25. Ivy
twenty-five
Ivy
The kitchen looks and feels wrong.
I’m standing here with the fridge open, coffee started, taking in a room I've walked into hundreds of times this summer. Something's off, some detail my brain flags before my conscious mind catches up.
Beck's water bottle isn't on the counter.
It had been there for weeks, dented metal, a Bigfoot sticker half peeled off one side, sitting in the same spot beside the sink for the past two months.
I've walked past it and moved it to wipe down the counter without ever really seeing it.
Now the space where it should be is just empty counter.
Its absence is louder than the bottle itself ever was.
Beck took it with him. Of course he did.
It's his water bottle. He doesn't live here anymore.
Reid's gone too, obviously, his side of the equation just as empty.
But Reid leaving for a fire is old news to me.
Beck gone is new. This is different math, and I don't want to do it standing in an empty kitchen at nine in the morning on a Saturday.
So I work instead.
I get my laptop out, spread my notes across the table, and dig into a section of my thesis that's been giving me trouble, some analysis I couldn't quite make click.
This morning it clicks. I work steadily for three hours, restructuring a whole argument that finally makes sense once I stop fighting the data and let it tell me what the evidence supports.
I'm making real progress, the kind that used to take me entire weekends to manage.
I get up for water and, for half a second, expect to see Beck filling the doorway, his shoulders wide enough he always seems to catch the frame on one side, dark hair that never quite settles no matter how many times he runs a hand through it.
I can picture the stubble he has before he shaves, the gravel of his voice first thing in the morning before coffee smooths it out.
I could describe him in more detail than I've ever bothered describing anyone, and I don't even have to try.
He's just there, assembled whole in my head.
Later, someone puts music on in the common room. Three notes into it I recognize the song, the same one that came through the truck speakers the morning Beck and I drove into Timber Creek together and had lunch. The one we sang along to together. I don't sing along today.
It's strange. My life wasn't empty before Beck showed up on our floor a few months ago. It was full. Tessa. This crew. The Grangers. My thesis, my work, the mountains I've loved since I was old enough to walk them. I was happy. I know I was happy.
But Beck slid into all of it and made it fuller.
Morning coffee got better with someone stealing half of mine.
Workdays got better with someone matching my pace on the trail.
Sunday dinners got better with someone new to introduce to my grandmother's photograph.
Lefse got better with someone learning, badly, how to roll it.
I didn't fall for Beck slowly. I fell fast. And between tripping over him that first morning and watching him drive away this morning, I understand how far I’ve fallen.
Tessa saves me from further spiraling around noon, appearing in the doorway with her keys in hand. “We're getting pedicures,” she announces, like it’s not up for discussion. “You, me, Dani, Cassidy. Timber Creek. Go put on shoes that aren't boots.”
“I have work to do.”
“Your feet have spent all summer in boots. They deserve better. This is happening. I'm just informing you.”
I close my laptop. There's something appealing about being told what to do today instead of having to decide anything myself.
Acetone and lavender hang in the air in the salon. The four of us sit in a row of massage chairs, feet soaking, looking out of place in a way none of us minds.
“This is absurd,” Dani says, wiggling her toes in the water. “Nobody's going to see these. They're going straight back into work boots Monday.”
“We'll know,” Cassidy says.
“That's the whole point,” Tessa agrees.
We talk about polish colors and whether the technician judges us for our current level of foot neglect. The conversation drifts into what everyone's doing once the season ends.
“Probably back to the resort,” Tessa says, when Dani asks. “Bozeman side. Same as most winters.”
“And after that?” Cassidy asks.
Tessa pauses, like this is the first time anyone's asked her to think past next season. “I have a very sophisticated five-year plan. It mostly involves not making a five-year plan.”
That gets a laugh out of all of us.
“I go back to actual responsibility,” Dani says. “Substitute teaching, mostly. Sometimes paraprofessional work. Missoula, usually.”
“You? In charge of children?” Tessa says. “You can't even get this crew to stop arguing about spoons.”
