by Susan Sey
“Haul ass back to the lot,” Jax confirmed. “Roger.”
Willa said, “Eli, wait.”
“No time,” he said. “You drive.”
Willa bumped carefully up the dirt road that led to the Devil’s Kettle Loop Trail parking lot, the apologies bottled up in her throat slowly fermenting into righteous anger. She kept one eye on the road and one on her rearview mirror, where she could see Eli speaking to Jax and her dad in the truck bed. He’d elected to ride back there with them, ostensibly to go over how to deploy their fire shelters but Willa doubted it. Eli was angry at her. Well, fine with her. She was angry right back.
She pulled into the lot, hands in fists on the wheel. There weren’t many spots available. Hikers and art enthusiasts, all with their own reasons to worship at the Kettle, were out in force today. Would be all weekend, unless the fire simmering away in the northeast had its way and came down for a visit.
By the time she’d found a spot and slammed the door, the men were already standing at the tailgate, tightening their pack straps.
“Eli,” she said, more firmly this time and headed toward them. She’d be damned if she’d let him be all pissed off at her for being exactly who she was. She’d agreed to hide from the press and she was keeping her word, damn it. But sitting in Eli’s stifling little cabin like a rat in a trap was far likelier to kill her than a bruising, backcountry hike several miles from a fire she probably wouldn’t even see. And she wouldn’t apologize for that. Nobody had asked him to join her. He’d volunteered for that gig all by himself, the martyr. “Eli, I want to talk to you.”
Eli kept his focus on his pack. Brett was the one who looked up.
“Willa, hey.” Her dad stepped away from the group and made as if to touch her elbow. She blinked, startled, and jerked to a halt. He stopped, too, and put both hands up. “Sorry. I wasn’t going to—”
“No, it’s okay.” She frowned and thought that one over. It was okay. She’d just been surprised. In the week or so Brett had been home, he’d made no attempt to play the dad card. Hadn’t tried to hug her or touch her or offer her advice. And before that? She searched her memory for some instance of physical contact, affectionate or otherwise, but came up empty. Shay was the one who’d done all the hugging — and the hitting — as far as Willa could remember. “What do you need?”
His hand dropped awkwardly to his side and he shrugged. “I just wanted to say—”
“What?”
He met her eyes with a bright determination that startled her more than the aborted touch. “I want to thank you.”
She blinked. “For what?”
“For letting me know you. I wasn’t any kind of father to you, Willa, even when I was around. You didn’t — you don’t — owe me a thing but when I showed up out of the blue, you didn’t turn me away. You gave me a bed and a computer. You gave me a chance. I didn’t deserve any of those things but you gave them to me anyway, because you’d raised yourself better than Shay or I ever could have.” He shook his head, his eyes dangerously moist. “You’ve been through so much. I had no idea but even if I had, I doubt I’d have been any help to you.” He pressed his mouth tight. “It should’ve made you hard but it didn’t. You didn’t let it. You made yourself strong and smart and generous and kind instead. And I’m so damn proud of you.”
She stared, utterly speechless. Brett hooked a thumb over his shoulder and barreled on. “Eli’s a good guy,” he said. “Solid. He’ll make you happy and you deserve that. You won’t be like me and Shay. We were broken from the get go, her and me.”
She closed her mouth — it had been hanging open — and glanced at Eli. “We’re broken, too.”
“Everybody is, in their own way. But Shay and me, we made each other worse. You and Eli make each other better. Any fool can see that.”
She shifted her eyes back to his. “Why are you telling me this?”
He shrugged uncomfortably. “Life’s slippery. You should say things while people are in front of you.”
She studied him, then frowned at Eli, now bent over the map with Jax. “Why is this sounding like a farewell speech?”
“It’s not. But I see you and Eli circling each other and I worry that you might let the way Shay and I were color your thinking. That you might not believe you could do better. But you are better, Willa. So much better. You said last night that you don’t want to live with mistakes, mine or anybody else’s, so I want to tell you right now that letting go of him would be a mistake.”
