Epilogue #2
Cheers crack like kindling. I turn and the sea of faces hits me—the crew, my people, our town, eyes bright, happy, curious.
Levi is in fact crying without shame. Dax is smug.
Captain Cole stands stiff, proud, softer than he’ll ever admit.
Ash lifts Holly into the air and she scatters the last of her petals right over our heads like a blessing we didn’t know we could ask for.
We walk back down the aisle under a canopy of raised axes—polished and crossed into an arch the crew made without telling me, a firefighter tradition I’ve seen but never wanted until now. Metal glows in lantern light. Boots thump in rhythm. Each pair of crossed blades lifts just enough as we pass.
The clearing becomes a party in the way mountain parties do—small, loud, full of food and bad dancing and kids running in loops until they drop.
Tables hold trays of barbecue and winter salads and a cake Briar swears is structurally sound even though it leans wildly.
Kiln-fired mugs from the pottery shop in town sit ready at a hot cocoa station beside something much stronger.
Lanterns swing; the cold nips and Holly steals my bouquet and returns with s’mores skewers like it’s an even trade.
I don’t care. I have both hands free and Axel’s palm fills one like it was made to.
“Hungry?” he asks.
“Later,” I say, eyes on his mouth.
He laughs under his breath. “Greedy.”
“For you.”
“Good,” he says, leaning down, claiming my mouth again quick and hot, a contrast to the kiss at the arch. His hand tightens at my hip, fingers pressing possessive, protective, obscene in the best way. “You’re mine.”
“Say it in front of everybody.”
He turns his head, voice low but not quiet. “All of you,” he announces, and the conversations around us drop, amused and ready. “You see her?”
Calls of “we see her” chorus back.
“She’s my wife.”
The cheer that answers is ridiculous. To my left, Dax screams into the night like a rock star. Someone pounds on the closest table. Levi attempts a trumpet fanfare with his mouth and fails spectacularly. I’m laughing when Axel swings me around, then slides his mouth to my ear.
“Dance with me.”
“I hate you when you ask things you already know the answer to,” I say, going anyway.
There’s no DJ. Just a playlist and a mountain, and that’s plenty.
He draws me into him under the strings of lights, my palms on his shoulders, his on my lower back, the distance between us gone like it never mattered.
We sway to an old song that sounds like the inside of a cabin at three a.m.—low, crackling, sure.
People join. Couples find each other. Holly spins between Ash and Lucy, throwing her arms out like flying.
Snow begins to fall again, slow and theatrical, the flakes fat enough to catch and linger.
They salt Axel’s hair. I tell him he looks illegal. He says I look like trouble.
“True.” I tilt my face up. “Want to commit some?”
“Say when,” he says, all appetite and control, and I feel a spark catch low and hot.
His thumbs stroke circles that promise later.
His mouth brushes my cheek. His breath is heat.
Every inch of me is aware of every inch of him: disciplined strength, quiet power, the way he contains everything but never me.
The song changes. He spins me out and back, the kind of move you don’t plan but your body writes because it knows the language. I land against him with a soft oof. He laughs quietly, then goes still, eyes tracking something over my shoulder. I turn.
The crew lines the edge of the clearing with sparklers in their hands, unlit, waiting. Levi winks; Dax grins; Captain Cole lifts a brow with a well? that makes my throat go tight again.
Axel kisses my temple, then steps away, and I feel it before I see it—the way the group quiets for the ritual they didn’t put on the program because it would’ve made me cry.
He retrieves the small handbell from a velvet-lined box on the table near the arch.
The firehouse bell, not the big one, the one they use for weddings and retirements.
He rings it once.
The note is clear, bright, skating off the river and into the trees. The hair rises at the back of my neck. The crew lifts their sparklers to the lanterns and they take, flame racing along wire.
Axel turns back to me. The sparklers glitter around us like a ring of stars. “Inferno to forever,” he says, a vow.
“Inferno to forever,” I answer, matching him, claiming it.
He dips me—slow, deliberate, his hand firm between my shoulders, the other a hot brand at my waist. The kiss he lays on me is a promise with teeth: reverent first, mouth opening, heat blooming steady until my pulse forgets how to do anything but answer.
Somewhere someone whoops; somewhere someone else says about time.
I barely hear them. The whole mountain could roar and it would be background to this.
He brings me up gradually, keeping me close, forehead to mine, breath ragged. “You okay?” he asks, the soft inventory he does with his hands when the sirens stop.
“Better than okay.”
“How much better?”
“Dangerously.”
He smiles, the private one. “My favorite way.”
We dance until my cheeks sting and my toes thaw and my throat hurts from laughing.
We cut cake and pretend not to be competitive about feeding it to each other until I smear icing on his jaw and he promises revenge.
We take too many photos. We let the town hug us.
We kiss under the arch again, because it feels like the right place to do it, and because he makes a low growl when I tug his tie that I want to hear in other contexts soon.
Later, when lanterns burn lower and the kids’ energy collapses into blankets, someone whistles from the tree line.
A white shape pulls into view: a horse-drawn sleigh, bells a gentle chime, breath fogging in the cold, wool blankets heaped high.
It’s ridiculous and perfect. Axel feigns offense at the cliché and then helps me in like he planned it, because he did.
He tucks the blankets around my legs, climbs in beside me, and knocks twice on the wood.
The horse steps forward. The clearing cheers one more time, sparks trailing from sparklers, faces luminous.
We slide into the dark between trees, the sleigh runners whispering over snow, the river’s voice running parallel. The cold nips, sweet and sharp. I burrow into Axel and he pulls me closer, his coat half over my shoulders, his mouth finding my hair.
“Wife,” he says, tasting the word like whiskey.
“Husband.”
“You tired?”
“No.”
“Hungry?”
“For you,” I say, and feel his chest shake under my cheek.
“Greedy, Mrs. Ramirez,” he murmurs, bending to kiss the corner of my mouth.
“For once,” I answer, tugging his tie looser, “that’s a job requirement.”
His laugh turns into a groan when I nip his lower lip.
He kisses me under the open mouth of the night, slow first, then not, the kind of deep that turns your bones to heat.
The horse keeps a dignified pace. The bells keep time.
The mountain keeps watch. And I finally let my whole weight settle against the man who built a home in the exact shape of my grief and joy, who learned my language and taught me his, who held a porch light for ten winters and never let it go dark.
Inferno to forever.