“Kids are more reasonable than adults. Lower stakes.”
“That's fair.”
“Cassidy goes back to school,” Dani continues. “Environmental science, right?”
“Late August. Two years left.”
“And Trevor?”
Dani probably means it as a casual question, but Cassidy's cheeks go pink.
“Trevor and I aren't dating,” she says, too fast.
“Okay,” Tessa says.
“You've gone into town with him three times,” Dani points out.
“We've gotten food.”
“Together.”
“People do that.”
“On dates,” Tessa says.
Cassidy doesn't have a good comeback for that, mostly just goes pinker, and admits she doesn't know what happens with Trevor once she's back at school.
He's off doing winter construction work somewhere in the western part of the state.
It's too new. They haven't figured out the logistics.
They might not have to figure them out at all, if it fizzles the way summer things sometimes do.
I recognize that uncertainty a little too well.
Tessa doesn't know where she'll be in five years.
Dani has a whole separate life the rest of us barely glimpse.
Cassidy and Trevor are staring down the same unresolved distance Beck and I are.
The crew house feels permanent while we're all living in it together, but it never is.
People come here for a season and then scatter when the work ends.
I've always understood that. It just matters differently this year.
By the time our toes are done, painted a deep summer red that will not survive prolonged contact with hiking boots, I've got an idea. I take a picture of my feet, framed carefully, angled so my calves are clearly visible too. Nothing scandalous. Just enough.
Tessa glances at my phone screen and raises an eyebrow.
I don't explain. I send the picture to Beck with a short message about the pedicure, then put my phone away and go back to enjoying the afternoon with my friends, not checking every two minutes, not worrying that he hasn't answered yet.
He's back with his crew today. He could be anywhere, doing anything.
That's fine. We're already learning what trying looks like.
His reply comes a couple hours later, once we're back at the crew house.
Made it. Already put in a full day. Then: The toes looks great. Still more interested in the legs.
I laugh out loud on the porch steps. I have no idea what you're talking about, I type back, which is a lie he'll see through.
Sure you don't.
That's it, brief, easy, the kind of exchange we might have had if he were still down the hall instead of hundreds of miles away. Distance hasn't changed us, not yet, not today.
The evening winds down the ordinary way. Dinner. A game of cards nobody's fully invested in. It's been a good day. I got work done. I laughed with my friends. I learned things about people I thought I knew everything about. I flirted with my boyfriend from three hundred miles away.
Then everyone drifts off for the night, and I go to my room alone.
The day's good mood starts to thin out around the edges.
I find Beck's shirt where I left it, folded on top of my dresser.
I pull it on over my head before bed the way I did at the drive-in, sleeves swallowing my hands, hem falling well past where it should.
It smells like him, faint, familiar, something clean and woodsy that I could identify blind by now as him.
The scent takes me straight back to that night. The sundress. The temperature dropping once the sun went down. Beck noticing before I said anything. Disappearing inside his truck, coming back with this shirt.
He was right there that night. Solid, warm, an arm around me. Tonight it's just the shirt.
I get into bed and let my mind drift to last night. I remember what he said.
We try.
I don't need to know where we'll be in October to know I don't want us to end now.
I'm going to miss you too.
And then the part Beck doesn't know about.
“Beck,” I'd said, and he'd looked at me, waiting. I know what I was about to tell him. I love you. Three words, sitting right there. I wasn't uncertain. I wasn't scared they weren't true. I know, with complete clarity that I love him.
But I looked at a man about to leave for an active fire season, and decided I didn't want to hand him something that enormous the night before he left, not when it might feel like I was asking him for an answer he may not be ready to give.
So I'd said something smaller instead. Come back safe.
That's the plan.
I'm not sure I'd do it differently if I had the moment back. But lying here now, wearing his shirt, the truth of it is as present as it was on the porch. Maybe more so, now that there's this much distance between us to measure it against.
My life is still full.
But I know now, in a way I didn't fully understand even a few weeks ago, how much better all of it is with him in it.