Rafe Mendez, 53, spent 18 years as a smokejumper before a blown knee and a brutal 2019 Lolo Peak blaze left him with a scar snaking up his left forearm and a new career running wildfire mitigation consulting out of a cramped office above a Missoula laundromat. His biggest flaw, per his only remaining college buddy, is that he’d rather spend three nights alone sanding down a vintage chainsaw than make small talk with a stranger, and he’d gone seven years without so much as a first date after his wife left him for a real estate agent who wore loafers without socks. He’d agreed to go to the end-of-summer craft beer festival only after his buddy promised to bring the good venison jerky, and then the guy bailed 22 minutes in to take his 14-year-old to the emergency room for a skateboard wrist fracture.
So Rafe was leaning against a splintered cedar fence post, sipping a hazy IPA that tasted like pine and citrus, watching a group of 20-somethings play cornhole when he spotted Clara. She ran the native plant nursery he’d been buying from for client landscaping jobs for the past year, wore the same faded gray flannel every time he saw her, had chipped forest green nail polish and a scar slicing through her left eyebrow from a mountain biking crash she’d mentioned once in passing. He’d kept every interaction strictly professional, had never let his eyes linger on the freckles across her nose longer than two seconds, had convinced himself crossing that line was unprofessional, stupid, a surefire way to mess up a good business relationship when he was just getting his company off the ground.
She saw him before he could look away, waved, and started weaving through the crowd of drunk tourists and local ranchers. A group of kids carrying a half-empty keg surged past her, and she stumbled, grabbing his left forearm to steady herself, her palm pressing right over the thickest part of his fire scar. He flinched first, not from pain, from the shock of contact—no one had touched that spot on purpose in years, not even his physical therapist, who’d always treated the scar like it was something fragile, something to avoid. “Shit, sorry,” she said, not pulling her hand away immediately, running her thumb over the raised, pale skin absentmindedly. “This is from the Lolo fire, right? You told me about that, when you were buying 500 milkweed plants last spring.”
He blinked, shocked she remembered. He’d rambled about that fire for two minutes that day, had assumed it was just the kind of background noise people tuned out when they were ringing up a $1200 plant order. “Yeah,” he said, shifting his weight a little, so their shoulders were almost touching, the rough fabric of her flannel brushing the bare skin of his bicep where his Carhartt shirt was rolled up. “Got caught under a falling cedar, had to dig myself out with a folding shovel.” She nodded, and he could smell her perfume, something woody and sweet, mixed with the sour peach beer she was holding and the grilled bratwurst smell wafting from the food truck 20 feet away. “I knew it,” she said, grinning, the corner of her mouth tugging up higher on one side. “You’re the only person I know who buys that much milkweed and has a fire scar that impressive. I’ve been calling you Milkweed Guy in my head for months.”
He laughed, a rough, rusty sound he didn’t hear very often, and teased her back about charging him 10% extra for coneflowers every time he came in. She didn’t deny it, just leaned in a little closer, so her shoulder was pressed fully to his, her hand still resting light on his forearm. The live band at the other end of the field started playing a cover of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” and the crowd pushed in tighter, a group of drunk sorority girls screaming the lyrics as they stumbled past. For a second he wanted to step back, to put space between them, to go back to the safety of being alone, where he didn’t have to worry about saying the wrong thing, about being too rough around the edges, too used to quiet, too broken from the divorce. He hated that part of himself, the part that ran from anything that felt like it could matter, the part that thought he didn’t deserve anything that didn’t involve chainsaws or fire maps or takeout burritos eaten alone on his couch.
She looked up at him then, her brown eyes steady, no quick look away, no awkward laugh, just holding his gaze for three full seconds, and he could feel the heat of her cheek close to his, could feel the calluses on her fingers from digging in dirt rubbing against the scar on his arm. “I’ve been wanting to ask you out for three months,” she said, her voice just loud enough to hear over the band, wavering just a little, like she was nervous too. “But you always looked so busy, like you’d rather be anywhere else but talking to me. I didn’t want to bug you.”
He froze for half a second, every excuse he’d ever rehearsed sitting on the tip of his tongue: I work too much, I’m no good at dating, I still sleep with a fire radio next to my bed because I get nightmares. But then he felt her squeeze his arm gently, saw the way her cheeks were pink from the beer and the cool September wind, remembered he’d been stopping by the nursery twice a week for the past two months even when he didn’t need a single plant, just to hear her laugh, just to see the way she lit up when she talked about native bees. “I’ve been stopping by when I don’t need plants,” he said, the words coming out rougher than he meant them to. “Just to say hi.”
The sun dipped below the Bitterroot Mountains then, painting the sky pink and tangerine, the festival staff starting to take down the beer tents, the crowd thinning out. He nodded toward the parking lot, where the taco truck he loved was parked, the one with the habanero salsa she’d mentioned liking once, when she’d been loading coneflowers into his truck bed. “You wanna get tacos?” he asked. “I hear the guy running it makes a mean al pastor, extra pineapple.”
She grinned, lacing her fingers through his, the calluses on her palm matching the calluses on his from years of holding axes and fire hoses, and squeezed his hand. “Hell yeah,” she said. They walked past the line of empty folding chairs, his scuffed work boots kicking up bits of dry grass, her shoulder pressed tight to his, and for the first time in seven years, he didn’t feel the urge to pull away.
