Cleo
My laptop is open. I have been staring at the same paragraph for forty minutes.
Dottie Callahan has run the Summit Bar & Grill for thirty-one years and she knows exactly when someone is not paying attention.
I delete a sentence about the jukebox. I write a sentence about the mountain.
I delete the sentence about the mountain because it is actually a sentence about Mace — about the way he described the ridgeline with his whole hand, palm flat, like he was smoothing a map that only he could see — and I am not writing about Mace.
I am writing about Dottie. I have a deadline.
I have a piece to file. And I have a rule.
Sources are sources. Subjects are subjects.
Men who show up in both columns are not options.
I made that rule in my second year, after a chef in Savannah with good hands and a better wine list almost cost me a feature. I have not broken it since.
I believe in it. I always have.
I kissed him back. I kissed him back at the falls with both hands in his jacket like I was anchoring myself to something, and I would do it again right now if he walked through that door, and this is the problem.
My cursor blinks on Dottie's name.
The phone behind the bar rings. Dottie's landline — the one she uses for supply orders. It rings three times, stops. Then the office door opens and Dottie leans out.
"Cleo. Your editor."
My stomach drops. I left Marcus the Summit's number when I lost signal on the mountain. Three days ago that felt responsible. Now it feels like a summons.
I take the phone in the back hallway. The cord barely reaches.
"Jordan." Marcus doesn't do greetings. "Tell me you have Dottie."
"I have Dottie."
"Good. Because I moved your slot up. You're running in the Tuesday edition, not Thursday. I need the piece by tomorrow night."
My hand tightens on the receiver. "Tomorrow."
"You've had three extra days. That's more time than I gave Hennessey for the Portland series, and he filed four thousand words."
He's right. I have had three extra days.
I have used them sitting in a SAR base listening to a man I should not be noticing describe avalanche patterns, and walking up a mountain trail in borrowed boots, and kissing that man at the base of a frozen waterfall while the light went amber and his thumb pressed against my cheekbone like I was something he was afraid to drop.
I have not used them writing.
"I'll have it," I say.
"The Dottie piece. Not the SAR angle."
"The Dottie piece."
"Good. Call me when it's filed." He hangs up. Marcus has never said goodbye in his life. It's one of his better qualities.
I stand in the hallway holding the dead receiver. My pulse hasn't slowed down. That call was a reset. A hand on my collar, yanking me back to the version of myself who shows up prepared and files on time and does not stand in hallways replaying the way a man's hands shook after he kissed her.
I hang up the phone and walk back to the bar.
His jacket. That's the thing I can't stop circling.
Day one — he came through the Summit door with one arm in the sleeve and the other trailing.
A man who runs search and rescue operations in sub-zero mountains does not walk outside half-dressed.
He left before he was ready. He crossed fifteen feet of walkway in the cold because he was in a hurry to reach me before the road closed, and he didn't finish putting his coat on.
I noticed that three days ago. It comes back now, uninvited, and the reasons this is a bad idea get harder to count.
I open the laptop. I put my hands on the keys. I write three sentences about Dottie's jukebox that are actually about Dottie's jukebox.
Then boots on the walkway outside — heavy, deliberate — and his voice carries through the stillness.
Low, clipped, something about a gear check.
Just his voice. Across fifteen feet of cold air.
And my hands stop on the keys and my whole body tilts toward the sound like a compass finding north and I close my eyes because this is not professional and I know it.
I write another sentence. Then another. The piece starts to breathe again — Dottie's rhythm, Dottie's voice, thirty-one years behind a bar in a town that keeps getting smaller. It's good. I can feel it working.
I keep writing. The cursor moves. The piece fills.
But every time a door opens outside, my hands go still.
Dottie sets a chamomile tea beside my elbow without being asked. Looks at the screen. Looks at me.
"Road clears tomorrow," she says.
"Already?"
"Mm." She picks up a glass, dries it, sets it down. "Drink your tea."
She squeezes my shoulder once — brief, warm, the gesture of a woman who already knows how this ends and isn't going to explain it — and disappears down the back hallway. The office door clicks shut. The hallway light goes off.
I am alone in the bar.
Tomorrow the road opens. Tomorrow I can drive six hours south to my apartment and my deadline and my life that makes sense. He lives at nine thousand feet. I have a lease in a city. Four days is not a life.
I pick up the tea. It's too hot. I hold it anyway, both hands wrapped around it, and stare at the screen and the cursor blinking on Dottie's name.
Tomorrow I can leave. That's exactly what I came here to do.
So why does it feel like the problem?