19. Ivy
nineteen
Ivy
We pull into the crew house lot Friday afternoon, everyone tired and dusty and talking about pizza for dinner. As we pile out of the vehicle, Tessa mentions Beck and Reid probably won't be back for a few more hours.
I'm trying very hard not to count hours. I've counted enough hours over the last eleven days. A few more shouldn't matter. Then I see the truck.
It takes my brain a full second to process what I'm looking at, because that truck isn't supposed to be here yet. I stop walking, suddenly enough Tessa nearly runs into the back of me.
“What—”
I don't hear the rest of whatever she says.
Beck's on the porch.
The moment our eyes meet, he smiles, and every rational thought I had about hours and patience and dignity leaves my body. I drop the tools I'm carrying. I don't even check where they land. Then I'm running.
I don't think about the crew watching. I don't think about Reid standing somewhere nearby, probably grinning.
I don't think about anything except closing the distance between us as fast as I can. Beck sees me coming and braces, catching me as I launch myself at him, my feet actually leaving the ground for a second before his arms lock around me and hold on. He’s solid and real and here.
I bury my face in his neck, taking in the scent of him I haven't had in eleven days.
“I missed you,” he says, quiet, right against my ear.
“I missed you too.”
We stay like that longer than a normal hello requires. Eventually I pull back, just far enough to see his face. He looks tired, the kind of tired that doesn't wash off in one shower, but he's looking at me like I'm the only thing he's been thinking about.
He brushes a strand of hair off my face.
Then he kisses me, slow and warm, nothing frantic about it. The eleven days without him disappear.
“Good to see you too, Ivy,” Reid says, from somewhere behind me.
I laugh against Beck's mouth and finally turn around. “Hi, Reid. Welcome back.”
“We missed you,” Tessa says to Reid, coming up to hug him properly, which softens the blow.
Reid looks pleased with himself. “The trash has really been piling up without me.”
“Nobody's touched it,” Nolan confirms. “We just let it grow.”
Mabel appears from somewhere inside, trots straight past me and Beck, and winds herself around Reid's ankles, rubbing against his legs with what looks like genuine enthusiasm.
Reid looks around at everyone, triumphant. “See? Somebody missed me.”
“She does that when she wants food,” Tessa says.
Everyone laughs. Reid looks personally wounded but doesn't argue, mostly because he can't.
Once the initial chaos settles, I ask how they're already here. “You weren't supposed to be back until tonight.”
“Released a few hours early,” Beck says. “We left before they had a chance to change their minds.”
“He wanted to surprise you,” Reid adds.
“It worked,” I say, still holding onto Beck's hand, unable to let go of any part of him now that I've got him back.
“He wouldn't let me stop anywhere the whole drive,” Reid says, clearly delighted to have a story ready. “Scenic overlook. Roadside attraction. Didn't matter. No.”
“You wanted to sightsee,” Beck says.
“We were three hours early. What was the rush?”
I know what the rush was. There's no need for him to explain it out loud. I squeeze his hand a little tighter. He knew I'd still be working. That he wouldn't even see me when he arrived. He wanted to get here anyway, wanted to be waiting instead of driving when I got back to the house.
The crew's still talking about pizza in Timber Creek, the plan that was in motion before Reid and Beck showed up early. Tessa asks if Beck and Reid want to come.
Reid's already nodding.
Beck looks at me. I look at him.
We're staying.
Nobody's surprised. Tessa offers to bring pizza back for us, which solves dinner without either of us needing to think about it. Everyone piles into vehicles and heads out, the noise of engines and doors fading down the road until it's just us.
The house is quiet in a way it hasn't been in weeks. No crew filling every room, no constant background noise, just the two of us standing in a kitchen that suddenly feels enormous.
It isn't awkward. It's wonderful.
I grab us both something to drink, and we end up back on the porch, squeezed onto the porch swing that's really only built for one and a half people, but suits us fine.
Tonight there's no storm. Just a warm, quiet July evening, the sky still holding onto light, crickets starting up somewhere in the grass.
“Tell me everything,” I say. “The parts that didn't fit into texts.”
He does. Slowly, easily, not like a briefing.
Like a man who hasn't had anyone to really talk to in almost two weeks and isn't in any hurry to stop now that he does.
How exhausted he got by the end of most days.
Sleeping wherever they could, whenever the schedule allowed it.
The grim humor of fire camp food. The sudden relocation, the moment he realized service was about to disappear.
“I sent you that warning with one bar left,” he says.
“Didn't even get to watch it send before they called us to load up. I hated that you didn’t receive it.” He says it plainly, no drama attached.
“Not because I thought you couldn't handle it. I know you can. But that didn’t make me feel any better about leaving you without a word.”
I tell him my side, honestly, the way I haven't quite let myself say it to anyone but Tessa. Working through it. Trying to enjoy myself at Silver Creek anyway. Checking my phone far more than logic ever justified.
“Knowing why someone probably isn't calling doesn't make you stop wanting them to call,” I say.
“No,” he agrees. “It doesn't.”
I tell him all about Silver Creek, Nolan's ridiculous food tour, the lefse, Cassidy's terrifying pie-eating dominance, the band butchering half its set list. I tell him I kept seeing things all day I wanted to show him, kept reaching for my phone before I even thought about it.
“I liked getting those messages,” he says. “It felt like getting a piece of what I was missing.”
“How about Sunday?” I ask. “You got hijacked by an entire kitchen.”
He laughs. “I did. Didn't mind though.” A pause, his voice dropping a little, losing some of the easy humor. He says the next part slower, like he's still working out how much of it he wants to admit. “I didn't realize how much I missed Sunday dinner until I could hear it happening without me.”
“The Grangers'?”
“All of it,” he says. “Annie. Russ. You. Everybody arguing about pie. The whole house.”
I don't say anything because I know what it means, coming from a man who's spent his whole life being good at leaving, good at not needing a permanent home. I don't assume it means more than it does, but I hear it.
Mabel appears sometime during all of this, hopping onto Beck's lap like she's been waiting for the opportunity. He strokes behind her ears without breaking the conversation, and within a few minutes she's asleep, a small warm weight across his legs.
“She missed you too,” I say.
“Apparently everybody did.”
“Don't get cocky.”
He looks down at Mabel. “At least this time I'm not trapped under both of you.”
I laugh, and it feels like the first real laugh I've had in days.
I shift closer. Beck's arm comes around me, and I lean into his shoulder.
The night the storm rolled in, both of us were bracing for a separation neither of us had control over.
The separation helped me understand something I hadn't quite let myself name before now.
I love him.
I think it clearly, sitting here in the quiet, his thumb moving absently against my shoulder. I don't tell him. Not because I'm scared, and not because I doubt it. But I've only just found the words myself. Tonight doesn't need to carry that too.
Tonight just needs to be this. Beck's arm around me.
A sleeping cat. Crickets in the grass. This, more than the running or the kiss or any of the excitement of an hour ago, is what I think I've been missing most. On the porch with Beck, quiet, small unremarkable moments that don't need an audience or an occasion.
I know none of this is settled. Fire season isn't over. Beck will likely rejoin his smokejumper crew eventually. Neither of our futures are certain.
But tonight he’s here.
And for right now, it’s enough.