6. Reid
REID
Forty minutes south of Copper Peak, I stop being able to feel the road.
The convoy’s doing seventy down the canyon, my crew strung out behind me and everything I’m supposed to want, and I’m in the lead seat staring at a map I’ve read a thousand times and not seeing a line of it.
All I see is her across a cold street this morning, arms folded, handing me the door with both hands.
Last night was good. Go be a hero. I’ll be fine.
She’s not fine. I knew it while she said it. I stood there and watched a woman take herself apart on purpose so I couldn’t do it for her, and I let her, because leaving is what I’m built for and she made it easy. Easy is a coward’s favorite word.
Here’s what I know, forty minutes too late.
I told myself eleven years ago that I’d already spent my one shot at an ordinary life, that the job won, that I don’t get to keep things.
And I’ve spent every year since making it true—volunteering for the far detail, the assignment nobody else wants, so I’d never have to find out whether somebody would stay.
You can’t lose the ordinary life if you never let yourself have one.
She loses first so nobody can take it from her. I leave first so nobody can leave me. We’re the same animal. She calls hers efficient. I call mine the job.
There was a woman once who asked me to pick a wedding date and I picked a fire season instead, and when she left, I called the relief proof I wasn’t built for staying. I’ve told myself that story so many times, it wore a groove.
It was never the truth. The truth is I’ve always been more scared of staying than of any burn I ever walked into, because a fire I know how to survive. A person who might not leave—that one I never had a plan for.
And this morning, the first person I’ve ever wanted to stay for held out an exit. I took it, because taking it proved the thing I’ve told myself for a decade. See. This is what I get.
I don’t want to be right anymore. I want her.
“Noah.” I key the radio. My voice comes out level, which is a small miracle. “Pull it over at the next wide spot.”
The convoy slows, gravel under the tires. It’s only Noah and me up in the lead truck, the rest of them back in the convoy. He looks across the cab at me, because in eleven years I’ve never once stopped a roll for anything smaller than a downed tree.
“You’re taking them the rest of the way,” I tell him. “Acting super on this detail. You’ve been ready two seasons. I’ve just been too selfish to hand it over.”
“Reid—”
“The crew’s covered. I’ll square it with the district. I have eleven years of leave I’ve never touched and one thing in Copper Peak I should’ve fought for this morning instead of letting her wave me off.”
Noah looks at me for a long second. Then something breaks across his face, and it isn’t surprise. It’s relief. He’s been waiting the whole drive for me to catch up to what the rest of them already knew.
“Took you long enough.” He shoulders the door open and drops down to the gravel, headed back to ride with the crew. “Go. We’ve got it. Go get her.”
I turn the truck around on the empty shoulder and point it north, the canyon throwing the early gold I’ve spent eleven years driving away from. I break every speed law Colorado has to get back before the morning’s half gone.
And then I don’t go to her.
Because showing up with a speech is the easy version, and easy is the thing we’re both trying to quit. A man who means to stay doesn’t just say so between fires.
So I spend the day making it true. I sit in the district office and tell them to pull me off the far rotations.
There’s a deposit down by noon on a place by Prospect—a real lease, not the month-to-month I’ve kept packed and ready for eleven years.
The whole unromantic paperwork of a life that stays put, all of it, before I let myself anywhere near her.
And I don’t plant my flag in the middle of her shift on the night she finds out whether the spot’s finally hers, because I’m done being one more thing that makes her come second.
All day, I argue with the version of her that lives in my head.
She’ll have decided I’m a story she tells now—the firefighter who blew through for two days.
She’ll have her armor back on and her jokes loaded.
She waved me off once already, and she’s had all day to get good at it.
I don’t have a speech. I have a truck pointed the right way for once and eleven years of being wrong, and I’m going to hand her both and pray it’s enough.
By the time the sun’s down and the windows glow at Prospect House, I’m ready. I don’t go in the front. I go around to the patio, because that’s ours, and I wait in the dark and find out what it’s like to be the one hoping.
She comes out at close with a bag of trash and her apron still on, and she stops dead when she sees me. For a second, neither of us breathes.
“You’re supposed to be in a fire camp,” she says. Her voice isn’t steady. Good. Neither am I.
“I handed the crew to Noah and turned around.” I stand up out of the dark.
“Because you lied to me this morning, and I let you, and I’ve spent my whole life letting people leave so I’d never have to watch one of them choose to stay.
I’m done being right about myself, Reagan.
You are not a nice thing that happened once. ”
“Reid—”
“You said it’s a list of one.” I take a step. “So’s mine. Eleven years, one name, and it’s yours. I don’t want the far detail or the long season anymore. I want to come home to a woman who put the whole gold town in her butter, and I want to be the thing she finally stops running from.”
She’s crying and grinning at once. “You were supposed to leave. That’s how it goes. Everybody leaves. I made it so easy for you.”
“I made it easy right back. We’re good at that.” I close half the distance. “Ask me the thing you didn’t ask me this morning.”
“People come back for a night.” Her chin’s up and shaking. “They don’t come back for a life. Not for me. You’ll be gone by leaf-drop, and I’ll have been the independent one one more—”
“I gave my crew to Noah and drove north.” It stops her cold, because she knows what the job has always been to me. “I have never once picked staying over the job. Not in eleven years. I picked it today, on a canyon road, and I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. Now ask me.”
For a second she’s twenty-three years of practiced defeat, braced to lose. Then she takes the bravest breath I’ve ever watched anybody take.
“Stay,” she says. “Don’t you dare turn into one more person who leaves. Stay, be mine, let me be first for once in my—”
I kiss her before she can talk herself out of it. She drops the trash bag, her hands come up into my jacket, and for the first time in eleven years, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
And it isn’t a fire.
When we stop kissing long enough to come up for air, I have to ask. “The spot. Did you get it?”
She laughs, surprised, like she forgot it was even a question. “I got it. Permanent sous. My name on the door and everything.”
“Course you did.” I feel the grin against her mouth. “I’d have bet the whole season on you. Turns out, I’d have won twice today.”