She lifted her eyes to the sky, spotted the purplish column of smoke spearing into the blue in the distance. “What about this, though? What about today?Are we walking into something here we shouldn’t?”
“Eli wouldn’t let us go if he didn’t think it was okay.” He met her eyes directly, and they were clear. Sober, not a hint of doubt. “He’s solid, Willa.”
“No, he’s not.” She wondered if she was talking to Brett, or to herself. “He’s broken, just like you and me and everybody else.”
“Exactly. He’s not pretending otherwise, though. You can trust him. Whatever he’s carrying, he’s strong enough to carry it into these woods and back out again.”
“But he doesn’t want to.” And she knew it. The knowledge settled inside her with the inevitability of a stone dropping to the bottom of a lake. “This is the stuff his nightmares are made of — an unpredictable fire, an untrained crew, both of them his responsibility. And I don’t understand why the hell he’d take it on. But I’m going to find out.” She stepped around her dad, then paused. Reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “But hey, Dad?”
He stiffened under her touch, a deer scenting a threat. “Yeah?”
“Good talk. Thanks.”
He closed his eyes briefly, and released a breath so faint that Willa felt more than heard it. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”
Eli folded the map while Jax stepped away from the truck bed and gave Brett a smile. “Ready, partner?”
“Ready,” Brett said.
Jax clapped his shoulder. “Let’s get after it, then.”
“Channel three,” Eli called after them. “Keep us posted.”
“You, too.” Jax dropped a big hand to Willa’s shoulder on his way by, gave it a squeeze. “Stay safe.”
“Same.” Willa watched him split a sheaf of leaflets with Brett, little blue Trail Closed notices to be tucked under windshield wipers and stuck on campsites. She turned in time to accept her own stack from Eli.
“Let’s blanket the parking lot then hit the trail,” he said.
“Why?”
He frowned. “So people will know to get the hell out of here?”
“No, I mean, why are we doing this?”
“You tell me.” His eyes were bright and angry on hers.
“Because I have to hide from the press and I suck at the indoors,” she shot back. “I was three seconds away from calling Georgie to see if she’d come pluck my eyebrows when I decided to see if I could be of some service to my community instead.”
“Damn.” Eli sent her a sideways look and began tucking leaflets under windshield wipers. “That bad?”
“That bad. So I know why I’m doing this.” She shoved one under a wiper herself and stalked to the next car. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I love you, Willa.”
Her eyes skated from his and she heard him tuck another slip under the nearest windshield wiper. “You keep saying that,” she muttered and slapped another notice on another car. “I don’t have the first idea what to do with it. Or what to say about it. Or what to say to you when you say it.”
“You don’t have to say anything.” Eli hit the last car, then stuffed the leaflets in his pack and started toward the sign at the far end of the parking lot that read Devil’s Kettle North Loop. “You just have to trust that I mean what I say. I love you. And that means that I’m going to protect you whenever and wherever I can.”
“Not if it means walking into your own personal nigh
tmare! For God’s sake, Eli, go home!” She caught his elbow, stopped him before he could put a single boot on the trail. “You don’t have to do this!”
“Sure I do.”
“No, you don’t! Not for me!” She glared at him. “Love shouldn’t cost you that much. It’s not worth it.” She dropped her voice, forced out the truth she hadn’t wanted to face. “I’m not worth it.”
He leaned forward, put a hard, angry kiss on her mouth. “Yes, you are.” He drew back and glared at her. “Plus I’m fine. I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t, so just trust me, okay? Now we promised Ben and O’Malley that we’d clear this area by sunset, so it’s time to shut up and get hiking.”
