Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ELIAS
I’ve not stopped grinning in two days.
It’s getting a little ridiculous. My cheeks hurt. My face keeps doing this stupid automatic thing where it lights up whenever my brain serves up a memory of Boone’s hands, his voice, his smile—that particular look he gets when I say something that both exasperates and delights him.
Everything feels brighter.
The forest smells sharper, like someone turned up the saturation on pine and damp soil and sunlight on bark.
The birds sound louder. Even the little quirks of the station—the way the door sticks in the morning, the one floorboard that groans like a dying walrus—are endearing instead of mildly annoying.
I stand at the tiny sink, brushing my teeth, and catch my reflection in the fogged mirror.
I look… happy. Properly, stupidly, glowingly happy.
There’s a looseness around my eyes I’ve not seen in a long time.
My curls are doing their usual “I refuse to obey physics” thing.
My eyes are bright. My mouth keeps twitching up for no reason.
I spit, rinse, and lean both hands on the counter.
“Get it together,” I tell my reflection. “You’re a professional.”
My reflection smiles back like Sure, buddy. We both know that’s only half true.
In my defense, it’s hard to be dignified when my internal monologue keeps replaying the way Boone had held me against that fallen log. The way his voice had gone rough when he said my name. The way his careful, enormous hands had been… well. Very persuasive.
Every time I let myself think about it too long, desire blooms low in my belly and I have to bite back a giddy laugh. It’s like someone tucked a small sun under my ribs and it refuses to go out.
It’s not just the physical stuff, though.
It’s the way he looks at me. The way his body seems to relax as soon as he steps into my clearing. The way his smiles have changed.
I’ve seen a range of expressions from him over the past week—amused huffs, dry smirks, the occasional exasperated eye roll that absolutely counts as affection. But lately, there have been more.
A soft, fond smile that tugs at one corner of his mouth when I trip over my own enthusiasm, or when I start giving a plant a pep talk without realizing he’s behind me listening.
A wide, startled grin the first time I told a joke that actually blindsided him.
A blissed-out, almost dazed look when he let himself lean his forehead against mine after we kissed, breathing me in like I was oxygen and he’d been holding his breath for a century.
Those are the ones I want to earn. Over and over. As many times as he’ll let me.
I pad over to the table and flip my notebook open. Yesterday’s notes stare back at me—meticulous measurements of undergrowth coverage on the north ridge, soil samples cataloged in numbered bags, habitat observations scrawled in my messy handwriting.
Next to the neat columns of data, there’s a doodle of a big, fluffy sasquatch with a little heart above his head.
I’m a grown man with a doctorate.
I flip the page before I can judge myself too hard.
On the new page, I start a different list.
Trip dates
Route possibilities
Ranger check-ins needed
Gear to add for longer trek
Questions for Boone
The last one gets a star.
Thinking about Yellowstone still makes adrenaline fizz through my veins.
Part of me can’t believe I said yes so easily; another part can’t believe I was invited at all.
A cryptid festival in one of the most famous national parks in the country, and I get to go with the Bigfoot who runs the US server cluster like some grumpy, overworked wizard?
It sounds like a fever dream. Or the best field season of my life.
And yet, underneath the excitement, there’s something else: worry.
Not about me. About him.
The more I learn about the Monster Network, the more impressed I am.
It’s ingenious—a sprawling, multilayered system of magical and technological infrastructure, connecting beings who can’t safely show their faces to the physical world.
Boone’s “office” is a cobbled-together hub of half-broken human tech threaded with enchanted fiber-optic lines, anchored into the rock with old runes and new code. It shouldn’t work.
But it does, beautifully.
He shrugs it off when I say as much. Says things like “It’s just duct tape and wards” or “I’m only keeping the lights on.
” But he carries it. All of it. The responsibility.
The invisible weight of being the one monsters call when their region is glitching or their protections are fraying or someone is panicking about some human documentary crew getting too close.
He goes to the Solstice once a year and makes a long journey of it, checking nodes, rebooting relays, fixing whatever weird magical hardware the Yeti thought would be “fun to try this decade.”
The rest of the time?
He’s here. Alone.
Sure, he has the chat. I’ve already seen how quickly #us-cryptid-ops fills with complaints and jokes and emergencies. They rely on him. They tease him. They call him in the middle of the night to ask if their lair ward can be set to “annoying teenagers only.”
