Torch

by Roxie Noir

  My mom’s sitting in the armchair, her hands clasped on her crossed knees, staring distantly at a wall. I take a deep breath and lean against the sink.

  “I’m not working at the dude ranch this winter,” I say. “I’m moving to Lodgepole.”

  “Do you have a job there?”

  “Not yet.”

  I decided this three days ago, I think, but I don’t say it out loud.

  “A place to stay?”

  Here we go.

  “I’m staying with Clementine until I get my own place,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest.

  My mom looks at me for a long, long time. Then she stands slowly and puts her purse on her shoulder.

  “I know you think I don’t like her because she led you into sin,” she says.

  “Mom, you know that—”

  She holds up one hand and goes on, talking over me.

  “That girl used you and then tossed you aside the moment things got a little difficult,” she says.

  “That’s not what happened.”

  “Well, that’s sure what it looked like,” she says. “Hunter, you’re grown, and I can’t stop you, but I can tell you to think twice before making the exact same mistakes that you did before.”

  “I’m not.”

  The expression on her face says that she doesn’t believe me, even a little bit, but I know when arguing is pointless. When we broke up before, it’s not like I gave them a detailed account of everything that went down. They just know that I joined the military, she went to college, and six months later I told them she dumped me.

  “Call when you’re getting discharged,” she says. “I brought you some clothes, and I’ll come pick you up.”

  She points to a chair, where there’s a neat stack.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I say.

  She steps forward and kisses me on the cheek, then leaves without saying anything else.

  Three days later, I park my shitty, old truck outside Clementine’s house, grab my duffel bag, and walk up her porch steps. She pulls the door open before I can even knock and for a moment we both stand there, grinning like idiots.

  Then a ball of yellow-and-white fur shoves past Clementine, nearly knocking her over, and jumps up, both paws right on my stomach.

  “Oof!” I say, caught by surprise.

  “Trout, get down,” Clementine says.

  Trout gets off me and starts hopping up and down on her front paws.

  “Trout, sit,” Clementine says.

  Trout looks back at her, then at me again. Then she sits, slowly, her tail thumping the porch, staring at me like she has to tell me something really urgent.

  Clementine waits about three seconds. Trout picks up one front paw at a time and moves them, like she’s fidgeting.

  “Okay!” Clementine says, and Trout jumps to her feet and rams herself against my legs.

  “Atta girl,” I say, bending down and thumping Trout hard. She wags her tail and throws her head back, clearly enjoying this.

  “Do I get a greeting?” Clementine asks, leaning against the door frame. “I promise I’m wagging my tail on the inside.”

  I laugh, leaning over Trout, and give Clementine a long hello kiss.

  “Welcome to your temporary lodgings,” she says.

  I step around Trout and walk inside, the dog close on my heels. I look around, realizing I’ve never actually been in Clementine’s house before.

  “Mandy, Lucy, and I had a house meeting about you,” she says, keeping her voice low. “You get your own shelf in the fridge and we’re charging you rent after two weeks.”

  “Fair,” I say.

  She stops, then glances toward the living room, craning her neck around the corner. Then she pulls me back, out of sight, and whispers.

  “Literally half the meeting was about the toilet seat,” she says. “For the love of God, please put it down. Please. They’ll murder you in your sleep.”

  I laugh quietly and kiss her, lowering my duffel bag to the floor. I grab her hips and pull her against me, her body soft and yielding.

  “I’m serious,” she says.

  “I’m looking at a couple places this weekend,” I say. “And I promise not to horrify your roommates while I’m here. I wasn’t raised by wolves.”

  She kisses me again, her body pressed against mine, and I’m glad I’m wearing jeans.

  I’m just staying with Clementine and her roommates until I find a place. It’s not like I can just move in with her and her roommates, and even though I thought about suggesting we look for a place together, I know she doesn’t want to move quite that fast.

  “I’ll give you a tour in a few minutes,” she says, pulling away. “There’s rules about which soap you can use in the shower.”

