20. Beck
twenty
Beck
“You understand we're basically hiking three miles so I can look at plants,” she says.
“I've been warned.”
“This isn't exactly thrilling.”
“Who's going?”
She looks at me again. “Me.”
“Sounds promising.”
That earns me an eye roll, but she's smiling when she does it, and I decide I got the better end of the exchange.
We leave the crew house a few minutes later, and head into the trees. Ivy’s a few yards ahead of me on the trail, daypack riding high on her shoulders, wearing shorts because this is a day off, and nobody's requiring her to protect her shins from brush today.
I'm not complaining.
I've had opinions about Ivy's legs since the moment I met her, opinions I used to keep carefully filed away as an inconvenient fact about my best friend's sister. I don't have to file anything away anymore. Which somehow makes the problem worse, not better.
She glances back and catches me looking. “You okay back there?”
“Doing great.”
She squints at me like she suspects there's a joke she's missing, then keeps walking, deciding not to push it. Good call on her part. Some things are better left uninvestigated.
This burn is older than the one we worked in a few weeks back, eight or nine years old according to Ivy, old enough the recovery looks completely different.
Where the younger burn still had fireweed doing most of the visible work, this one's further along.
Young pines have gotten real height on them.
Shrubs have filled in thick enough in places you'd barely know there was a fire here at all if it weren't for the blackened snags still standing scattered through everything, silent and weathered, holding their ground while life fills in around them.
Ivy stops every few hundred feet to look at something.
A patch of undergrowth. A cluster of young trees establishing themselves in what used to be open, scorched ground.
She crouches at one point next to something I couldn't identify if my life depended on it.
She examines it with the kind of focus most people reserve for something considerably more dramatic than a plant.
“This is what I was hoping to find,” she says, half to herself.
“What is it?”
“Serviceberry. Coming back strong here, which tells you something about how the soil recovered after the burn.” She looks up at me, reading my expression correctly. “You don't care.”
“I care that you care.”
She studies me like she's deciding whether that's a real answer or a diplomatic dodge, then goes back to the serviceberry.
I've seen a lot of versions of Ivy since I landed on the crew-house floor back in June.
Sleepy Ivy. Competent-crew-member Ivy. Competitive-at-everything Ivy.
Dancing Ivy. Worried-sick-about-me Ivy. This is a new one.
Scientist Ivy, completely absorbed, forgetting to be self-conscious about how much she's talking or how excited she sounds about a shrub.
I like this Ivy a lot. Not because I suddenly find plant ecology fascinating.
Because she does, and watching someone be genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy about something is its own kind of good time.
The trail steepens in a couple of places, loose rock underfoot.
I reach for her hand the way I did at Silver Bell weeks ago.
This time there's no tension in it, no discovery, just her fingers closing around mine like it's the easiest thing in the world, which it now is.
We keep holding hands a while after the rough section ends, until one of us needs a free hand for something.
Somewhere along a flatter stretch I say, “I think I like watching you get excited about shrubs.”
“I'm going to pretend that was a compliment.”
“It was. Mostly.”
“I'll take it.” She glances over.
We reach the overlook a little before noon, a rocky outcrop above the burn that gives us the whole patchwork laid out below, old blackened trunks standing among new growth, the pattern of recovery more obvious from up here than it was down in the middle of it.
Beyond that, ridgelines roll out toward the rest of the district, mountains stacked up blue and hazy in the distance.
We drop our packs and sit, boots stretched out. Ivy digs out the lunch she packed. Sandwiches, chips, fruit, and a bag of trail mix she starts picking through for the chocolate.
I steal one of her grapes, which earns me a look of genuine betrayal.
“That's not how this works,” she says.
“How does it work?”
“I steal from you. You don't get to steal from me.”
“That seems like a rule you invented twenty seconds ago.”
“Doesn't make it wrong.”
I let her take my chips, mostly because arguing about it is more fun than winning.
“How's the thesis going?” I ask, once we've settled into the easy quiet that comes after food.