But in person? In the flesh?
From what I can tell, he spends eight, maybe nine months of the year physically by himself.
I know a little about that kind of loneliness.
It’s strange, because on paper my life is full. I have a family who loves me. Parents who check in. A brother who sends me pictures and voice notes and ridiculous memes. Friends, scattered but real.
I chose this profession. I love it. I love the forests and the wetlands and the deserts, the act of observing and understanding and documenting. I love the feeling of being a tiny part of something vast and alive.
But flitting from park to park, season to season, changes you. You become a traveler in your own life. Always arriving, never quite staying, leaving just as a place starts to feel like home.
The emptiness sneaks up in quiet moments. At night in a tent, listening to your own breathing. On long drives between projects. In the silence after a video call ends and the room feels too still.
Now, though?
I wake up and there’s a thread pulling me forward. A sense of… purpose sounds too lofty, but it’s close. A sense of someone waiting, a particular presence planted in the landscape of my days like an anchor.
I don’t know what’s happening with Boone. Not really. We haven’t used any big words. No declarations. No official labels.
I know I want more. More time. More of his stupid grumpy affection. More of his laughter, which he pretends he doesn’t have and absolutely does. More of the way he softens when I lean against him, as if he can’t quite believe I trust him that much.
Every morning, that wanting wakes up with me.
I tap my pen against the page.
Time to make sure the human side of my life lets me follow where that desire is pointing.
I scribble visit rangers in the margin and circle it.
Because if I’m going to vanish into the wild with a legendary cryptid for a multistate trek and a secret monster convention, I need to tell the people who think I’m “just” a researcher something that will not get helicopters dispatched after me.
Gladys looks at me like I’ve just told her I’m eloping with a black bear.
“You want to… cut the season short?” she says slowly, stirring too much powdered creamer into her coffee. We’re in the tiny Ranger HQ, sitting at a scuffed table that’s seen more paperwork than wood grain in the last decade.
“Not exactly short,” I say. “More like… relocated.”
Her brows arch.
I slide the folder across the table, because nothing helps a lie land like backing it with too many documents.
“I’ve been in talks with a colleague over in Wyoming,” I say, deploying the most plausible half-truth I can think of.
“We have an opportunity to expand my study into a comparative survey. Two different forest systems, similar latitude, different elevation and tourism pressure. It would mean I leave here a little earlier than planned, but I’d come back in the fall to wrap up some of the long-term plots. ”
It sounds good. It sounds exactly like the sort of thing I’d get excited about even if I wasn’t secretly planning to walk across half the country with Bigfoot.
Gladys flips through the papers, scanning my printed email exchange with a fictional “colleague” whose name I absolutely did not borrow from one of Milo’s photo assistants.
“You know we like having you out here,” she says. “It’s good data. And you don’t do anything too stupid.”
“High praise,” I say. “I try not to fall off cliffs more than once a season.”
“There was that one time,” she reminds me.
I grimace. “In my defense, moss is treacherous.”
She snorts quietly, then sighs. “How early?” she asks.
“A week and a half,” I say. “Maybe two. I want to wrap up everything I can here first, then travel, then set up there before their season hits full swing.”
She leans back, assessing me.
“You’ll come back in the fall,” she says, not quite a question.
“If you’ll have me,” I say, and mean it. “I know these woods now. It would be stupid not to keep building on that.”
We both know there are no guarantees. Funding shifts. Grants expire. Life happens.
But I want to come back.
I want there to be a coming back to this place, to this station, to this forest where I met a legend who stole my heart so fast my head is still spinning.
Gladys lets out a slow breath. “All right,” she says. “You’re a grown-up. Mostly. I can’t chain you to a tree.”
“Probably frowned upon in the handbook,” I say.
She gives me a narrow look. “You’ll keep in touch. Check in with the team when you’re traveling. If you’re doing long stretches on foot, I want your locations. And if you vanish off the map—”
“I know,” I say. “You’ll send a search party armed with paperwork and disappointed looks.”
“Damn right,” she says.
A knock on the doorframe interrupts us.
“Hey, Doc,” says a familiar voice. “You breaking up with us?”
I turn to see Sam leaning against the doorway, his hat tipped back and smile easy.