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“There are only two reasons to move to Prineville,” he said finally. “There’s the Les Schwab headquarters,” he said, referring to a regional chain of tire centers, “and there’s the Prineville Hotshots.”
“I’m going to guess you weren’t working for Les Schwab.”
He just cocked an eyebrow at her.
“So what are the Hotshots?”
He was a little surprised. Most people in central Oregon had heard of them. “A firefighting crew. They get shipped out all over the West during wildfire season.”
She leaned back in her chair and drank about half her beer, staring at him over the bottle. “Huh,” she said finally.
He mimicked her posture, slowly knocking back the rest of his own bottle. “Huh.”
“Why firefighting?”
He thought about asking her why anybody did anything, but instead he told her the truth. Some of the truth. “I wanted to do my part for the environment, I guess. And I was bored.” He’d also been trying to make amends for the part he’d played in running a company that had done a grotesque amount of damage to the forests of the western United States. Sure, his father was the one who’d broken the law, but Tom should have known it was happening. Should have done more, sooner.
A few summers as a firefighter were hardly a drop in the karmic bucket, but it had felt like the least he could do.
She drained her bottle, had a few chips, kept staring at him.
“What?” he asked finally.
“Oh, I’m just trying to fit all the pieces of the Tom Geiger puzzle together. You seem a bit miscellaneous, you know? I wouldn’t have figured you for a firefighter. Or an environmentalist.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not anymore.”
“Not which?”
“Either.”
“Why not?”
“Same reason for both, actually. I got tired of busting my ass to put out fires that would never have gotten so big in the first place if we had sensible fire management policies. But we don’t, because even though you have to do controlled burns to keep down the fire risk out here in the West, people are afraid of fire, so it’s politically impossible to get permission to set them. Most of the fires that do start ought to be left to burn themselves out, but they aren’t, usually because they threaten houses owned by rich people in places where there shouldn’t be houses to begin with. And that’s basically why I got sick of being an environmentalist in general. It’s a lost cause trying to fight for good policies when rich people with no sense are pulling all the strings.”
He pushed back his chair. “Want another beer?”
“Sure.”
He started walking toward the bar.
“Tom?” she asked from behind him.
“Yeah?”
“How many beers does it take before you’re capable of having a normal conversation?”
He smiled, since she couldn’t see him. “A lot more than two.”
He wondered how many beers it took before Lexie looked as relaxed as she did after an orgasm. It would be fun to find out.
Over their second beer, she quizzed him about firefighting,
and he got her to talk about how she kept control of a classroom of unruly high school juniors with that glare and her iron fist. The thought of Lexie disciplining seventeen-year-olds amused him. He bet half the guys fantasized about their English teacher in the privacy of their bedrooms.
Three-quarters of the way through their third beer, her cheeks started getting pink, and her eyes lit up with amusement as she peppered him with questions about a tour he’d done in South America. She gave him a hard time about his bike, his clothes, his technique, his tent—pretty much everything about the way he toured—and he gave it right back to her for being so uptight in the saddle. She told him there was a right way and a wrong way to ride, and he was doing it the wrong way. He laughed and countered that she could follow the rules or have fun, but not both.
A big group of Hotshots came in then. Half a dozen of them were guys Tom knew, and he introduced Lexie around. The guys flirted with her, and with four beers in her she started to laugh at the least provocation. Tom provoked her. She was pretty when she laughed.
