6. Trav
TRAV
I wake up at four-fifty-three a.m. and lie still for a minute listening to the wind.
It’s backed off. Not gone but softer, coming from the northwest now instead of the northeast which means the fire’s going to angle south along the ridge instead of pushing into the corridor.
It’s good news. It’s the best possible news for the wolves and the corridor and Coral’s two years of grant writing and territorial surveys and three presentations to the Montana Department of Fish and Wildlife have done good.
It also means she can leave today.
I stare at the ceiling for another minute and then I get up.
She’s still asleep on the cot, her field notebook open on her chest where it fell, her dark auburn hair loose and spread out on the pillow in a way that’s completely different from the field cap and the professional composure and the straight shooting and everything else she’s been since she grabbed my first ladder rung two nights ago.
She looks younger asleep. Softer. Not less capable— just less armored.
I look away and put the water on.
By the time the coffee’s done she’s awake and sitting up and reading from the notebook with the immediate focus of a person whose brain doesn’t mess around with the in-between. No slow blink, no stretching, no easing into the day. Just awake and working.
I set her coffee on the console.
“Wind shifted,” she says without looking up.
“Northwest. Sometime around oh-three-hundred.”
She looks up then. Reads my face the way she reads everything — fast and accurate and not particularly gentle about it. “That’s good for the corridor.”
“Yeah.”
“But.”
I pick up my mug. “But nothing. It’s good news.”
She closes the notebook. “Trav.”
“Coral.”
“You’ve got the same face you had at the creek bend yesterday morning.”
I look at her. “I don’t have a face.”
“You absolutely have a face.” She pulls her knees up and wraps both hands around her mug and looks at me over the rim with those steady dark eyes. “It’s the face you make when you’re processing something you don’t want to say out loud.”
The problem with a straight shooter is that they don’t miss.
She’s dead on.
“The northwest wind is good for the corridor,” I say. “It’s less good for the southern residential area below peak four. Fire’s going to angle that direction by midday if the tankers don’t get ahead of it.”
“So the fire’s not contained.”
“Corridor’s safe. Pack’s safe. Your data’s solid.” I set my mug down. “But no. It’s not contained.”
She nods slowly. “Which means I can’t hike out today.”
“Not south. Not safely.”
“And you can’t exactly drive me out.”
“Truck’s at the base station. Hour’s hike from the tower.” I pull up the morning spread data on the console. “Road between here and town runs through the southern drainage. By midday that drainage is going to be in the fire’s path.”
She’s quiet for a moment and I keep my eyes on the monitor because looking at her right now while she processes being stuck here for another day feels like a thing I should avoid. Like looking directly at something that’ll make the next part harder.
“Okay,” she says finally.
“Okay?”
“I’ve been in worse situations.” She unfolds from the cot and stands and rolls her neck once. “And the corridor data needs another full observation day anyway. I want eyes on whether the pack doubles back to check the pinch point or continues south.”
Of course she does.
I pull up the wind projection and we stand at the console side by side going through the morning data the way we did yesterday and the day before and somewhere in the last forty-eight hours this has become a thing we just do, stand here in the early morning cold with our coffee and our data and the mountain laid out below us like it’s waiting to see what we decide.
The argument starts at seven-twelve a.m.
It starts because I suggest she take the northern trail to the observation point above the creek bed and she says she’s not taking the northern trail she’s going back down to the drainage and I say the drainage is going to be in the smoke corridor by oh-nine-hundred and she says she’ll be out by oh-eight-thirty and I say that’s a forty-minute margin in active fire conditions and she says she knows her own field protocols and I say I know this mountain.
“You know it from up here,” she says and she’s not wrong but she’s not entirely right either and I tell her that.
“I was on the ground yesterday,” I say. “I know the drainage.”
“So do I. I’ve run it three times.”
“Not in these conditions.”
“Trav.” She turns to face me and she’s got that jaw set the way she had it at the base of the ladder two nights ago. Decided. “I’m not one of your Hotshots. You don’t have authority over my field decisions.”
“No,” I say. “I’ve got authority over who goes into my watch grid in active fire conditions and under what parameters. That’s not personal that’s the job.”
“My survey grid overlaps your watch grid and my permit?—”
“Coral.” I take a step toward her and she doesn’t step back which I knew she wouldn’t.
“I’m not questioning your competence. I’m questioning the margin.
” I hold up my hand. “Forty minutes. In a drainage that’s going to be filling with smoke by oh-nine-hundred with a fire that’s already moved faster than two forecasts in a row. ”
She stares at me. I stare back.
“You’re scared,” she says.
“I’m cautious. There’s a?—”
“Not about the fire.” Her voice drops a register and loses the argument edge and gets something else in it that I like a whole lot less because it’s accurate. “You’re scared of something happening to someone on your mountain again.”
The cab goes quiet.
Outside the wind moves through the tower and the trees below shift and the fire on the ridge puts up a slow column of smoke into the grey morning sky and I’ve got nothing to say to that because she’s right and we both know it and she’s been right about most things since she came up that ladder and I’m tired —genuinely fucking tired— of being the only person up here with all of it sitting on my chest.
“Yeah,” I say. Low. “Maybe I am.”
She looks at me for a long moment.
Then she crosses the cab and she puts her hand on my jaw and she kisses me.
Not soft. Not tentative. Not the kind of kiss that asks a question. The kind that answers one.
I go still for about half a second which is all the time it takes for my brain to catch up with the rest of me and then I’m kissing her back.
