Roy Pritchard, 62, retired smokejumper and owner of a tiny custom fly-tying shop outside Missoula, had been dragged to the annual winter brew fest against his will. His old crewmate Earl had shown up at his shop at 4 p.m. with a six pack of his favorite hazy IPA, refused to take no for an answer, even mocked him for hiding out in his work shed for eight years straight after his wife left him for a luxury RV salesman. Roy’s biggest flaw was holding grudges, and he’d spent the last three months ranting to every customer who walked through his door about the new forest service supervisor who’d restricted access to his favorite backcountry fishing stretch on the Bitterroot River. He’d fully intended to spend the night glued to Earl’s side, drinking enough beer to tolerate the crowd, then slip out before he had to make small talk with anyone he didn’t know.
The tent was thick with the smell of roasted nuts, malt, and cinnamon sticks strung from the support poles, warm enough that he’d unzipped his beat up Carhartt coat halfway, the scar across his left knuckle from a 2012 fire line accident catching the light as he lifted his beer. He spotted her across the room first, leaning against the bar, laughing so hard at something the bartender said that her shoulders shook, a streak of silver cutting through the dark brown hair pulled back in a loose braid. She wore a navy flannel under a puffy down vest, scuffed cowboy boots, a small forest service badge pinned to her vest lapel. Earl nudged him hard in the ribs before he could look away. “That’s Lena Marquez. The new boss you’ve been screaming about. Real pain in the ass, right?”
Roy’s jaw tightened. He’d built up a whole persona for her in his head: stuck up, east coast transplant, never spent a day outside an office, didn’t care that that stretch of river was where he’d taken his daughter fishing every summer until she left for college. He turned to leave, but a group of rowdy college students cut him off, and he stumbled right into her, her cup of spiced cider sloshing over the edge onto his coat sleeve. She yelped a little, then immediately reached for the napkins stacked on the bar, dabbing at the wet spot before he could protest, her cold fingers brushing his wrist for half a second, sending a jolt up his arm he hadn’t felt since he was 22 and asking his first girlfriend to prom. She smelled like cedar and vanilla, warm, not the overly sweet perfume his ex-wife used to wear.
“Sorry about that,” she said, grinning, and he realized she was holding eye contact longer than most people did, like she was actually paying attention to what he was going to say next. “I should’ve been watching where I was standing. You’re Roy, right? The fly tying guy, ex-smokejumper. I’ve read your old fire line reports. Used your backcountry trail notes when I was doing trail crew training in Idaho 20 years ago. You’re kind of a legend around the office.”
He froze. He’d spent months ready to tear into her the second he met her, but now he couldn’t remember a single one of his talking points. They ended up leaning against the far side of the bar, away from the crowd, talking for an hour. She leaned in every time he told a story about the old fire crew, her shoulder brushing his every time someone squeezed past, laughing so hard at his dumb joke about the forest service’s obsession with over-sized warning signs that she snort-laughed, then covered her mouth, her cheeks turning pink. He found himself telling her things he hadn’t told anyone, not even Earl: how he’d started tying flies after he retired because it was the only thing that calmed down the jumpy, always-on-edge feeling he’d carried home from 30 years of fire seasons, how he’d stopped going to the river after his wife left because it felt too empty without her there.
He was torn the whole time, half of him still simmering about the fishing access, half of him buzzing so loud he could barely hear the band playing in the corner. He shouldn’t be this into her. She was the enemy. But when she tilted her head and asked him about the custom salmon fly he’d displayed in his shop window, he forgot all about the access rules.
She said she wanted to show him something, grabbing his wrist to pull him outside, the snow falling soft and thick now, turning the streetlights a soft gold. She pulled a folded piece of paper out of her vest pocket, handing it to him: a revised access plan, his favorite stretch of the Bitterroot marked as open for local anglers only, a note scrawled in the margin in messy cursive: *I fought the regional office for three weeks over this. Don’t make me regret it*.
“I was going to call you,” she said, shifting her weight from foot to foot, snow sticking to the ends of her braid. “I heard you were a total hardass, and I was nervous. Figured you’d yell at me before I could explain.”
They were standing so close he could feel the heat off her even through their coats, his hand brushing hers when he folded the paper back up. He didn’t overthink it, just leaned down and kissed her, slow, not too pushy, and she kissed him back, tasting like spiced cider and cinnamon, her hand resting on his chest right over the old smokejumper badge he still pinned to his coat lapel every day. The snow was piling up on the shoulders of their coats, and he could hear the faint sound of the band inside playing a Johnny Cash cover, but he couldn’t focus on any of it, just the way her hand curled into the front of his coat, the way she smiled against his mouth when he pulled back for air.
She told him she had a bottle of small batch bourbon in the back of her truck, and she wanted to come back to his shop, see how he tied those salmon flies, get a few to give her dad for his 80th birthday. He nodded, lacing his fingers through hers, the calluses on her palm matching his, rough from years of swinging an axe on trail crews. They walked toward the parking lot together, their boots crunching in the fresh snow, and he didn’t even remember he’d spent three months hating the woman next to him an hour earlier. The cold air stung his cheeks, but he didn’t notice, too focused on the weight of her hand in his, warm and steady, like it had been there the whole time.