CHAPTER 34
ELI TURNED AWAY from Willa’s skeptical eyes and started up a dirt trail rutted with millions of bootprints and veined with exposed tree roots. The shade swallowed him up, cool and dim and quiet. For a moment, he didn’t think she’d follow, then he heard her fall in behind him. Relief flooded him, and he stretched his legs into the smooth, mile-eating pace that was as familiar to him as a lullaby. She could’ve walked away from him, he knew. She had every right, honestly. She’d been through some serious shit this past twenty-four hours. Put that next to the fourteen or so years she’d already lived through, and she could be forgiven for deciding that she was better off without a man who wouldn’t negotiate. Couldn’t negotiate. Not on this.
He wasn’t proud of himself. He was proud as hell of her, though.
They’d hiked in cool silence for the better part of a mile before she finally spoke.
She said, “Okay.”
He sent her a startled look over his shoulder. “Okay? Okay, what?”
She shrugged. “Okay. I trust you.”
Hope surged inside him, nearly overshadowed the thin, omnipresent trickle of terror that connected his soul to the distant fire like some hideous umbilical cord. “Trust me to what?” he asked. “To know my own limits? Or to know when I’m in love?”
“Either,” she said simply. “Both.”
She hadn’t said she loved him, but it was a start. Her trust drifted warmly to the floor of his stomach, and smoldered there like embers stored away for the evening fire. The trail narrowed to a single-file footpath as the miles fell away, choked with gooseberry leaves as big as elephant ears. Wild raspberry vines snatched at his pant legs, dragging at their pace even as Eli’s mood soared.
A pair of hikers appeared on the trail ahead of them, a college-aged man and woman wearing matching packs.
“Hey,” Eli said when they overtook the pair. “Sorry, guys, you’re going to have to turn back.” He pointed toward the northeast, though the tower of smoke wasn’t visible through the dense green canopy. “We have a wildfire in the neighborhood.”
“We know.” The woman frowned. “But that’s at least ten miles from here. I checked.” She pulled a phone from her pocket and held it up like evidence.
“True enough.” Eli smiled. “It’s just a precaution at this point, but the wind changes on a dime this close to the big lake. The DNR doesn’t want anybody to get into a situation.”
“But we drove seven hours to get here.” She thumbed the phone’s screen and made a frustrated noise. “No service, of course. But I checked the radar back in the parking lot. The fire’s nowhere near here and we’ve been planning this hike for a month.”
“I’m sorry.” He handed them a blue slip. “Not my decision.”
The man took the slip, studied it. “This recommends evacuation.” He exchanged a look with his girlfriend. “It doesn’t mandate it.”
“Well, no. This isn’t a mandatory evac,” Eli conceded. Great, a couple of law students. “Not yet. But as I said—”
“Well if it isn’t mandatory, and you’re not the police—” The woman cast a triumphant glance at Eli’s civilian clothes. Didn’t even bother looking at Willa. “—I think we’ll just go ahead and take the vacation we planned.”
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” Eli said.
“What are you going to do, arrest us?” She smirked. “Put us in park ranger jail?”
“No, ma’am.” Eli blew out a breath and shifted his shoulders under the weight of responsibility for these clowns descending upon him. “I have no authority to detain you.”
“If you don’t mind, then?” She arched a brow at the trail Eli was now blocking.
Eli glanced at Willa, who stood silently at his shoulder, studying the pair with bemused detachment.
“It’s their skin,” Willa said finally and nodded up the trail. “Come on. These two want out of the gene pool, it’s cool by me.”
“Excuse me?” The woman’s face flushed. “I’d like your name and position, please. I’ll be speaking to your supervisor when we’re off the trail.”
Willa smiled. “Yeah, good luck with that. We’re volunteers, lady. We’re out here because some really smart people who know their shit think you ought to get off this trail now. You obviously think you know better.” She shrugged. “There’s no law against stupid, and even if there was, we’re not law enforcement, as you so astutely pointed out. Now if you don’t mind, I’m sure this trail is full of folks who aren’t suicidally bone-headed, so we’re going to go find them.” She nudged Eli again, clearly his signal to move on. But it chafed, leaving anybody out here, even the suicidally boneheaded who clearly weren’t going to listen to reason.
