by Anne Marsh
I don’t want to scare her. I should get up, go, give her her space. Instead, I keep right on talking.
“You gonna hit me with that?” I nod at the bat she’s still clutching. The brunette seems to have disappeared, and we’re alone with the fire someone needs to put out. Sarah Jo’s eyes dip to the bat in her hand. She looks sort of surprised, like she’s not sure how she ended up armed and dangerous. I’m sure plenty of criminal careers have started that way.
She mumbles something and tosses the bat onto the ground. Not too far away, I can’t help but notice. But then she lays in a course for me and comes right on over. She even offers me a handful of candy. The stuff’s probably been on the ground and beaten to a pulp by her bat. Piñatas have never struck me as terribly hygienic, but I snag her offering and tear open a package of mini M&Ms. The fire camp’s down a cook—again—and it was slim pickings in the cafeteria earlier tonight. The girls who cook for us can’t keep up with the demand. Sarah Jo sinks down on the edge of the log.
Since she looks a little hesitant, I try to be helpful. “I only eat little girls on Wednesdays and Thursdays, so you’re safe.”
“Until next week.” She sighs with mock seriousness. “Duly noted, Mister Hotshot.”
“You gonna give me shit if I stay here?” I drag my palm over my head. Fucking need to get a haircut sometime soon or I’ll look like Colt with his stupid, stubby man bun.
“You want to hang out here?” She sounds vaguely horrified.
Do I?
“Might be hazardous.” I rub my hand over my chin and give her my best mock-thoughtful look. “Seeing as how folks here like to wander around armed and dangerous.”
She snorts. Win.
Colt picks this minute to prove he’s waiting for me after all. The man starts honking up a storm. The cocksucker thinks he’s got musical talent because he varies the beeps and lengths like he’s playing me a symphony of hurry-the-fuck-ups. I get that sitting around in the dark waiting on my ass isn’t his idea of a good time, but I’d like to know that Sarah Jo’s okay. That’s what you do when you accidentally scare the shit out of someone. On the other hand, if she says she’s not fine, I’m not sure what I’ll do. Colt won’t wait all night for me and the only fix-it solutions I have are duct tape or kissing it better.
But I have to ask. “Are you okay?”
The question has her looking at me like I’m an idiot. “Fine.”
I gesture toward the bat. “You sure?”
“Yes.” She blows out her breath in a big huff, making her bangs dance around her face. I’m not sure how she got just parts pink, but it’s a talent.
“So you’re totally, completely good.”
She holds up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”
And as if that’s not bad enough, seeing her tuck her pinky finger into her thumb and make the perfect space for my dick to play slip-and-slide, she sticks her tongue out at me. Hell yeah, my dick bellows. My inner caveman demands we toss her over our shoulder and find a mattress stat.
Time to go.
“You’re safe up here.” I have no idea where the fuck those words come from. They sort of slip out and I can practically see them hanging in the air between us. They also translate nicely into you fucking idiot. Sarah Jo’s fuckhot and more than a little sweet, but she’s made her disinterest in me—in any part of me, enormous hose included—perfectly clear and I have a hands-off, eyes-only date with a dancer named Candy Jones anyhow.
Sarah Jo blinks at me and chews on her lower lip as she processes my promise. She’s got a streak of caramel on her lower lip; she must have stolen the last Twix. I’m not sure how it happens, but my thumb swipes gently at the sticky spot. I’d rather lick her clean—and then lick her dirty for good measure. Too much? Yeah. I think so, too. She’s barely met me.
“You want to come with us?” I’m not sure where that idea came from. It’s not like there’s some kind of hard-and-fast rule that tit owners dance on stage and non-possessors-of-tits cool their junk in the audience, but I can’t remember ever seeing a girl watching the show. But maybe Sarah Jo’s the kind of person who likes breaking barriers. Maybe watching some girl shake her stuff is exactly what she likes to be doing best.
“To Tits Up?” She’s not scared anymore. Nope. She’s fucking shaking with laughter. Good to know I’m no longer the big, bad wolf.
“We can hit the place up.” I grin at her. Fuck, she’s kind of fun when she’s not hiding in her clothes. “Grab a beer. See the show. My treat.”
