older than the one we worked in a few weeks back, eight or nine years old according to Ivy, old enough the recovery looks completely different. Where the younger burn still had fireweed doing most of the visible work, this one's further along. Young pines have gotten real height on them. Shrubs have filled in thick enough in places you'd barely know there was a fire here at all if it weren't for the blackened snags still standing scattered through everything, silent and weathered, holding their ground while life fills in around them.

Ivy stops every few hundred feet to look at something. A patch of undergrowth. A cluster of young trees establishing themselves in what used to be open, scorched ground. She crouches at one point next to something I couldn't identify if my life depended on it. She examines it with the kind of focus most people reserve for something considerably more dramatic than a plant.

“This is what I was hoping to find,” she says, half to herself.

“What is it?”

“Serviceberry. Coming back strong here, which tells you something about how the soil recovered after the burn.” She looks up at me, reading my expression correctly. “You don't care.”