“Good.” She sounds surprised by her own answer. “I got a lot done while you were gone. Turns out having something to throw yourself into is useful when your boyfriend's not around for almost two weeks.”
“Glad I could motivate you through sheer absence.”
“Don't get used to it as a strategy.”
She tells me where things stand, most of the writing done, revisions still ahead, then the defense once her committee's ready for her. It's close enough now I can hear it in her voice, a mix of relief and nerves that comes with almost finishing something that's mattered for years.
“What happens after?” I ask. “Once it's done?”
“Honestly, I don't fully know yet.” She picks at a piece of trail mix, thinking about it. “There are a few kinds of positions I'd be a good fit for. Some in Montana. Some not. I've been watching a few openings, but nothing's solid enough to plan around yet.”
I hadn't quite expected that. Somewhere along the way I'd started thinking of Ivy as the rooted one, the person who belongs somewhere, while I'm the one whose life gets decided by wherever the next assignment happens to be. Turns out her future's as unsettled as mine, just for different reasons.
“That's a big unknown,” I say.
“It is. I try not to think about it too hard on my days off.”
“Fair enough.”
“What about you?” she asks. “Any idea yet on where you might be for ski patrol?”
“Looking like Colorado.”
“Every year it's somewhere different?”
“Usually.”
“That's been your whole adult life?”
“Pretty much my whole life, period. My dad moved us every couple years growing up. I never really learned to think about staying somewhere. Moving was the default. You get good at it. You stop minding.”
She's quiet for a second, chewing on that. “Do you mind now?”
“I don't know yet.”
That's true. It's also the first time I've admitted, even to myself, the old pattern doesn't feel as automatic as it used to.
Fire season ends, I go somewhere new, that's just what happens.
Except this year, somewhere new means leaving Ivy.
Leaving Reid, and Tessa, and Nolan's disasters, Sunday dinners at the Grangers', and a crew house with a cat who's decided I'm furniture.
Leaving used to be neutral. Now it's a cost, and I'm only starting to add up what it’s going to be.
I don't say any of this out loud. Neither of us has an answer that would make the conversation easier, and I don't want to spend our day together solving a problem that doesn't need solving today.
Ivy takes another chip from my bag, catches me noticing, and grins. “That's how it works.”
For a while we just sit here, not talking, looking out over the burn and the mountains beyond it. I find myself watching her more than the view. She's got her knees pulled up, chin resting on them, looking out at the recovering landscape like she's cataloging every square foot of it.
She catches me looking.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You're staring.”
“I know.”
She doesn't argue with that, just gives me a small, pleased look, like she's decided she doesn't mind being stared at after all.
I lean in. She meets me halfway. The kiss isn't tentative like Silver Bell was, isn't tinged with everything unsaid the way the storm kiss was, isn't relief the way our reunion kiss yesterday was.
It's just easy, sitting on a rock on a Saturday, kissing because we can, because there's nowhere else either of us needs or wants to be.
When I pull back, she's smiling.
“No dirt this time,” she says.
“Give me credit.”
We stay up here a long while after that, Ivy leaning back against me, my arm around her, neither of us in any hurry to start the hike back down. My whole life has been organized around getting somewhere and then getting somewhere else. Today there's nowhere I want to be except here.
Eventually we do pack up, and the hike back goes quick and easy, mostly downhill, sunlight coming through the canopy in patches. Ivy stops once more near the trailhead, crouching beside something growing at the base of one of the old snags.
“I thought we were done looking at plants,” I say.
“That's not how this works.”
“I’m learning.”
She explains what she's found, something about how this species tends to show up later in recovery than most people expect.
I listen, and I don't mind how long it takes.
I've got nowhere I need to be, no truck idling, no assignment waiting.
Just Ivy, crouched in the dirt, entirely absorbed, and me, entirely content to wait for her.
She finally stands, brushes dirt off her knees, and holds out her hand for me to pull her back onto the trail.
I take it, and I don't let go once we start walking.