Javier Ruiz, 57, spent 29 years leading wildfire hotshot crews across the West before a 2021 blaze shattered his left ankle and forced him into early retirement outside Grass Valley, California. His biggest flaw, if you asked the few people close enough to know, was that he’d convinced himself he was unfit for soft things: he still slept on a twin cot in the spare bedroom of the cabin he shared with no one, kept his fridge stocked only with beer, eggs, and leftover fire crew MREs, and hadn’t let anyone touch him in a non-work context since his wife left him for a high school math teacher in 2011. He’d spent the morning patching a split rail fence on the edge of his 10-acre property, so his flannel sleeves were rolled to the elbows, forearms crisscrossed with old burn scars and dusted with pine sap, when his neighbor banged on his door and dragged him to the annual apple harvest festival’s pop-up bar down the road.
He was leaning against the rough cedar bar nursing a spiced hard cider, calloused fingers curled around the frosty mason jar, when he spotted her. Lila Marlow, 42, Tom Marlow’s little sister, the kid he’d taught to skip rocks at the lake when she was 10, the one who’d snuck beer from their cooler at Tom’s 30th birthday party and he’d lied to Tom about where it went. She’d moved to Portland 10 years prior to open an herbal apothecary, and he hadn’t seen her since Tom’s funeral three years earlier, when she’d hugged him so tight he could smell sage and chamomile on her hair and didn’t know how to hug back. She was wearing a faded denim jacket covered in iron-on patches of native wildflowers, a leather cord strung with a chunk of iridescent labradorite around her neck, and when she spotted him she grinned, bright and unapologetic, and wove through the crowd of flannel-clad locals and tourist families until she was standing so close her shoulder brushed his bicep when she leaned in to yell over the bluegrass band picking in the corner.
“Thought you’d be hiding up in your cabin pretending you don’t know how to have fun,” she said, and her breath was warm against his ear, sending a jolt up his spine that he immediately tried to stamp out. She was Tom’s little sister. Off limits. Always had been, even when she’d turned 21 and showed up to Tom’s Fourth of July cookout in a cutoff tank top and he’d spent the entire night staring at the freckles across her nose and berating himself for it. He mumbled a response about the fence, took a too-big sip of cider, and tried not to stare when she leaned past him to flag down the bartender, her hand brushing the thick, silvery scar running across his left forearm from a 2018 blaze in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest. She paused, her thumb brushing the raised edge of the scar for half a second before she pulled back, holding her own mason jar of cider, and held his gaze for three beats too long, like she knew exactly what she was doing.
They talked for an hour, pressed shoulder to shoulder against the bar to avoid the crowd, and the tension built slow and thick, sweet as the pressed apple cider being sold at the booths down the street. She told him she’d moved back to town two weeks prior, bought the old cottage on the edge of town to open a small apothecary shop, had just finalized her divorce six months earlier. He told her about the fence, about the small pine stand he was planting on the back half of his property to replace the trees burned in the 2020 Jones Fire, about how he still woke up at 4 a.m. out of habit, even though he had nowhere to be. When a group of drunk college kids stumbled past, jostling her into his chest, he wrapped one arm around her waist to steady her, and neither of them moved for a full ten seconds, his rough work-worn hand splayed across the soft denim of her jacket, her hand pressed flat against his chest, he could feel her heart beating fast under his palm.
He didn’t know who suggested they step outside for air first, but they ended up walking down a dirt path lined with apple trees heavy with fruit, the air sharp with the smell of crushed apple pulp, wood smoke from the food truck fire pits, and the faint, sweet scent of her perfume. The noise of the festival faded behind them, and when they reached a split rail fence overlooking the valley dotted with yellow oak trees, she stopped, turned to face him, and said she’d had a crush on him since she was 16, that Tom had even teased her about it back in the day, told her if she ever worked up the nerve to make a move after he was gone, she should do it, because Javier was the only good man he’d ever known.
Javier’s brain went completely blank for a second, all the guilt and the self-loathing he’d carried for years warring with the warm, tight feeling in his chest that he’d thought was long dead. He didn’t have time to respond before she leaned in, kissing him soft at first, then deeper when he didn’t pull away, her lips tasting like cinnamon and hard cider, her hand tangled in the short graying hair at the nape of his neck. He cupped her face in his hands, his thumbs brushing the freckles across her cheeks, and for the first time in 12 years, he didn’t feel like he was too rough, too scarred, too broken for something soft.
They walked back to his beat-up 2007 Ford F-150 an hour later, his hand resting light on the small of her back, her head tilted up to laugh at a dumb story he told about a prank his old crew pulled on their rookie during a two-week fire assignment in Oregon. He opened the passenger door for her, and before she climbed in, she tugged on the collar of his flannel to pull him down for one more quick kiss, her cold fingers brushing the scar across his left eyebrow. He shut the door behind her, walked around to the driver’s side, and slid behind the wheel, reaching over to lace his calloused fingers through hers where she’d set her hand on the center console.