“Pass.” She makes a face. “If I want to see boobs, I can look down the front of my shirt.”
“You could pretend to be disappointed,” I point out. “You know, you’re rough on a guy’s ego. First you scream and point when you see me, and now you won’t even let me buy you a beer.”
“At a strip club.” She gets busy untying her flannel shirt from her waist and covering up. Guess she’s definitely remembered that I have a dick.
“Huh.” I stand up as Colt lays on the horn again. If he abandons me here, it’s a long walk back to fire camp. “Well in the spirit of fairness, we could look at tits tonight and then next weekend we could ride over to Sacramento. Find the Chippendales or something so we can look at dick packages.”
And then she giggles. She looks me straight in the eye, her face lights up, and she makes this fantastically dorky, wonderful high-pitched heehaw of sound that’s better than a million porn moans of do me harder, big guy.
“You have a good night,” she says.
I already am.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I met the mother of my children. She didn’t know it yet, but Sarah Jo was about to become mine.
1
SARAH JO
“Kiss the first hotshot you see. Whoever’s first in line, just lay one on him.” Rosalie waves her spatula for her emphasis, ponytail bouncing like an exclamation point. She’s the head cook at fire camp and my boss for the last few weeks, which means I’m supposed to do what she says. Somehow, I don’t think sexually harassing the hotshot firefighters was what HR had in mind.
Another cook mimes kissing, hooking a tanned arm around the neck of an imaginary lover. “A hot kiss, mind you. You’re not kissing your grandma. A little lip, a little tongue—that lucky boy won’t know what hit him. Nothing to it. And nothing you haven’t done before, I bet.”
Oooh… now my co-workers are speculating about my sex life. So much for my plan to keep a low profile—I’m about as visible now as a fireworks show on top of Mount Kilimanjaro. I stand there staring at them like I’ve never heard of kissing, tugging my oversized flannel shirt tighter around me. It’s big enough that I could use it as a tent. Or a turtle shell. If I were super smart, I’d pull my head inside the flannel and not come out for another century or two.
“A hot kiss for a hotshot,” another whoops.
We’re an equal opportunity camp: if men think about sex constantly, so do the women. Even me. I devote plenty of mental time to kissing. First kisses, dirty kisses, kisses with tongue, butterfly kisses… don’t make me pick between them. I’m an “E—All of the above” woman when it comes to choosing my favorite. Rough kisses, soft pecks, Eskimo kisses, French kisses—yes, yes, and yes please. Really, even bad kisses aren’t all bad because you can share a good laugh with your fellow kissee about whatever it is that went wrong.
So other than the sad fact that I need to not draw attention to myself, I don’t have any problem with my boss’s demand that I kiss a hotshot. I’m happy to take one for the team and add to the photo gallery I’m keeping in my head. You thought only guys stored up spank bank material? Think again. Last night over s’mores and before the piñata-smashing main event, my friend Lola suggested we rename the spank bank.
Rub club.
Jill till.
The flick file.
I’ve stored up my favorite kisses over the years, and yes, I re-run them in my head when it’s time for a little ménage a moi. I may have a kissing addiction
, if we’re being honest. I’ve got an entire highlights reel of best-ever kiss moments stored up in my head. I’ve been accused—with some grounds—of preferring the warm up kisses to the main act. Some people make an entire meal out of appetizers and skip the main course. I’m done apologizing for liking what I like—and so if I prefer tongue action to sausage action, so be it.
At the moment, however, I’m on a kissing hiatus. I may just possibly have kissed the wrong guy a little bit too much, resulting in my presence in this fire camp in Nowheresville, California. A girl has to kiss a lot of frogs to find her prince, and my last frog was a warty one with nary a crown in sight. I got no magic fairy tale ending where he morphed into Mr. Tall, Dark, and Regally Handsome in order to sweep me off my feet in his private Learjet to some obscure but filthy rich European country. I was the happy recipient of no tiara, no happily-ever-after, and no super-talented dick. Instead, I’ve ended up with life on the lam and a minimum wage job that requires me to both cook and do the dishes.
