Cole Harding, 58, retired U.S. Forest Service wildfire crew lead, had shown up to the neighborhood block party only because his 72-year-old next door neighbor had pressed a free beer coupon into his palm at 7 a.m. and said if he skipped, she’d leave dandelion seeds all over his custom woodworking bench. He’d spent 12 years avoiding organized neighborhood events since his divorce, still bitter that the prior HOA board had tried to fine him $250 for his stacked firewood pile three months prior, calling it a “fire hazard and aesthetic blight.” He leaned against a ponderosa pine at the edge of the crowd, flannel tied around his waist even in the 82-degree golden hour heat, boots caked with sawdust, sipping a fruity IPA he hated, glowering at the cluster of HOA board members manning the grill.
He spotted Elara Voss first when she tripped over a golden retriever’s leash, stack of paper plates teetering in her arms, stumbling directly into his chest. Her palm landed flat over the faded, silvery burn scar that stretched across his left pec, leftover from a 2019 fire outside Sisters, and a half-sip of her seltzer sloshed onto the front of his faded John Deere tee. She laughed first, loud and rough, not the prissy, apologetic titter he’d expected from the new HOA president whose name had been at the bottom of every stupid neighborhood email he’d deleted in the last two months. “You’re Cole,” she said, wiping a drop of seltzer off his shirt with the edge of her Pearl Jam tee, not stepping back like most people did when they saw the scar. “I reversed that stupid firewood fine the day I took office. Old board had a stick so far up their asses they couldn’t tell a properly stacked wood pile from a moldy patio cushion.”
He blinked, thrown. He’d assumed she was another pandemic transplant, one of the tech bro-adjacent types who’d moved to Bend to mountain bike and complain about locals leaving their trucks parked on the street. She was 52, he later learned, a wildlife biologist who’d grown up outside Eugene, taken the unpaid HOA president job just to roll back the dumb rules: no more lawn watering requirements during the drought, no more fines for un-mown native wildflower yards, no more attempts to tear down the abandoned 1950s fire lookout tower on the edge of the neighborhood.
She leaned against the pine next to him, shoulder brushing his every time a kid sprinted past chasing a beach ball, and didn’t flinch when he talked about the 2019 fire, about losing two crew members that season. Her eyes stayed locked on his, no quick dart away to check her phone, no awkward pat on the arm to change the subject. He was torn, a low, sharp war between disgust and desire thrumming in his chest: he’d spent a year hating the HOA on principle, had told every friend he’d sooner move to a trailer park in Idaho than associate with anyone on the board, but he couldn’t stop staring at the freckles scattered across her nose, at the chipped navy nail polish on her fingers, at the way she laughed so hard at his joke about the prior board’s obsession with matching mailbox colors she snort-laughed into her seltzer can.
When she asked if he wanted to ditch the party and hike up to the fire lookout tower to check out the rotting support beams she was trying to get the county to fund repairs for, he hesitated for all of three seconds before saying yes. The trail up was loose gravel and pine needles, the sun dipping lower behind the Cascades, painting the sky pink and tangerine, crickets chirping loud enough to drown out the distant sound of the block party’s speaker system. Halfway up, she slipped on a loose rock, ankle twisting, and he grabbed her wrist to steady her, calloused fingers wrapping around the soft skin just above her scuffed white tennis shoe. She didn’t pull away. Instead, she stepped closer, palm pressing again to that burn scar on his chest, and kissed him, slow, no hurry, like she’d been thinking about it all afternoon. He didn’t overthink it, didn’t run through the list of reasons this was a bad idea, didn’t worry about what the neighbors would say if they saw them. He just kissed her back, one hand on her waist, the other tangled in the ends of her wavy auburn hair.
They made it to the top ten minutes later, sitting on the splintered wooden ledge of the lookout, legs hanging over the edge. She pulled a dented can of PBR out of the pocket of her high-waisted denim cutoffs, passing it to him, and told him she’d been divorced seven years, had quit dating six months prior after a guy who sold crypto asked her if she’d ever considered getting the scar on her own cheek (from a college rock climbing accident) removed for “aesthetic purposes.” He laughed, told her he’d turned down three setups from friends in the last year, convinced any woman who lived in the neighborhood would nag him about his wood pile or his sawdust-covered truck. The sky turned deep indigo, the first pinpricks of stars coming out, the distant glow of Bend’s downtown lights glowing at the bottom of the hill. He leaned over, brushed a stray pine needle off her shoulder, and let his hand rest on the warm curve of her knee as the first fireflies blinked to life in the fir trees below.
