I sit up, let my eyes flicker away from the page to take in the expectant look on his ruggedly handsome face. “My turn?”
“I told you mine, you tell me yours.” He grins a little at that.
I roll my eyes, but I will humor him, because I like the shine in his smile and how, for all his talk about breaking the law, teasing cops, he makes me feel safe.
“Fine. If I weren’t here — and if my foot was healed — I’d pack up my car with a picnic and a good bottle of wine and a nice dessert, like the apple crumble from the Starlight Bakery downtown. I’d drive out to one of the trails in the mountains outside of town — there are some that no one else knows about and they are so peaceful — and I would go for a long, long run. Just me. On my own for hours. I would run until I was sweating buckets and so tired that I couldn’t think about anything else going on in my life. And then I’d come back to my car, I’d spread out a blanket and eat every last piece of cheese and salami and slice of bread I’d packed, and then I’d wash it down with wine. I’d forget about everything else. About being here, about being in Torreon, about being unemployed.”
Blaze shuffles some papers he’s sorting and frowns. “You know, this was supposed to be a cheerful thing to talk about. To take our minds off the fact that my mom has more paper in this room than a fucking library and I feel like I’m being forced to make up for every single homework assignment I skipped back in the day.”
I shrug. “Sorry, but being here — not here, here, but back in Torreon — isn’t the most cheerful subject for me.”
“Why did you come back? Why’d you leave Stanford and whatever big opportunities at the stock exchange or whatever that you had waiting for you?”
“It was Goldman Sachs, actually. I interned with them my junior year. They were going to hire me once I graduated.”
“They’re a big name, I take it?”
When he doesn’t react to my surprised look except to show genuine curiosity, I realize he’s serious. “Yeah. They’re kind of big.”
“So why come back?”
Metal tang floods my mouth; I’ve chewed my lip so hard that it’s started bleeding.
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
Blaze raises an eyebrow. I’m sure he intends it to look perturbed, but somehow all that comes across is how hot he looks. The way his eyes always burn with some kind of emotion — curiosity, protectiveness, confidence, passion — keeps me riveted. It’s not an unpleasant situation to be in, I could look into his eyes for longer than I’d like to admit.
“You know why I’m here: I have to help my mom. Even if she doesn’t want it.”
I shake my head. He’s not getting out of it that easily. If he intends to pry into my life, he will have to open up some of his.
“That’s not what I’m asking and you know it. Tell me why you left the smokejumpers,” I say. My voice is so harsh it surprises me, but I don’t flinch or show any outward regret; maybe this will discourage him from putting his nose where it doesn’t belong. “So, come on, Blaze, put it out there: tell me what happened.”
“You really want to know?”
“Would I be asking if I didn’t?”
He doesn’t say it out loud, but I can see the thought flash across his face — you really don’t care why I was fired, you just don’t want to talk about why you came back — and he’s right. It doesn’t matter why he lost his old job or what crimes he’s done; people make mistakes and none of what he’s done in the past will change the reality of our present situation. All he needs to do is change the subject, admit he doesn’t care about what happened to make me come back to Torreon, and then we can move on to what’s really important.
But then he surprises me.
His eyes drift down to his feet, his voice changes — it gets warmer, fuller, deeper — and his fists clench, as if he’s grabbing hold of a memory that wants to squirm and fight with all its power to stay out of the light of day.
“You’ve got to understand that I loved my job. Loved it. I never thought I would want to make a lifetime career at something, but this was it. The fire crew is like a brotherhood, and it’s just you, your brothers, against this primal force of nature. I mean, you’re in the middle of nowhere fighting this uncaring, unstoppable force: fire. I’ve seen fire lines miles wide and parachuted into the middle of the fucking mountains with nothing more than a pack of gear, an ax, and twenty men on my crew, and it was our job to stand up against this wall of flame,” he says. His voice drops to this guttural, sensual rumble. “Oh, it was fucking heaven. Days and nights of burning hell and everything I could want.”
“What happened?”
He continues on, like I didn’t even speak. “And I was fucking great at it. While I was on the line, I never got tired, I could go for fucking days and days and the only thing I would think about is what I needed to do in the next hour, the next minute, the next second, to make my brothers safe and halt the fucking fire in its fucking tracks. God damn, do I fucking miss it. I had this purpose. Never thought I’d have it — figured I was going to be
