Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
REED
12 years old
“ R eed, this is Jack.”
A rugged man with lean features takes my hand in his for a shake.
“Nice to meet you,” he says.
I have to tilt my chin to meet the steel gray of his eyes. “You too.”
His smile warms behind the salt and pepper of his beard. But it isn’t until he drops his grip and takes a step back that I relax. He looks far less intimidating with a couple feet between us.
“You picked a good one,” Jack says, gesturing to the shade of navy blue that flickers between the pine branches. “It’s closest to the lake.”
I spin in a slow circle, taking in my first campsite. It’s smaller than I thought it would be—no longer than a football’s toss across. It seems a little too tight to fit two tents. Especially when Jack’s is already staked to the ground and taking up more than half the space .
My dad pops the tailgate open and drags the green canvas and pile of poles to the edge of his truck bed. “Would you mind helping Reed set up the tent while I unload the coolers?”
“Sure thing,” he says, and grabs the poles.
“Sarah made sure we’d all be well fed,” my dad adds.
Jack nods but dodges his eye contact. “She’s a good woman.”
I’d feel disappointed that my father is already pawning me off on someone else if I wasn’t busy studying their interaction. I almost miss the way my dad’s smile slips at Jack’s response.
What exactly happened to his wife?
A soft amber glow settles around us with the sun dipping beneath the skyline. I’d rather explore this place with the small window of light we have left, but I’m not given the chance. It seems they both have a knack for prioritizing work.
Dad ushers me over to where he’s standing and pushes the fabric toward my chest. It takes an aggressive amount of kneading to gather the slick material in my arms without it trailing in a tripping hazard at my feet. How big is this tent? I can barely make out Jack’s gray hair over the wad of canvas.
I follow the crunch of sticks and pinecones until he comes to a stop a few feet from his own tent. The poles clank as he drops them in a heap. He clears his throat as he approaches me.
“So, uh, Reed… you’re twelve, right?”
He grabs an edge of the canopy I’m holding and backs up until we’ve stretched it wide enough to send it parachuting to the ground.
I answer when I can finally see him. “Yeah. Today, actually.”
“Happy birthday,” he says, handing me one of the poles.
“Thanks.”
He points to the small hole to feed it through before finding his own. “Do you know what you want to be when you grow up?”
I haven’t been asked that question since kindergarten. But to be fair, I don’t know what to ask him either.
My pole snags on a section of fabric halfway through the center arch, and I bite my lip.
The last thing I need is to look incapable in front of my dad. With some aggressive wiggling, it breaks free and finds a home on the other side.
“Not really, no.” I barely think past lunch, much less years into the future.
Jack grunts. “Yeah. I guess you’d be a little young yet.”
He’s threaded three poles in the span of time it’s taken me to do one, so we work on the last one together as the tent takes shape.
“What do you do?” I ask. It’s the only question I can come up with.
“I fight fires,” he says.
“That actually sounds like something I would like,” I say. Waaay better than my dad’s job.
He circles the tent and stakes each corner into the ground. “Maybe you’d want to help me start the fire then?” he asks.
“Sure!” For the first time since we arrived, I feel excited.
I follow his lead to the west end of the campsite.
“You want dry fuel… dead branches, small sticks, fallen leaves, pine needles. Not hard to find this time of year,” he says, wiping the sweat off his forehead.
Anything he misses from that list, I pick up. Except the flat piece of driftwood. He stops when he sees it, long and smooth. It sticks up from the ground like a sign. From the lake, I guess. He tugs it from the packed dirt and tucks it under his arm instead of adding it to his pile like the rest.
With arms full, we approach an empty steel rim charred black with ash. He dumps his bundle into the hollow pit, and I toss mine on top. He pulls a matchbox from his pocket and strikes the tip across the sandpapered side. As soon as it lights, he holds his arm toward me.
“Why don’t you do the honors.”
I reach for it. The heat of the tip singes the hair on the back of my pointer finger with the transfer. I pinch it steady and hold it in front of my eyes. The little flame on the end dances in the open air. It’s mesmerizing to watch. I let it eat away the distance, nearly touching my skin, before I let go.
“You have no fear, do you?” Jack asks. But I’m too distracted to respond. Hypnotized by the flame that nests beneath two branches. The way it creeps under sticks and spreads over pinecones. Eats clean through crumpled leaves like they never existed at all. In just a few minutes, the flicker of a flame has swelled to almost ten times its original size.
“It’s fun to look at,” he says.
I’m certain I’m staring as if I’ve never seen fire before. But that’s not it. There’s something electric about how out of control it is, nothing stopping it from doing exactly what it wants to.
“I think I could watch it all night,” I say.
“Good job on that tent.” The sound of my dad’s voice pulls me from the spell I was under.
“He made the fire too,” Jack adds.
My dad wraps his arm around my shoulders, and I feel heat spread through my body in the same way that fire is right now—inside out. Maybe having Jack here isn’t the worst part of this camping trip after all.
Present Day
I thought my worst-case scenario for this flight was being stuck in a seat next to my father. But then I met Hailey. Impossibly beautiful, endearing, and crippled with travel anxiety, Hailey. After swearing off women, I don’t know why I care so much about how she’s feeling.
Maybe it’s that my idea of a decent human being is someone who makes sure everyone around them is okay. So, when I catch the tremor of her fingertips on her thighs and her breath scraping past her lips, I want to help her. Regardless of whether or not I let myself experience similar feelings. I move fast through life on purpose. It drowns out the noise. Which gives me an idea…
“Electric boobs, below her shoes.” I sing off-key into the open air, voice bellowing over the tops of the seats.
