Rafe Mendez, 51, has spent the last eight years building his northern Colorado wildfire mitigation business around avoiding unnecessary human interaction. Most days he’s alone on remote mountain properties outside Fort Collins, chainsaw slung over his shoulder, clearing dry brush and building fire breaks, talking to no one but the occasional mule deer that crosses his path. He only agreed to man the local fire department’s booth at the town’s summer street fair because his 16-year-old niece, who’s in the junior volunteer program, begged him, batting her eyelashes and reminding him he owed her for covering his border collie Spark’s feeding schedule when he was on a two-week job in Wyoming last month. His biggest flaw? He’d spent so long guarding his quiet, self-imposed isolation after his wife left him for a Denver real estate broker, he’d forgotten how to talk to anyone who didn’t want a quote for brush removal.
The first hour drags. He hands out cheap plastic fire hats to squabbling kids, repeats the same “clear 30 feet of vegetation from around your home” line to bored retirees, and tries not to stare at the woman running the adjacent booth, selling lopsided clay wind chimes and hand-painted greeting cards to raise money for the elementary school’s art program. He recognizes her immediately: Lila Marquez, 36, the stepdaughter of his former best friend, the guy he’d had a screaming falling out with 12 years prior over a botched commercial mitigation contract that cost Rafe $12,000 and his local reputation for six months. Everyone in town still treats the two families like rival gangs, so he knows better than to so much as nod at her.
Then he reaches for the pitcher of lemonade he set on the shared edge of the two booths at the same time she does. His elbow brushes her sun-warmed forearm, and he freezes when he feels the faint smudge of blue acrylic paint on her wrist against his calloused, pine-sap-sticky skin. She doesn’t pull away. She holds his gaze for three beats longer than polite, the corner of her mouth tugging up in a half-smirk like she knows exactly how uncomfortable he is. She smells like lavender soap and fir needles, like she spends as much time hiking the foothills as he does.
They start talking slow, like they’re testing a rickety footbridge over a gorge. He teases her about the wind chimes, all slightly warped, their clay clappers shaped like sunflowers, fire trucks and squashed house cats. She teases him about the fire hats, which half the kids are wearing backwards, their little plastic badges peeling off after ten minutes of running through the fair’s dust. He learns she moved back to town three months prior, took the art teacher job after her mom divorced his former friend the year before, so the only tie she has to that old grudge is the last name she’s already planning to change back to her maiden name as soon as the paperwork goes through. He tells her about Spark, whom he rescued from a wildfire zone two years prior, and she laughs so hard at the story of Spark stealing a pastrami sandwich off his work truck dashboard that she snorts.
A tight twist of disgust and desire sits low in his gut the whole time. He’s 15 years older than her. Everyone in town would run their mouths for months if they saw them together. He’s spent eight years building a life that requires zero emotional vulnerability, zero risk of getting his heart broken again, and here he is, leaning against the booth rail like a gawky teenager, hanging on every word she says. He tells himself he should leave early, pack up the booth and drive back to his cabin in the hills, forget this ever happened. He’s halfway to grabbing his stack of pamphlets when the first clap of thunder rumbles overhead, dark gray storm clouds rolling over the foothills so fast no one saw them coming.
Rain dumps down thirty seconds later, cold and hard, sending fairgoers scrambling for cover. The scent of fried dough and cotton candy that hung in the air all afternoon mixes with the sharp, fresh smell of wet dust. He grabs a heavy vinyl tarp off the back of the fire department truck, and helps her load a crate of fragile pottery into the back of her beat-up blue Subaru, their shoulders pressed tight together under the tarp, rain drumming so loud on the plastic he can barely hear her when she laughs about a batch of mugs she ruined last week when she fell asleep in her studio and left the kiln on too long. He puts his hand on her waist to steady her when her boot slips on a wet patch of asphalt, his palm splayed over the soft, worn cotton of her flannel shirt, and she tilts her head up to kiss him before he can overthink it.
Her lips are warm, taste like the cherry sno-cone she was eating half an hour earlier, and he doesn’t pull away. For a second he forgets about the old grudge, about the gossipy town regulars, about the quiet, isolated life he’d spent years building. The rain seeps through the collar of his work shirt, cold against the back of his neck, and he kisses her back, slow, like he’s got all the time in the world.
When they pull apart, she tucks a chipped clay wind chime, its clapper shaped like a tiny fireman’s hat, into the pocket of his work pants, and gives him her phone number scrawled on the back of one of her sunflower greeting cards. They agree to meet for coffee at the diner on the edge of town at 6 a.m. the next day, early enough that none of the usual morning crowd will be there to stare. He stands in the rain and watches her Subaru pull out of the parking lot, the wipers slapping back and forth across the windshield, and runs his thumb over the rough, glazed surface of the wind chime peeking out of his pocket.
