CHAPTER SEVEN #2
"Wasn't going to be slow about it."
"No," Jax agreed, "I don't imagine you were.
" He moved off to check on the rest of the crew, leaving the two of them standing at the edge of the newly contained line, smoke still rising thin behind them, the whole ordinary Tuesday having tipped, briefly, into something considerably more serious before tipping back again.
The mop-up took another two hours, the unglamorous back half of every burn day that nobody outside the crew ever heard about — walking the whole contained area checking for smouldering stumps and hot spots, dousing anything still holding heat, the specific tedious thoroughness that prevented a contained burn from becoming an uncontained one three days later when everyone had gone home and stopped watching.
Wes worked alongside Renz for most of it, saying little, the particular companionable silence of two men who'd both had a genuine fright that morning and weren't yet ready to talk about it directly.
"Close one," Wes said eventually, hosing down a stubborn ember at the base of a burnt stump. "Heard you covered forty metres flat out. Sasha reckons she's never seen you move like that."
"Wasn't thinking about the distance."
"Didn't imagine you were." Wes straightened, wiping soot from his hands onto already-filthy overalls, and left it there, the particular restraint of a man who knew when a thing didn't need further comment from him, moving on to the next hot spot without pushing further.
By the time the whole crew regrouped at the trucks in the low afternoon light, gear stowed, hot spots confirmed dead, the near-miss had already folded itself into the ordinary crew mythology the way every close call eventually did — a story that would get told at future gatherings, softened at the edges with time, the way Cal's flood story had softened, the way every genuine fright this crew survived together eventually became a piece of shared history rather than a raw wound.
Sasha caught Renz's eye across the truck bay as they packed up, said nothing, just nodded once, the particular acknowledgment of a woman who'd asked him three weeks running when someone had last fixed something for him and had just watched him answer a rather different, more urgent version of the same question with his own two legs.
Jax found him afterward, alone at the tailgate of the truck, checking gear that had already been checked twice, the old reflex Renz hadn't quite managed to shed even after everything.
"You're doing the thing again," Jax said, mild, nodding at the gear.
"Habit."
"I know it's habit. Doesn't mean you need to do it right now.
" Jax leaned against the truck beside him, quiet a moment, the particular stillness of a man weighing whether to say something that cost him something to say.
"You know I lost a bloke, early on, running this crew.
Before your time. Wind shift, not unlike today's, except the margins didn't work out the same way they worked out for you and Pip.
Eight seconds either way and today's a very different story for this whole crew, not just the two of you. "
Renz went still, hearing the weight under the words. "Didn't know that."
"Not something I talk about much. But watching you run today — flat out, fastest I've ever seen you move — I'll admit it put me right back on that ridge for about four seconds before I remembered how today actually ended.
" Jax's jaw worked, something old and carefully managed moving behind his eyes.
"You did everything right. Better than right.
But I want you to hear this properly, not just as a compliment: what you felt today, the fear under the speed, that's not weakness, and it's not something you need to bury the second the adrenaline wears off.
That fear's just love, doing its actual job.
Don't let anyone, including yourself, ever talk you into thinking it should feel any smaller than it did. "
"Wasn't planning to."
"Good." Jax clapped him once on the shoulder, the particular weighted gesture of a man who didn't extend physical warmth lightly, and moved off toward the last of the mop-up crew, leaving Renz standing at the tailgate with one more true thing to carry home.
? ? ?
They didn't talk about it properly until that evening, sitting on Renz's back step with two beers neither of them had much interest in drinking, the adrenaline of the afternoon finally settling into something quieter and more contemplative.
"I keep thinking about the eight seconds," Pip said, turning her bottle slowly, not drinking from it.
"How close that actually was. Not in a frightening way, particularly — more just, it puts things in a certain kind of order, doesn't it.
Reminds you what actually matters, when you've had eight seconds' warning of what it'd feel like to lose it. "
"What does it put in order, for you?"
She was quiet a moment, watching the last of the light go orange over the water below his house.
"You, mostly," she said, plain, no elaborate framing round it.
"Just you. All the circling I've done, all the careful not-quite-saying — it felt, today, for about eight seconds, like the most foolish way I could possibly have spent four years.
Nearly ran out of time to say a thing I've known for years, over an argument with myself about whether I'd earned the right to want it. "
Renz sat with that a long moment, the two of them shoulder to shoulder on the step the way they'd sat shoulder to shoulder at a hundred kitchen tables and fire pits over the years, and found, turning his own bottle slowly, that the fright of the afternoon had loosened something in him too, some old caution about moving too fast finally overridden by the plainer, more urgent fact of nearly having lost the chance to move at all.
"I've got eleven years of never letting anyone fix a single thing in this house," he said, apropos of very little and everything at once.
"Did the guttering myself. Replastered the spare room off three online videos rather than ring a mate who'd have done it properly in half the time.
Never once let anyone else's hands touch anything I'm responsible for.
" He looked at her sideways, something new and a little frightened and mostly, underneath the fright, entirely certain.
"I don't want to keep building things alone, Pip.
Not this house. Not — whatever this is, between us.
I've spent a decade proving I don't need anyone's help with anything, and today I ran the fastest I've run in eleven years because the alternative was unthinkable, and I don't want to go back to a version of my life where that's not true anymore. "
Pip reached over and took his hand, the same grip from the fire pit weeks ago, worn now into something closer to a fact than a question.
"Then don't," she said, simply. "Let me hold the ladder next time you're up on that roof.
Let me be someone whose hands are allowed to touch the structure, for once. I promise you I won't drop you."
"I know you won't," Renz said, and meant it, in a way that felt, sitting there on his own back step with the last light going down over the water, considerably larger than the sentence itself.
They sat there a while longer, the beers finally forgotten entirely, watching the last colour drain slowly out of the sky over the water, and neither of them felt any particular urgency to move, to speak, to fill the quiet with anything more than what was already there — two people who'd both had a genuine fright that day and had found, in the telling of it to each other, something steadier and more certain than either of them had walked into the conversation carrying.