Elias Voss, 59, retired wildland fire crew boss, hunches over his bourbon on the edge of The Crooked Spur’s scuffed oak bar, boot tapping in time to the banjo player’s fast, twangy riff. The bar smells like fried green tomato grease, old wood, and rain seeping in under the front door, and most of the regulars are clustered near the small stage, yelling requests between songs. He’d come tonight to tune out the quiet of his empty cabin, not make conversation, so he tenses immediately when a woman slides onto the stool two inches from his elbow, her damp wool coat brushing his worn fire crew jacket as she shifts to set a canvas tote on the bar.
She mumbles an apology, soft, and he grunts a non-response, staring at the ice melting in his glass. He doesn’t do small talk, doesn’t do casual interactions that will end up as town gossip by Thursday morning, especially not with the new librarian everyone in town has been chattering about for the last three weeks. But then he catches the scent of her perfume, cedar and orange blossom, sharp and warm, not the cloying rose stuff his wife wore for 27 years, and he glances over before he can stop himself. She’s shaking rain out of a braid streaked with a single stripe of silver at the temple, leaning in to flag the bartender, and the neck of her flannel shirt gapes just enough to show a small silver pendant shaped like a pine tree tucked against her collarbone.
The bartender is swamped, so she turns back to him, nodding at the faded 2018 Camp Fire patch sewn to the sleeve of his jacket. “My brother was on a crew that came up from Redding to help with that,” she says, raising her voice just enough to cut over the fiddle. “He still talks about how the lead boss from Oregon kept everyone running on gas station burritos and terrible dad jokes for 12 straight days.”
Elias snorts, because he was that lead boss. He doesn’t tell her that right away, though, just says he was on the line for three weeks straight, lost ten pounds and a favorite pair of work boots to a mudslide on the west end of the fire. She laughs, loud and bright, and her elbow brushes his again when she gestures at the stage. He doesn’t flinch this time. He hasn’t let anyone sit this close to him on purpose in eight years, not since his wife died, not since he stopped letting people ask questions about the scar that runs from his left wrist to his elbow, the one he got pulling a rookie out of a burning stand of ponderosa pine.
The music gets louder, and she leans in closer to hear him when he talks about the time a bear stole a whole case of beer from his crew’s campground outside Yellowstone. Her knee brushes his under the bar, warm even through the thick denim of their jeans, and he doesn’t move away. When she laughs at the part where they chased the bear for half a mile before giving up, her hand rests on his forearm for two full seconds, and he can feel the heat of her palm through the thin flannel of his shirt, his skin prickling like he’s standing too close to a campfire.
Part of him is screaming to leave, to pay his tab and drive back to his cabin before any of the regulars notice they’re talking, before the gossip mill starts churning about the reclusive ex-fire guy hitting on the new librarian. He’s spent two years building a reputation as the guy who keeps to himself, who doesn’t want anyone’s pity or anyone’s attention, and he hates the thought of losing that, hates the thought of feeling anything sharp and new and scary again, the kind of feeling that makes you ache when it’s gone. But the other part of him can’t stop looking at the way her eyes crinkle when she smiles, can’t stop listening to the way her voice drops when she talks about the after-school reading program she’s starting for the kids whose parents work in the local apple orchards, can’t stop wanting to sit here for another hour, another three, just listening to her talk.
The jam ends a little after 10, and the rain is coming down harder, streaking the front windows of the bar. She groans when she sees it, saying she walked here from her apartment six blocks away, didn’t check the forecast before she left. Elias offers her a ride before he can think better of it, nodding at his beat-up 1987 F-150 parked out front, the one with the dented passenger side door he’s been meaning to fix for six months. She grins and accepts, grabbing her tote, and when they run through the rain to the truck, her hand wraps around his wrist for half a second to keep from slipping on the wet sidewalk.
He turns the heat on high when they get in, and the cab fills with the smell of pine air freshener and rain on his work boots and her perfume. The drive is quiet, the wipers slapping against the windshield, and he catches her looking at the stack of vintage truck repair manuals on the seat between them, smiling to herself. When he pulls up to the curb outside her small brick apartment building, he walks her to the door, his boots squelching in the puddles on the sidewalk.
She pauses on the porch step, fumbling for her keys, and reaches up to brush a drop of rain off the edge of his Camp Fire patch, her fingers brushing the fabric for a split second. “You wanna come in for coffee?” she asks, casual, like it’s no big deal, like she won’t be offended if he says no. “I make it strong enough to strip paint. Just how guys who fight fires like it, right?”
Elias hesitates for two full beats, thinking about the quiet cabin waiting for him, the pile of repair parts on his workbench, the years of being alone he’d thought he wanted. Then he nods. She unlocks the door and holds it open for him, and when he steps inside, the warm air wraps around him, and she hands him a chipped ceramic mug of coffee, their fingers brushing for a full second when he takes it from her.
