Page 11 of Bonfire with the Mountain Man

I’ve spent my whole life being the one who stays. Nobody’s ever once been the one who came.

He came.

“Say it again,” I tell him. “The wanting part.”

“I want you.” He lets out a breath. “Not the fruit. Not the help. You. I’ll say it every day until you stop bracing for me to take it back.”

I get a fist in the front of his shirt, the same as the fire pit, and I pull him down to me. “Okay,” I say against his mouth. “Choose me. But I’m telling you now, I’m not cheap, and I’m done pricing myself like I am.”

“God, no.” He’s almost laughing, holding me up in the cold row with the last of the light going gold over both our mountains. “You’re the most expensive thing I’ve ever wanted. I’ll pay the price happily. Every day of my life.”

Behind us the orchard stands in the frost, the trees I stayed for, the trees that watched me want this out loud. They don’t say anything.

They don’t have to. For once, I’m not the one left holding the branch.

EPILOGUE

MAGGIE: 5 YEARS LATER

The bottle has my name on it.

Not the orchard’s. Mine. Lang & Hudson, the label reads, in copper foil that catches the firelight.

Tonight, the whole strip has turned out to drink the fifth-anniversary bottling of the brandy we built out of a half-ton of seconds nobody else would take. The fire pit’s roaring. The locals are thick around it—the ones who were here that first cold night and a hundred who weren’t—and the aspens are burning gold up both sides of the valley the way they were the night I backed a rattling flatbed into Boone’s alley and got told yes before I finished asking.

That flatbed’s parked out front right now like it owns the block. New starter. New solenoid. Same rattle, because some things you keep on purpose.

Boone’s working the crowd, pouring, a hand on every shoulder that passes. Five years, and he still lights this fire himself every night of leaf season. Still keeps what the world gave up on. Still chose me, out loud, every single day, until somewhere in the second year I finally quit bracing for the day he’d take it back.

He crosses to me with a glass of the anniversary pour and holds it out. He stops. His eyes drop to the glass, then come up to me, and I know I’m caught before he says a word. The man who watched my truck for three years reads me faster than I read myself.

“You didn’t touch the last one either,” he says, low, just for me.

“Didn’t I?”

“Maggie.” My name comes out rough. He sets the glass down on the barrel-top bar without looking at it, eyes never leaving me. “Are you telling me something?”

“I’ve been sitting on this since the test.” I glance at the crowd, the fire, the fifty people between us and anything private. “This isn’t it.”

He takes my hand. He doesn’t say a word to the crowd. He just pulls me out of the firelight, around the dark side of the building, across the frost-silvered lot to the flatbed, and opens the passenger door. He hands me up into the cab carefully, like I’m the most expensive thing he’s ever touched.

He climbs in the driver’s side and pulls the door shut on the cold and the noise. Then it’s just us and the fogging windows and the fire throwing orange light through the glass.

“Say it,” he says.

“I can’t drink the brandy.” My voice goes unsteady, and I let it. “Not for a while. Eight months, give or take.”

For a second, he doesn’t move. Then his hands are on my face, both of them, rough the way they’ve always been. He’s looking at me like the whole night just cracked open.

“You’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“A baby.” He says it like he’s testing whether it’s real. “Ours.”

“Yours and mine. On purpose. First choice.” I get a fist in the front of his shirt, the old way, and pull him in. “Now kiss me before I start crying in front of my own truck.”

He does. And then it isn’t a kiss so much as everything we’ve built pouring into one warm dark space with the party going on twenty feet away and no idea we’re gone.