The gust of air she pulls into her lungs at the sound of my voice holds on a gasp. Her eyes dart around the cabin to see if anyone else heard me. Then she leans over and whisper-shouts, “What are you doing?”
The edges of my mouth tick up in a smile. “I’m sorry. Is this embarrassing you?” I peek past her down the aisle. As I suspected, my dad is wearing his gray noise-canceling headphones. His head is not one of the many that turn my way.
Her big brown eyes gape up at me. “Stop!” she begs, tugging on my arm.
But I can’t. Her hands are still shaking, and my job here is not done yet.
Positioned pretty close to the middle of the plane, I karaoke the next line of “Bennie and the Jets” through the entire cabin. “You know I read it in a wagon seat…” My voice pitches on that last word like the first syllable a donkey makes, and a deep crimson explodes across her cheeks.
She giggles. The most lighthearted sound. And I don’t know what the hell she read on her phone a minute ago, but the way she’s looking at me now—like Katherine Heigl looked at James Marsden in 27 Dresses when this song came on—tells me she has long since forgotten it .
“Did I not tell you I’m a rom-com lover? I can go all day,” I tell her. And I mean it.
If it guarantees that she’ll look at me the way she is right now, face flushed, eyes dancing. Letting me see all of her. I like it a little too much. In fact, I want to keep focusing on our intoxicating exchange, but it’s difficult to do when she smells like a summer candle—something citrusy grounded in vanilla.
I continue with the chorus when a high-pitched humming sound competes with my voice.
The plane rises and dips like the drop in a roller-coaster as the wheels lift off the ground.
Her eyes flit to the eighteen-inch window, watching as we climb toward the sky. I press against the back of my seat so she has a good view. She watches the city dwarf into a patchwork quilt of earthy tones. The push and pull of her breath steadies as we drift away into a sea of translucent cotton balls.
When she finally drags her eyes away from the window, she whispers, “Thank you for that.”
I shrug. “For what?”
She tilts her head and smiles knowingly. “Listen, I don’t want to be rude… especially after what you did for me just now. But I got like three hours of sleep last night.”
“No. I’m terrible company. I get it.”
She grips my forearm, and I catch myself wondering what it would feel like if her fingertips slid down my wrist and across my palm. It’s been a long time since I held a woman’s hand.
“It’s not like that, I promise!” She notices my smirk, and her palm falls away. “You’re joking.”
I nod, wondering if she’s usually this easy to rile up.
She huffs and relaxes into her seat. Her head tips back, rocking from side to side until she finds a comfortable position against the headrest. Three minutes later, she’s fast asleep. Right about the time I realize I miss her company .
You wanted this . A seventy-five-minute plane ride without anyone breathing down my neck.
I fish around for those headphones one more time, only to remember last seeing them in a coiled heap on my dresser. Right where I should have left that pocketknife.
Without someone to talk to or music to listen to, with nowhere to go and nothing to do to drown out the thoughts in my head, the words in that letter come crawling to the surface.
The truth is, as much as I joked that Miles wasn’t any good at them, I’ve never been great at goodbyes either. The thought of never seeing either one of you again hurts too much. It was easier just to pack my bags early and move forward with what comes next.
And that’s exactly what I’m doing, I remind myself.
Three days ago, a recruiter called me with an opening on a hand crew out of the Payette National Forest. They lost a member mid-season to a leg injury and needed an immediate replacement. I had twenty-four hours to decide and even less time to leave Bear Lake to pack my bags. It was almost the most difficult decision I had to make.
Letting Teddy Fletcher go was the worst of them all. I was falling in love with her all over again—the girl with the constellation of freckles I thought mapped my future. The one I spent five perfect summers with.
She was dancing in my arms at my parents’ end of summer soiree one minute and walking away the next. And the sad thing is, I would have stayed for her… changed the trajectory of my life. But she decided for me. She picked Miles.
I hope you are off on wild adventures together , I wrote. You deserve it.
And I meant it. I still do. But that left only one other place in the world for me. So, I called the recruiter back, purchased the list of gear he forwarded, and that was that .
“ Preparing for landing .” The captain’s voice sounds over the intercom.
Somehow an hour slipped by in what felt like minutes.
There’s pressure on my right side that wasn’t there before. Brown locks drape my neck in a scarf. I can’t see her face but feel the rise and fall of her breath.
She’s still sleeping.
The fasten seat belt signs chime on, and she jolts to an upright position. There must be some kind of product in her hair, because it’s fixed in a giant wave on one side. A line runs across her cheek from a wrinkle in my T-shirt. Her lashes fan with each rapid blink as she takes in the scene. Then she covers them with her hands and groans.
“I fell asleep on you.”
“Now what would make you think that?”
“Because you were… and I…” Her hands mime the way each of us were sitting until she freezes.
She mats her hair down with her palms as the plane floats into a dense pocket of clouds.
The turbulence bumps everyone forward and on instinct, my arm swings out wide.
The moment I touch her, my brain registers how much better off I’d have been letting her head find a home against the seat in front of her rather than her breast in the palm of my hand. I yank it away like it caught fire.
I did not just graze her boob. What has happened to me on this flight?
Her head swings my direction and she glares at me.
She thinks I did it on purpose.
I don’t know what it would take to convince this woman I’m not like that. But the fact that this plane is landing… I’m out of time to plead my case.
“I’m sorry,” I say anyway .
The second the seat belt sign turns off she reaches for her phone. I’ve got a few inches on her, so it’s not hard to see when the screen lights up. I’m trying not to be nosy, but there’s no mistaking a guy’s name on that text banner.
She must be seeing someone.
Someone who doesn’t want to be seeing her.