“Be safe,” he said to them. “If you smell smoke or hear fire, head back to the parking lot at a run, understand?” He accepted the woman’s glare as his due, and started up the trail again. Willa fell in behind.
“Have a nice hike,” she called back to the baby lawyers.
“We will,” the woman called back. “And screw you!”
“That was pleasant,” Willa said.
“Yeah,” Eli muttered.
“Law students?”
“That was my guess.”
“I hate lawyers.”
“Now I do too.”
“I hated them before.” Willa sighed behind him. “They talk and talk and talk, and it never amounts to anything but a massive bill.”
“I hope those two don’t have to pay for today.”
“Me, too. If only so you don’t tie yourself in knots over them.”
He threw a glance over his shoulder. “I’m not tying myself in knots.”
She returned his look with a cool, steady silence.
He looked away first, found himself staring at the path under his boots, watching it fly away underneath him like a river, a current carrying him closer and closer to the flames. “I’m not in knots,” he muttered. It sounded like a lie even to him.
Behind him, she exuded that stillness of hers, serene and unconcerned. “I know I’m not the only reason you’re in these woods, Eli. If I were, those idiot pre-lawyers back there wouldn’t have bothered you. They sure as hell didn’t bother me.”
He frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You’re really upset that they won’t get off the trail.”
“Of course I am. If the wind picks up, they could be in a lot of trouble.”
“We all could be.” He felt rather than saw her shrug. “They’re adults, though, and they’ve been warned. They clearly want to take their chances. Why not let them?”
“I am letting them.” He shifted his shoulders under the straps of his pack, their presence in the woods an itch he couldn’t scratch. “They’re still hiking, aren’t they?”
“Yep. But you hate it. It’s making your skin crawl. You’ve been twitching since we gave up on them.”
“I’m not twitching.” He caught himself wanting to adjust his pack again and suppressed the urge with ruthless self-control. Christ, it was nearly unbearable.
“You are.” The stillness thickened, wrapped itself around him. The itch eased almost immediately.
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Sedating me.”
“Stop guilt-tripping out over a couple of idiots then.�
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“I’m responsible for those idiots!”
“Exactly.” She grabbed his elbow, dragged him to a halt. “Eli, exactly! The guy you were, the one you’ve been trying so hard to walk away from? He’s still in here.” She tapped him just above his sternum strap. “And he’s a good guy. He’s not an arrogant cowboy or a thrill seeker. Not anymore. You’re here today because I dragged you here, sure. But it’s also because you have the skills and the knowledge to save some lives, and a sense of responsibility that won’t let you walk away when you can help. It’s a Venn diagram, right?”
“A what?”
“You know, those charts with the overlapping circles? Everything in life can be explained by a good Venn diagram.”
He stared at her. “Okay.”
“So you’ve got these circles, these problems, okay? Here’s one for My uncle and O’Malley want to punch each other.” She drew a circle in the air. “And here’s one for The reporters want to eat Willa.” She drew another circle. “And here’s one for Hotshot training I no longer want to use, and another one for I’m hardwired to care about people, either because I’m a firefighter or because I’m a bartender.”
“All that in one circle?”
She shrugged. “Make it two circles. I don’t care. This is your chart.”
“Okay.”
“So this situation happens with the reporters and the fire and me, and all the circles — all the problems — start to move closer together.” She lifted her arms, gathered in all the air-circles she’d drawn in a tight bundle between them. “Pretty soon they’re bumping up against each other, and there’s no way to separate them out into individual issues. The only thing to do is find the one place in the center where all the circles come together, where all the problems touch.” She stabbed a finger into this imaginary overlap, this confluence of all Eli’s problems. “That’s your solution, the only one. And in this case, the only way to solve all these problems, to satisfy all the pieces of you — the nephew, the firefighter, the bartender, the protector, the lover — was to walk into the fire again. So you screwed up your courage and you did it. It was the last thing you wanted to do, but you did it. And that’s fantastic.”