My hands find her waist and she makes a small sound against my mouth that short circuits every careful considered thought I’ve managed to construct in eleven months of deliberate solitude.
She pulls back just far enough to look at me. Her hands are on my chest and she’s breathing the same way I am which is not steady, at all.
“I’m not going down to the drainage,” she says.
“Okay,” I say.
“Not because you told me not to.”
“I know.”
“Because forty minutes is a bad margin.” She holds my gaze. “You were right.”
“I know that too,” I say and she laughs and it’s the best sound the cab’s produced since she knocked on the door.
I pull her back in and this time it’s slower.
Less argument and more intention. My hands move from her waist to her back and she presses into me without hesitation, no careful distance, no professional composure, just Coral straight and direct the same way she’s been about everything since minute one.
She pulls back again but not far. “Your shoulder,” she says quietly against my jaw.
“Is fine.”
“Trav.”
“Manageable,” I say. “Definitely manageable.”
She leans back and looks at me with that clear-eyed assessment that I’ve stopped trying to get out from under. Then she reaches up and very carefully moves her hand from my chest to my right shoulder instead of my left.
“Then I’ve got you,” she says simply.
Something sizzles in my chest that I don’t have a name for yet.
I walk her back toward the cot with the morning light coming grey and flat through all four windows and the fire on the ridge doing what fires do. The wolves are somewhere safe in the southern timber and the wind shifts to the northwest and neither of us is going anywhere today.
She sits on the edge of the cot and pulls me down with her and I go, careful with the shoulder, not careful about anything else.
“Hey,” she says quietly.
“Hey,” I say back.
Her hands slide into my hair and I drop my forehead to hers and for a minute we just stay there, breathing the same air, her thumbs tracing slow arcs along my jaw, and I’m thinking about waves and how the best ones don’t announce themselves.
You’re just sitting out there in the water and the whole ocean lifts beneath you and then you’re either going or you’re not.
I’m going. I’m riding this wave wherever it takes me.
She pulls me down and I take my time because she deserves that —she deserves someone who takes his time— and the morning opens up slow and golden around us and the tower holds us a hundred and twenty feet above the world and for the first time in eleven months the height feels like protection instead of distance.
Like I’m not up here to keep everything out.
Like maybe I was up here waiting for exactly this to find me.
My hands follow all of her curves… mountains, valleys, up and down, over and out.
She’s not a goddess… she’s the goddess. I’m not a virgin, but I’ll admit, it’s been a couple of years.
My dedication to the job and then recovery taking a chunk out of that, but it’s like I’m learning for the first time.
“Coral…” I breathe out her name heavily.
“Yeah…”
“I’d prefer you have some pretty low expectations.”
She bursts out into a fit of laughter. “Been a while?”
I push up and look her in the eyes. “Two years, six days and,” I think quickly, “forty-two and a half minutes.”
“Wow, you can calculate copulation to the minute… impressive.”
“But that’s two years and right now, my cock is about as hard as granite and pretty sure making a pre-cum spot in my boxers that’ll have Mrs. Waverly in town at the laundromat shaking her head.”
“Well, then let’s just make it stop doing that.”
In a flash she’s off the cot, over me and at my belt buckle and I’m quickly riding a surge of pleasure when she pulls my pants and underwear off, her lips suckling at the tip of my dick.
Sucking softly, then harder, soft then hard, then she engulfs my entire hard cock.
The tip touches the back of her throat and I groan.
“You like that?”
“It’s great… more, please.” I’m not afraid to beg. It’s just too good not to.
She stills. “I know it’s hard for you to trust, Trav. But I’m here for you. I’m not going anywhere and I’ll never hurt you.”
Every word settles warm into me.
I reach down and cup her face. “Thank you.”
She returns to my cock and goes faster and faster, sucking, pumping, and jacking me until I’m nearing the point of no return.
“Baby, Coral, fuck… you need to stop or—” I groan and it only seems to spur her on.
The woman is a woodland vixen.
And I love it…
Her?
My body lights from the inside out and I pump my hips as my body empties into her mouth. My eyes are clamped closed and I feel her leave the bed. I try to open them, but I’m too fucking gone.
In a minute, I feel a soft body press onto mine. Naked body.
“I’m clean, but I don’t have a condom,” I say while nibbling on her ear.
“I’m covered and clean.”
“I trust you, Coral.”
“You can trust me, Trav.”
She sits up, and her glorious tits shine in the moonlight. Fuck, sixteen-year-old me would have come in his pants, but all I can think about is making his woman scream my name. Leaning back, she lines my still hard cock up with her body and in one quick motion she seats herself.
“Oh, fuck…” she takes a minute. “I knew you were going to feel good, but shit… Oh, God.”
And as she moves up and down, her body starts to shake until soon she’s in an all-out moan while her body trembles from the inside out.
She slows her grinding on my cock.
“God, that was beautiful.” I push her hair from her face.
“I don’t think I’ve ever come like that.” The words exit and she seems taken aback that she said them.
“I know what you mean.” I don’t wait for more sentiment, I pull her down to me and as I’m kissing her, I sit back up and grab her ass while standing. I walk to the wall, right next to the window. I pound into her as her fingers dig into my shoulders.
“Trav, please, come with me.” She pants and groans, her pussy gripping me in a vise.
I look into her eyes. “I’ll come with you wherever you go.”
I plant and her body quakes against me.
The setting sun bathes us in an orange glow with bands of pink and beautiful just got a new definition in my book.