The cafeteria I’m standing in used to be a mess hall back in Civilian Conservation Corps days, a period that I’ll put in the category of long, long ago. The building is still largely utilitarian, but the words dilapidated, rundown, and on its last legs also come to mind because the decorating style runs to worn linoleum and fuzzed-out screens. The cooks prop the screen door open with a rock. It definitely isn’t the Ritz, with its wooden picnic tables dotting the surrounding clearing for the overflow crowd.
And it’s certainly no dating Mecca.
Not that I’m interested in dating.
Or guys.
Sex and anything to do with the penis-possessing members of society are strictly off-limits, see the aforementioned plan of flying under the radar and sticking to the spank bank. I’m supposed to be hiding, not drawing attention to myself.
“I can’t just kiss the first guy I see.” My mouth protests, on auto-pilot while my libido considers the option. Seriously. The Big Bear Rogues light fires that have nothing to do with the trees and protecting the wildland interface. I secretly suspect that the nineteen men and one woman (go, sister!) who make up the elite team of wildland firefighters were hired as much for their pretty faces as for their fierce firefighting skills. Or maybe it’s the combination of a big, rough lumberjack of a man who’s bulked up even more by long weeks hauling a fuck-ton of equipment around the wild. Hell, I’d interface with Pick Revere, one of the hotshot team’s two seconds-in-command, any day of the week and twice on Sunday. We’ve only met once, much earlier in the summer before I started working here, but it was memorable. Even if he did accidentally scare the hell out of me, how do you forget that much man?
Pick is a bear of a man. When cooking gets boring—and since I’m no Michelin chef, I’m usually bored—I amuse myself by imagining him as a frontiersman. My brain likely has too much free time, but I’ve spent a lot of time lately contemplating the honed muscle and disciplined focus that is Pick. He’s precisely the kind of man who knows his way around the forest, and I’ve invented an entire resume for him. Fantasy Pick is comfortable with a hunting rifle or a ten-mile hike because he’s grown up on a diet of outdoor activities. He also moves with an easy confidence that does unspeakable things to my insides.
Because you just have to wonder if he knows his way around a bed and a woman’s body just as well.
Nope, there’s no missing this particular Big Bear Rogue. He loves what he does, showing up for more fires than even Hunter Black does. First in, last out, those two are practically joined at the firefighting hip. Perhaps I should add a ménage a trois to that spank list…
“She’s thinking about it,” a feminine voice gleefully calls me back to earth.
Snap.
“You don’t think an uninvited kiss smacks of”—I wave my spatula for emphasis before prying the slightly charred pancake off the griddle I’m manning—“sexual harassment? Won’t I be setting myself up for a sure meet and greet with a pink slip?”
I totally need to hang on to this job. Paychecks don’t magically deposit themselves into my checking account. I was down to my last few dollars when I stopped for gas in Big Bear Lake, California and saw the avalanche of Help Wanted and For Rent posters pinned to the wall. Old-fashioned kind of cute, I thought, tickled that someone still went the 8-x-11 route with a strip of tear-off numbers on the bottom.
Since being unemployed and on the run meant that I had time to kill and nowhere to be, I read while I worked my way through a car-warmed Coke. And it’s like Karma or God herself tapped on my shoulder because that’s how I’d found out about the Break Up Club. Or maybe my attention had been grabbed by the Craigslist posting printed out on hot-pink construction paper decorated with copious swirls of glitter glue. The sign screamed Look at me! and practically blinded me when a ray of sun hit the paper. Apparently, I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join said Break Up Club and “work through” the demise of a recent relationship. The poster promised an eight-step master plan guaranteed to purge douches, exes, and troublesome penes from every area of my life.
Since I didn’t want my ex finding me under any circumstances, purging sounded right up my alley. Even better? The Break Up Club was a sleepaway camp. Members got dibs on “charmingly rustic” cabins “situated in a pristine mountain environment.” I dialed the number pronto and became founding member number three. Finding semi-permanent shelter of the non-car variety had been step one in my Reinvent Sarah Jo plan, and even if I’ve ended up in a cabin that made tiny living look palatial, I’m happy. I have a roof, running water, and my own bathroom. It’s a definite step up from the cardboard box I’d envisioned when I bolted from Auburn. It’s possible that situation there could have sorted itself out, but I’ll take my chances on the cabin and the hotshots.
