Rafe Mendoza is 52, retired smokejumper turned wildfire risk consultant, and he’s spent the last 18 years perfecting the art of leaving social events before anyone can ask him for a second date or a story about jumping into a burning forest. The annual Missoula summer food truck festival is the last place he wants to be, but his buddy begged him to drop off a case of homemade pickles for his tamale stand, so he’s stuck, sweating through his faded Carhartt, can of IPA in one hand, dodging groups of screaming kids and retirees trying to sell him custom cutlery.
The line for the BBQ truck is 20 people deep, so he veers toward the half-empty peach cobbler stand at the edge of the field, and his stomach drops when he sees who’s behind the counter. It’s Elara Voss, the woman who showed up at his workshop six months prior begging for a free risk assessment for her family’s cabin up Lolo Pass, who he’d brushed off so harshly she’d left with tears in her eyes. He’d felt like an asshole for weeks afterward, had even driven up to the cabin to leave a handwritten list of mitigation tips on her porch, but he’d never worked up the nerve to apologize.
She spots him before he can turn and run, a slow, knowing smirk tugging at the corner of her mouth. She’s got flour on her left cheek, her dark hair pulled back in a messy braid, a frayed denim apron slung over a cutoff flannel and cutoff shorts, scuffed work boots on her feet. “Well look who decided to stop hiding in the woods,” she calls, leaning her elbows on the counter, close enough that Rafe can smell ripe peach, vanilla extract, and the lavender shampoo she uses. He freezes halfway to turning, then shuffles over, his boots kicking up dust in the dry, sunbaked grass.
He mumbles an apology before she can say anything else, rubbing the thick, raised scar on his left forearm, the one he got when a burning oak branch fell on him during the 2019 Bitterroot fire. She waves it off, says she saw the note he left on her porch, figured he was just having a bad day. When he hands her a ten dollar bill for a cobbler, their fingers brush, and he feels the callus on her index finger from splitting firewood, the soft warmth of her skin against his rough, calloused knuckles. He yanks his hand back like he’s been burned, and she laughs, a low, throaty sound that makes the back of his neck feel hot enough to match the 90-degree heat.
She hands him the cobbler in a crinkly wax paper wrapper, leaning further over the counter, and he can see the smattering of freckles across her nose, the flecks of gold in her dark brown eyes. She holds his gaze for three full seconds, longer than any stranger has any right to, and he looks away first, staring at the patch of scraggly dandelions at his feet, feeling like a stupid 16 year old with a crush instead of a grown man who’s jumped out of planes into burning forests more than 100 times.
A group of kids on dirt bikes goes tearing past, one of them slamming into Rafe’s shoulder hard enough that he spills half his IPA down the front of her apron. He panics, reaching across the counter to wipe the beer off the fabric, his hand brushing the soft curve of her hip for half a second, and he freezes, waiting for her to yell, to call him a creep, to tell him to get lost. She doesn’t pull away. She just smirks up at him, tilting her head, says he can make it up to her by helping her haul her coolers and leftover supplies to her truck when the festival closes in an hour.
He agrees before he can think better of it, spends the next hour perched on a dented folding chair at the edge of her stand, making dumb jokes about the town mayor who’s burning burgers on the public grill 50 feet away, telling her stories about jumping into fires that don’t end with him talking about how his ex-wife left him while he was in the hospital recovering from that oak branch injury. She laughs at all his jokes, even the bad ones, and every time she leans over to hand a customer a cobbler, her arm brushes his, and he can feel that same electric jolt he felt when their fingers touched earlier.
By the time the festival wraps up, the sun is dipping below the Bitterroot Mountains, painting the sky pink and tangerine, the sound of the bluegrass band from the main stage fading into the hum of crickets waking up for the night. They haul the dented, frosty coolers to her beat-up Toyota Tacoma, and when they’re done, she leans against the tailgate, crossing her arms over her chest, looking at him like she can see right through the grumpy hermit act he’s been hiding behind for almost two decades.
She tells him she didn’t just show up at his workshop that day for a risk assessment. She’d seen him at the hardware store a dozen times before that, hauling lumber and fire extinguisher parts, had asked his next-door neighbor who he was, had worked up the nerve to go see him for three weeks before she finally did. She’d thought he was cute, even when he was being an asshole.
Rafe feels his throat go tight. He’s spent so long telling himself he’s too broken for anything real, too old, too set in his ways, too quick to push people away before they can leave him first. But he looks at her, at the flour still smudged on her cheek, the way she’s biting her lip like she’s nervous he’ll laugh at her, and he can’t remember the last time he wanted something as bad as he wants to ask her to stay.
He asks her if she wants to get a milkshake at the diner on the edge of town, the one with the half-broken neon sign that only lights up half the “M” in MILKSHAKES, the one that serves chocolate shakes so thick you can stand a spoon up in them. She grins, big and bright, and hops up into the passenger seat of his beat-up Ford F-150 before he can even open the door for her. He slides into the driver’s seat, turns the key, the old truck rumbling to life, and she propped her bare, peach-syrup-sticky foot on the dash, laughing as he fumbled with the radio to find the old Merle Haggard station he’s listened to since he was a kid.
