Page 85 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

He looks at me, something in his expression I can't quite read yet. “I'm not going to Colorado.”

I go still. Whatever I expected him to say, that wasn't it. “What?”

“I accepted a permanent position,” he says. “With the Forest Service. At Blackpine. Fire management and fuels work, mostly. Year-round.”

I stare at him. Permanent. Blackpine. Year-round. Not another seasonal assignment, not a temporary reassignment while another crew figures out staffing. He's talking about staying.

“You're staying?” I ask, still working through it.

“Yeah.”

I throw my arms around him, laughing, in disbelief. “You're really staying?”

“I'm really staying.”

I pull back to look at him, and something else occurs to me, underneath the joy. “But a permanent job. That's a huge change for you.”

“I know.”

“What made you want that?”

He takes a deep breath, in and out. “I got tired of living like I was always leaving.”

His whole childhood was moving, base to base, never staying long enough for one place to feel unquestionably his. Then adulthood built on the exact same pattern by choice, fire season into ski season into fire season, temporary housing, seasonal friends. Always a departure waiting somewhere on the calendar. I've known those facts about him for months.

I understand something deeper now. He's tired of that way of living. “Was it Timber Creek?” I ask.

“All of it,” he says, and he's looking right at me when he says it, which tells me all of it includes me without him needing to spell it out.

“When did you decide?”

He tells me something I didn't know. Back in August, when he and Reid got that brief break after the Timber Creek fire, they didn't drive straight to the crew house.

“I stopped to see Russ first.”

“You did?”

“I wanted to ask him about permanent openings in the district. He pointed me toward this one. Told me who to talk to, how the process worked. I did the rest myself. Application, interview, the whole thing.”

I think back to that August weekend, remember it clearly, the reunion, the walk through town, the porch that night, both of us finally saying the words we'd been circling. I told him I love him. He said it back.

But he'd stopped to talk to Russ before he even came to see me.

He hadn't chased this because I told him I love him. I hadn't asked him to stay. He didn't hear my confession and then rearrange his life to match it. He'd already decided, on his own, before any of that happened, that he wanted something permanent.

And he wanted it here.

“I never accepted the Colorado offer,” he adds. “Kept putting it off. Once Blackpine turned into a real possibility, there wasn't really a decision left to make.”

“Does Reid know?”

“Yeah.”

“How long?”

His mouth twitches. “Long enough.”

“And he never said anything?”