Work even magically fell from the sky and landed in my lap. I called on a few of the Help Wanted posters, and thanks to a completely understandable lack of people willing to make millions of pancakes for minimum wage, I ended up here. Thank God no one actually tested my cooking abilities before saying the magic words you’re hired. With my phone and Google, I can fake anything. I also flipped a digit on my Social—close enough to excuse if and when someone notices—and gambled no one had time to run a full background check when they were shorthanded. Hotshots can eat their weight in pancakes, I kid you not.
But back to the whole sexually-assault-a-hotshot thing. I’m sure you want to know how that turns out. I know I do.
Rosalie’s shaking her head. She’s still stuck on the whole kissing thing. “Those boys like a good joke.”
“Uh-huh.” Frowning, I examine my pancake. One side is definitely edible. The other? Not so much. With a mental shrug, I carefully position the pancake on the stack. Show only the good side. I’ve learned that, haven’t I? Strategic cover-up is the story of my life.
“The first guy in line. That’s the dare.” Rosalie crosses her arms over her ample chest where large letters declare Firefighters light me up and with which statement I am in whole-hearted agreement. It’s like mountain scenery. Sometimes, you just have to stop and stare.
“I dare you,” she continues. “We all had to do it. You want to be a summer cook and one of us, you kiss the guy.”
“I’m hardly new,” I point out. “I’ve been working here for over a month.”
Rosalie grins at me. “Yeah, but none of us thought you’d last this long.”
She makes a good point.
What she doesn’t know, however, is that the sad state of my checking account combined with my secret escape plan means that I have plenty of incentive to stick with the job, even if it isn’t fantasy fodder material. You know. Except for the sexy hotshots that parade through my line every day.
“I’m a sticker,” I say virtuously. It’s not like I’m pro-quitting, after all. I can totally polish my halo on this one.
“Uh-huh.” Rosalie snorts and points at my pancake. The one I’ve flipped over to hide the burned bits. “Hope you kiss better
than you cook.”
Rising to the bait is stupid, but I’ve never liked backing down from a dare. I can do this. I just have to hope that the first man in line is decent looking. Yes, I’m shallow that way, but if I’m getting my first kiss in months, I want a good one.
“Hostile work conditions,” I grouse, pouring more batter out of the ancient Tupperware container. The griddle spits and hisses, trying to christen my forearms with second-degree burns. My flannel is multi-purpose—camouflage and protective gear.
“Honey, you want hostile, you go out there.” Rosalie jerks a thumb southeast where a thick column of oily black smoke punches up over the horizon. Seen from a distance, the fire is little more than a thick, sluggish haze right now. The hotshots headed out early this morning, on a mission to keep the fire small. Early is the perfect time to catch a fire and put it out. Later, when the sun rises and the day heats up, fire becomes a bear to stop, or so I’ve learned. I eavesdrop on a lot of conversations while I’m serving pancakes.
“You really did it?” I have to ask.
“Kissed the first man I saw? Honey, you bet I did. That hotshot didn’t know what hit him. Took him home with me, too, and kept him.” Rosalie laughs, amusement shaking her entire frame.
“This isn’t some kind of weird dating service, is it?” My suspicion is a hard-learned lesson. If a perfectly lovely, noble white steed popped its ass onto my front lawn I’d absolutely look it in the mouth. I’d run a background check on it too because no matter how pretty a horse is, it’s still going to shit all over your grass and generally make a public nuisance of itself.
Case in point? I went out with a perfectly respectable deputy sheriff, no questions asked, and that ex-boyfriend burned a house down around my ears and blamed me for the ensuing property destruction. To avoid certain legal charges, I’ve transplanted my city-loving self here to fire camp. Big Bear is my second chance, and sex isn’t on my to-do list. Although a kiss hardly counts as sex. A quick peck on the lips, a flirty answer to the girls’ dare, and my place here this summer is secured. Ka-ching.
