Rafe Mendez, 57, retired smokejumper turned wildfire mitigation consultant, propped his bad left knee on the lower rung of the high top at the Rusty Spike, nursing a lukewarm Pabst and mentally cursing his usual trivia partner for bailing with a last-minute text about a sick kid. The bar smelled like pine cleaner, fried cheese curds, and the faint sweet tang of huckleberry moonshine someone was passing around a booth in the back, 90s Alan Jackson cutting low through the hum of chatter. Snow dusted the windows, the Bitterroot peaks glowing pale blue through the slush outside, and he was half ready to pack it in and drive back to his empty cabin when someone slid into the seat across from him.
It was Elara Voss, 49, the new US Forest Service district lead he’d spent three hours yelling at at the town hall two weeks prior, over her policy of letting low-severity burns run their course on public land. He’d called her reckless, she’d called him a stuck-up relic stuck in 90s fire management tactics, half the town had recorded the fight for their Facebook pages. She was wearing a frayed navy flannel rolled up to her elbows, calloused forearms dusted with a faint smattering of freckles, a thin scar slicing across her left eyebrow from a chainsaw accident the year prior. “Don’t look so thrilled, Mendez,” she said, smirking as she tapped the answer sheet the host had dropped off. “My partner bailed too. Host said we’re paired up unless you want to forfeit the $200 bar tab grand prize.”
He grit his teeth, then nodded. Fine. It was $200 worth of beer, he could put up with her for an hour and a half. The first round was 80s action movie trivia, and he ran the table, answering every question before she’d even finished reading the prompt. She raised an eyebrow, impressed, when he nailed the name of the secondary villain in *Predator* without hesitation. Second round was local botany and public land history, and she wiped the floor with him, reeling off Latin names of native grasses and the exact year the Lolo National Forest was established like she was reciting her own phone number. When they both reached for the pencil to mark a final answer at the end of the round, their knuckles brushed. Hers were cold from holding her iced tea, rough from weeks of field work, and he pulled his hand back like he’d touched a live wire. She snickered, leaning forward a little, elbows on the table, the edge of her flannel brushing his wrist. “Relax. I don’t bite. Unless you ask nicely.”
He didn’t have a comeback for that. For the rest of the round, every time she leaned in to whisper an answer in his ear, her breath warm against the side of his neck, he could feel heat crawling up his collar, his bad knee forgetting to throb for ten full minutes at a time. They bickered over a bonus question about prescribed burn protocols, her eyes bright and sharp, voice low enough only he could hear it. “You know I’m right. You just don’t want to admit a woman who was still in middle school when you did your first jump knows more about modern fire management than you do.” He laughed, a real, rough laugh, the kind he hadn’t let out since his wife left him for a software engineer in Portland eight years prior.
By the time the final round ended, they were 12 points ahead of the next closest team. The host called their names, and she cheered, grabbing his bicep to squeeze it, her hand lingering for three full beats before she pulled away. He didn’t move to shake her off. They collected the tab voucher, and he offered to walk her to her car, the snow coming down a little thicker now, turning the parking lot slushy under his boots. Halfway across the lot, his bad knee gave out, and he stumbled, and she caught him, wrapping an arm tight around his waist to steady him, her body pressed close to his, the smell of lavender and pine sap sticking to her hair.
“You’re so stubborn,” she said, quiet, snowflakes sticking to her eyelashes, her lips pink from the cold. “I watched you limp through that entire town hall. You never asked anyone for help, did you?” He stared down at her, the parking lot streetlight gilding the edges of her hair, and he admitted he’d thought about her every night since that town hall, that he’d hated how much he couldn’t stop looking at her mouth when she was yelling at him. She smiled, tilting her head up, her thumb brushing the scar on his jaw he’d gotten on his second ever jump. “You gonna invite me back to that cabin you keep bragging about, or are you gonna keep being an ass?” He said yes, no hesitation, no overthinking.
They climbed into his beat up 2008 Ford F150, and he cranked the heat, his knee throbbing soft now, not sharp. She reached across the center console, lacing her fingers through his, the rough scar on her palm pressing against the calluses on his. He pulled out of the parking lot, the snow coming down softer now, the Bitterroots glowing deep purple in the dark behind them, and he didn’t even think about the empty cabin waiting for him, not for the first time in eight years.
