Claimed by the Mountain Man Hotshot

1. Reagan

REAGAN

The tasting menu is going out to eight firefighters in the next four minutes, and I’ve already decided this is the most important night of my life. Not because of them. Because of the clipboard.

Chef Marchetti carries a clipboard during soft-open service the way other men carry a grudge. On it is a single line item that will decide whether I still have a job, and he has not once let me see what he writes next to my name.

“Sous.” He doesn’t look up. “Table four wants the trout early. Fire it.”

“On the trout,” I say, which is my whole personality now. I am a woman who says “on the trout” and means it with her entire soul.

I plate. I wipe the rim. I check the microgreens for the little guy who always tries to fall off the edge and ruin my life, then I send four plates through the pass into the dining room.

That’s where Prospect House is having its very first pretend dinner for people who won’t be charged, in a restaurant that smells like new paint and other people’s opportunity.

Here’s the thing I know about myself. When something good is about to happen to someone, it isn’t going to be me.

It’s a track record, not a mood. I’ve been the bridesmaid, the understudy, the second choice for a job, the girl whose brother got the car because he “needed it for work.” My turn is a bus that stops one block early, every single time, and lets everybody else off.

So when Marchetti announces there is one permanent sous position and it goes to whoever “owns the room” during soft-open week, I hear it correctly. I hear, Someone else is going to own the room.

“Reagan.” Devon, the expo, leans in. “Firefighter table. They’re asking who did the trout.”

My breath catches. “Asking bad or asking good?”

“Asking. I’m not a translator.”

I look through the pass. Prospect House put its kitchen half-open to the dining room, which is a design choice made by someone who has never had a bad hair day mid-service.

The firefighter table is eight men who look like they were carved out of the same tree and then left outside for a season.

And one of them is looking straight back at me.

Not at the pass. At me.

He has tousled dark hair, forearms on the table like it works for him, and a stillness the rest of them don’t have. They’re loud, he isn’t. He’s watching me the way you watch a pot you actually want to boil.

I look away first, because I’m a professional. Then I look back, because I’m a liar.

“Chef,” I tell Marchetti. “I’m going to run four out. The patio table.”

“Runners run food.”

“The runners are drowning.”

He waves the clipboard at me, which I choose to interpret as a blessing.

I carry the plates out through the swinging door, past the bar that isn’t pouring yet, onto the heated patio that faces the whole decorated length of Prospect Street. Hay bales, string lights, pumpkins stacked like somebody’s showing off.

It’s pretty. I don’t have time to find it pretty. I have four plates and a man watching me cross a room.

“Trout for the table,” I say, setting them down. “Chef sends the—”

“You did this?”

It’s him. Up close, he’s worse. Or better. He’s a category of person I don’t have a permit for.

“I did the trout, yeah.”

“The brown butter.” He says it like a verdict. “There’s something in it.”

“Sage. And a little apple, because I have feelings about this time of year.”

That gets me the first crack in the stillness. Not a smile. The suggestion of one, filed under maybe.

“Feelings about September,” he says.

“Aspen gold. Everybody driving up the pass to look at trees. The whole town pretending it invented autumn.” I should stop talking. I keep talking. “I put it in the butter. Don’t tell the trees.”

“Reid,” he says.

He holds out a hand, and I realize we’re doing this. We’re introducing ourselves, the plates barely down.

“Reagan.”

I take his hand. It’s warm and rough and closes around mine like he’s checking whether I’m real. A current of something goes up my arm and lands somewhere I’m not going to think about in front of eight firefighters.

I let go first. I’m just being professional.

Really. I am.

“You’re new,” he says.

“I’m seasonal. There’s a difference. New means you’re staying.” I hear how that comes across a half-second too late and add, “That was more honest than I meant it to be. Enjoy your trout.”

One of the other men—big and grinning—leans across. “She always this fun, or is it the September feelings?”

“Ignore Noah,” Reid says, not looking away from me. “How long’s the season?”

Not a question, the way he says it. He’s checking that a door is locked.

“Until the lifts open, if I’m lucky. Until Thursday if I’m me.” Stop. Talking. “There’s one permanent spot. Chef gives it to whoever owns the room this week.”

“And who owns the room?”

“Historically? Not me.” I pick up an empty water glass I don’t need, because my hands have decided we’re leaving. “I’m very good at the trout, though. Put that in your report.”

“I don’t write reports.”

“Everybody writes reports. You have a clipboard face.”

That does it. The maybe-smile becomes a real one. It’s brief—gone before the others can catch him having it—but it does something to his whole face. For one second, he looks less like a monument and more like a man who’s just been caught.

“Reid.” Noah again, delighted. “She got you.”

“She did not get me.”

“You’re smiling. You don’t smile at soft opens. You inspect them.”

“I’m inspecting the trout.” Reid’s eyes haven’t left me. “It’s very good trout.”

Somewhere behind me, the kitchen door bangs and Marchetti’s voice cuts across the patio asking where his sous is. I am, technically, the answer, holding a water glass I stole and being inspected.

“That’s me,” I say. “The missing sous. Wanted in three states.”

“Reagan.” Reid says my name like he’s trying the weight of it, and I have the deeply inconvenient thought that I could get used to a man saying it exactly that carefully. “You’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Soft open runs all week. I’ll practically live here.”

“Good.” He picks up his fork. “Then I know where to find the trout.”

I walk back to my kitchen with a stolen glass and a pulse doing something athletic, and I tell myself it’s the adrenaline. It’s a table of eight, it’s the paint fumes. I tell myself he’s just a customer with a clipboard face.

Thursday’s coming. The permanent spot’s already spoken for, same as everything good—gone before my turn ever comes around.

I tell myself all of it, right up until I push through the door and catch Marchetti writing something next to my name. I can’t make out what he’s writing, but he wanted me to see that there was something to read.

My turn—the bus that stops one block early—idles at the curb.

I fire the next trout like my life depends on it. On some level I’m not ready to look at yet, I think it might.