Clay Hollister, 58, retired U.S. Forest Service firefighter turned custom woodworker, had shown up to The Rusty Tap’s weekly trivia night fully intending to lose alone. His usual three-man team bailed that Tuesday—one had a grandkid’s soccer game, another was recovering from knee replacement surgery, the third had forgotten and booked a fishing trip. He nursed a cold Pabst, picked at a plate of lukewarm cheese curds, and ignored the chatter around him about the new city ordinance passed three days prior, the one that let cops ticket unmarried people $75 for public displays of affection as minor as hand-holding. He’d always hated small-town grandstanding, hated even more the idea of being told what he could or couldn’t do with another consenting adult, but he’d spent 12 years carefully avoiding any situation that would force him to test that line, ever since his ex-wife left him for a rookie firefighter 15 years his junior. He’d built a comfortable, quiet life, built tables and birdhouses for neighbors, went fishing every other weekend, and didn’t let himself want anything that might make him feel like a fool.
The host called for last-minute team pair-ups 10 minutes before trivia started, and she slid into the vinyl booth across from him before he could say he was fine alone. Mara Carter, 52, owned the independent bookstore three blocks from his workshop, the one with the hand-painted wildfire awareness mural on the side wall. He’d bought a used copy of Norman Maclean’s *Young Men and Fire* from her last fall, had chatted with her for 10 minutes about the 1988 Yellowstone blazes he’d worked straight through for six weeks. She wore a faded flannel shirt, the same plaid pattern he had hanging in his closet, and a silver streak cut through the dark brown hair pulled back in a loose braid. When she slid into the seat next to him to be closer to the answer sheet, her knee brushed his denim-clad thigh, and he caught a whiff of vanilla hand lotion and pine soap, the same kind he used to wash sawdust off his arms at the end of the day.
They clicked fast. She laughed so hard at his offhand joke about the trivia host’s neon pink bowtie that she snort-laughed, and clapped him on the bicep hard enough to leave a faint pink mark when he nailed a question about 1990s federal wildfire policy. When they both reached for the same loaded nacho at the same time, their fingers brushed, and he felt the raised callus on her index finger, the one she got from turning thousands of book pages a week. She didn’t yank her hand away, just held his gaze for two full beats, her dark eyes crinkling at the corners, before she grabbed the nacho and popped it in her mouth. He felt his face heat up, and he cursed himself for being 58 years old and flustered like a teenager at a high school dance. Part of him was disgusted with the urge, the stupid, reckless desire to lean in closer, to ask her out, to risk looking like a sad old man who couldn’t keep his feelings to himself. He wanted to shut it down, to say he was tired and head home, to go back to his quiet house and his wood shavings and no chance of embarrassment. The other part of him couldn’t stop staring at the way her mouth curved when she smiled, couldn’t stop thinking about how warm her hand had felt against his.
They won by 12 points, split the $50 bar tab credit evenly, and headed out into the parking lot just as a light, cold drizzle started to fall. Her Subaru was parked two spots down from his beat-up 2008 Ford F-150, and a Boise PD cruiser idled at the end of the lot, its lights off, the officer visible in the driver’s seat scrolling on his phone. Clay’s first instinct was to wave and head his separate way, to avoid any chance of a run-in, any chance of people whispering about the old retired firefighter messing around with the bookstore lady. She stopped halfway to her car, turned to face him, and reached up to brush a stray raindrop off his cheek, her thumb brushing the scar that cut across his left cheekbone from a falling tree branch in 2017.
He froze for half a second, the voice in his head screaming that they were 10 feet from a cop, that the ordinance was in effect, that he was too old for this kind of stupid, reckless thrill. Then he reached out, laced his calloused, sawdust-stained fingers through hers, and squeezed. She smiled, wide and bright, and didn’t let go when the cop car rolled slowly past them, the officer glancing over for a split second before driving on.
She lived two blocks from the bar, and they walked the whole way holding hands, the drizzle soaking through their flannel shirts, neither of them saying a word. She made coffee when they got to her place, strong and black, just how he liked it, and pulled out a stack of old photos of her dad, who’d fought fires with the Forest Service in the 70s and 80s. He stayed the night, and when he woke up the next morning, the smell of pancakes and bacon drifting from the kitchen, he found her sitting at the kitchen table polishing her dad’s old Forest Service badge, the metal worn smooth at the edges.
He sat down next to her, laced their fingers together again over the table, and ran his thumb over the raised engraving of the pine tree on the front of the badge.
