Javi Mendez is 57, a retired smokejumper turned wildfire mitigation consultant, and he’s spent the last eight years treating casual connection like a dry tinder bed just waiting for a stray spark. He lost his trainee, 19-year-old Lila, in the 2022 Yellow Rock fire, and his wife left two years before that, so he’s made a habit of keeping interactions surface level: grunt hello to the guy at the gas station, drop off donations at the VFW fish fry and bolt before anyone can corner him into a rant about the town council or the new librarian.
That plan goes to hell the second he steps through the VFW door, rain dripping off the brim of his worn Carhartt hat, holding a tray of sockeye he smoked himself after a fishing trip up the Bighorn. The linoleum just inside is slick with melted snow, his boot slips, and before he can send a dozen pounds of salmon crashing to the floor, a hand shoots out to catch the edge of the tray.
Her name is Elara Voss, the new county librarian every guy in the VFW has been complaining about for three months, ever since she refused to pull a half dozen books they called “unpatriotic” from the adult section. She’s 49, wears a faded flannel under a wool cardigan, has ink stains smudged across her knuckles and a callus on the tip of her left index finger from turning thousands of pages. Their hands brush when he steadies the tray, and her skin is cold, softer than he expects, and she smells like pine dish soap and the cherry hard candies he remembers his grandma keeping in her purse.
She tilts her head back to look up at him, and her eyes are hazel, flecked with gold, and she holds his gaze two beats longer than polite, like she’s not scared of him, like she doesn’t care that half the guys in the room are already glancing over and nudging each other. “You’re Javi, right?” she says, and her voice is low, a little rough, like she’s been singing along to old rock in her car on the drive over. “You wrote that letter to the editor defending the library last month. I printed it out and taped it to my office door.”
He freezes. He wrote that letter at 2 a.m. after three beers, didn’t sign it with his full name, didn’t think anyone would connect the dots. He’s torn between lying and walking out, between avoiding the shit the guys will give him for talking to the “woke librarian” and leaning into the weird, warm hum in his chest that he hasn’t felt since before his wife left.
He stays. He grabs a folding chair across from her at the edge of the room, ignores the snickers from the table of guys he’s hunted and fished with for 20 years, and lets her ask him questions about his smokejumping days, about the wildfire history exhibit she’s putting together for the library. When she passes him a can of Coors Banquet, her wrist brushes the scar on his left forearm, and he shivers, even though the VFW is overheated. She notices, smirks, and leans in a little closer, their knees almost touching under the table, so only he can hear her when she says “They’re all mad I won’t take their favorite trashy romance novels off the shelves too, by the way. Half the guys complaining about ‘indecent content’ check out three a week.”
He snorts, loud enough that the guys at the next table glance over again, and he doesn’t even care. He tells her about Lila, about how she wanted to be a librarian off-season, about how she used to sneak paperbacks into her gear bag on fire assignments, and he doesn’t even flinch when he says her name, which hasn’t happened in two years.
When the rain lets up a little, she leans in even more, her shoulder brushing his, and he can feel the heat of her through the flannel. “I don’t feel like hanging around here while they yell about property taxes for the next hour,” she says, her breath warm against his ear. “You wanna get coffee down at the diner? Or I hear you have a cabin up in the hills with a view of the Tetons. I’ve been wanting to see the stars without all the city light pollution.”
He doesn’t hesitate. He grabs his jacket off the back of the chair, ignores the loud wolf whistle from the guys at the hunting table, and holds the door open for her. The air outside is crisp, smells like wet pine and wood smoke, and she steps close to him under the awning, their sides pressed together, while he unlocks his beat up 2008 Ford F150.
She climbs into the passenger seat, kicks her mud-caked boots up on the dash, and hums along when the radio kicks on to Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” as he turns the key. He glances over at her, rain streaking the window behind her, the neon sign of the VFW glowing pink on her cheek, and he reaches over to turn the heat up a little, his hand brushing her knee for half a second. She doesn’t pull away.
