CORDITE AND COFFEE
The mornings have taken on a rhythm of their own these past two weeks, both of us arriving before the sun's fully up, headlights cutting through the gray pre-dawn light, thermoses of coffee steaming on the tailgate while we set up the day's drill.
There's a comfort in the routine I don't examine too closely, the specific ease of two people who've fallen, almost without deciding to, into something that looks a great deal like partnership.
It's not fear of the explosives. I've never been afraid of the explosives, not once in my life, not even the first time Hollis let me wire a real detonator at nineteen with actual consequences riding on my precision.
I remember that first live shot with a clarity fourteen months and four hundred miles never managed to dull: my hands steady despite my racing pulse, Hollis a careful ten yards back giving me room to either succeed or fail entirely on my own merits, the specific silence of a whole crew waiting on a nineteen-year-old girl to prove she belonged in a trade most of them assumed she'd wash out of within a season.
I didn't wash out. I've never once doubted my hands around explosives since.
It's everything else in my life that seems to keep failing that particular test of nerve.
It's the cold. My fingers have gone stiff and clumsy in the pre-dawn chill, and the wire strippers keep slipping in my grip, and I'm three coffees deep and still can't get my hands to cooperate the way I need them to.
"You're shaking," Micah says, watching from a few feet off, arms crossed, breath fogging in the gray light.
The light's doing something particular this early, a thin gray-gold seeping up over the eastern rim of the pit, catching the frost on the bench face and making the whole wall glitter faintly, like the rock itself is dusted in something more precious than mere ice.
"I'm cold. There's a difference."
"Uh-huh." He doesn't argue further, but he doesn't fully buy it either, I can tell, watching the particular way his eyes track my hands instead of my face, reading my body the way he reads a bench face, for weakness, for warning signs, for anything that might indicate a fracture about to give.
The truth is more complicated than cold, and we both know it.
The truth is that I've been up since four, running scenarios in my head about the state exam, about the shares, about Birdie's question at the cottage two nights ago that I still haven't managed to answer honestly even to myself.
The truth is that standing this close to Micah at dawn, breath fogging between us, does something to my hands that has nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with a body that apparently didn't get the memo about fourteen months of careful distance.
"I know there's a difference. I'm not questioning your nerve, Wren, I've never once questioned your nerve.
" He steps closer, not touching, just close enough to look at what I'm doing.
"You're going to strip that wire wrong if your hands keep doing that, and then you're going to have to redo it, and we're on a schedule this morning. "
"I'm aware of the schedule."
"Let me hold the panel steady. You do the stripping. Might help if you've only got one variable to fight instead of two."
I want to argue, out of pride more than practicality, but he's right, and the sun's coming up fast enough now that I don't have time to be stubborn about it.
I nod, and he steps in, close enough now that I can feel the warmth coming off him even in the cold, and he braces the charge panel with both hands, steady as the granite he spends his days cutting.
"Go ahead," he says. "I've got it."
I go back to work, and this time, with the panel locked in place, my hands find their rhythm again, muscle memory taking over where nerves had been winning.
Strip, twist, seat, test. Strip, twist, seat, test. It's methodical work, almost meditative, and somewhere in the second minute of it I stop thinking about the cold, or the fourteen months, or Talia's face in the grocery aisle, and just think about wire and current and the specific satisfaction of a connection made clean and true.
"There," I say, sitting back on my heels once the last connection tests good. "Done."
The satisfaction of clean, correct work settles over me the way it always has, a specific pride that has nothing to do with anyone watching and everything to do with the work itself, a feeling I'd half forgotten how much I missed during fourteen months of a life that, however stable, never quite gave me this particular kind of quiet triumph.
"Nice work." Micah's still holding the panel, hasn't moved to set it down yet, and I look up and realize how close we actually are, crouched together over the charge panel, his hands steady on the frame, mine resting an inch from his on the same cold metal.
Neither of us moves for a second longer than the work requires.
The office has gone quiet around us, the last of the day crew's chatter faded into the hum of the space heater and the tick of the old clock above the filing cabinets.
Outside, full dark has settled over the pit, and through the trailer's single window I can see a scatter of stars I never get this clear a look at back in Butte, city light pollution having stolen that particular pleasure from me without my ever quite noticing the theft until now, crouched here in a cold trailer in the town I grew up in, looking up at a sky I'd half forgotten I used to know by heart.
Then his hand shifts, just slightly, and his fingers brush mine, not an accident exactly but not quite deliberate either, some middle territory of contact neither of us planned and neither of us pulls away from right away.
"Micah."
"I know." He says it low, rough, and pulls his hand back first, setting the panel down with more care than it needs, putting a full arm's length of distance between us before either of us does something we haven't agreed to do. "Rule two."
"Rule two," I agree, though my pulse is doing something that has nothing to do with rule two and everything to do with the specific, electric memory of his fingers against mine, granite dust and cold metal and four seconds of contact that undid two weeks of careful professional distance in about as long as it takes to say so.
We finish the drill in silence, pack up the equipment as the site crew's trucks start rolling in down the access road, and I don't look at him again until we're back at the pit office, coffee in hand, the ordinary business of the day swallowing up whatever almost happened on that frozen bench at dawn.
I catch myself, twice that afternoon, replaying the specific weight of his hand against mine, four seconds that shouldn't hold this much power over a woman who spent fourteen months learning to live without him.
By the time Nan flags me down at the end of the day to review the week's compliance paperwork, I've mostly managed to bury the distraction under an appropriate quantity of professional focus, though it resurfaces, unbidden, the moment I'm alone in my truck heading home, headlights cutting through early winter dark.
The crew arrives in a rattle of trucks and boots and the particular loud camaraderie of men who've worked together long enough to have their own private shorthand, and Micah and I fold back into our professional roles with the practiced ease of two people who've had a lot of recent experience switching a feeling off the moment it becomes inconvenient.
He briefs the day's schedule. I log the morning's calibration numbers.
Nobody watching would guess that four seconds of accidental contact, twenty minutes earlier, had rearranged something fundamental in the air between us.
But Preacher, arriving late with a thermos and a knowing look he doesn't bother to hide, catches my eye across the trailer and raises an eyebrow, just slightly, just enough to tell me he's noticed something even if he doesn't yet know exactly what.
I look away first, cheeks warm despite the cold, and busy myself with paperwork that suddenly requires a great deal more attention than it actually does.
But I think about it for the rest of the day.
I catch myself, more than once, running the numbers on it the way I'd run a burden calculation, weighing variables I have no real formula for: fourteen months of careful distance against four seconds of accidental contact, old grief against new evidence, the woman I built in Butte against the woman apparently still living somewhere underneath her, the one who never quite finished grieving a life she once thought was permanent.
I think about it that night, lying awake in Hollis's cottage listening to the lake move against the shore, the iron pendant cold against my collarbone in the dark, and I think, not for the first time and probably not for the last, that thirty days was either exactly enough time or nowhere near enough time to figure out what I actually want to do about Micah Rourke, and I honestly don't know which.