  “Am I gonna have to take notes?” I ask.

  Clementine laughs.

  “Probably,” she says, and tugs on a belt loop with one finger. “But I’ll try to make it worth your while.”

  “You could start now,” I murmur.

  “Mandy and Lucy are in the living room,” she says. “Probably wondering what the fuck is taking us so long.”

  “We could take longer.”

  She doesn’t answer, just kisses me one more time, then grabs my hand and pulls me along.

  “C’mon,” she says.

  41

  Clementine

  Six Weeks Later

  “Wait, no,” I say, glancing around. “I think it’s this way.”

  I take off without waiting for Hunter to answer, mostly because I know he’s going to disagree.

  “It’s not,” he says, but he follows me anyway.

  I round the corner and stop. It’s just another row of ugly, half-dead cornstalks. A dead end.

  “Goddamn motherfucker,” I mutter, clenching my fists in the pockets of my fleece.

  “It’s back there,” Hunter says, pointing.

  “We went that way already,” I say.

  “We went this way too.”

  “Well, we did now,” I say.

  “You could try believing me,” Hunter says.

  A breeze blows through the corn maze, shaking the stalks and rattling the leaves, and I realize that we’re about to get into a fight over a Halloween attraction for children.

  I think Hunter realizes it too, because for a moment, we just look at each other.

  “Want to be that couple who gets into a fight in the Great Maize Maze?” I ask.

  “Only if we can air our dirty laundry at the top of our lungs,” he says, and pushes his hands into his pockets, relaxing a little.

  “I was thinking we could argue about our sex life in detail near a group of children,” I say.

  Now Hunter laughs.

  “C’mere,” he says, walking toward me. He puts one arm around me and points with the other toward the wooden tower in the middle of the maze.

  The wooden tower we cannot fucking seem to find, by the way.

  “Didn’t that kid enter the maze with us?” he says.

  I blow my bangs out of my eyes, because I need a haircut.

  “Magenta jacket?” I ask. “Yeah, I think she did.”

  We stand there for a moment, and I’m pretty sure we’re thinking the same thing: we both navigate the wilderness as part of our jobs. How the hell are we so bad at this?

  “I bet she cheated,” he says. “It’s not like these are real walls, she’s probably small enough to just run between the cornstalks.”

  “Probably,” I agree. “Kids are cheating jerks.”

  Hunter kisses me on the cheek, the tip of his nose cold against my face.

  “Want to go try your way?” I ask.

  We find the tower without getting into a fight. Turns out neither of us was right, and the turnoff was further back than either of us thought.

  From twenty feet in the air, the corn maze is embarrassingly small. We both look at it for a while, considering the best exit strategy.

  “Looks like we start by going north,” I say, pulling ou
t my compass.

  “I can’t believe you brought a compass to a corn maze,” he says.

  “I like being prepared,” I say.

  “Then what heading do we proceed along?” he teases.

  “The heading is shut up or I’m leaving you to fend for yourself,” I say. “It’s getting dark and someone told me that they release wolves into the maze at sundown, so be nice to me.”

  “I could fight a wolf,” Hunter says, grinning.

  “You could fight one wolf,” I say. “Not a pack of wolves.”

  “I’d retreat up here,” he says, looking around the tower. “They’d be forced to come at me one at a time, like henchmen in a bad action movie.”

  “Sure, no problem,” I say.

  A magenta jacket catches my eye. It’s running out of the maze. Hunter sees it too, and we both sigh.

  “Cheater,” I mutter.

  When we finally get out of the maze, it’s nearly sunset, so we skip the pumpkin patch, get hot apple cider, and go sit by the bonfire. I sit against a haystack, Hunter leans against me, and I drape one arm over his chest.

  We’re surrounded by teenagers making out. It’s pretty obvious that the Ladies Auxiliary didn’t quite think the bonfire through, because several of them are just walking the bonfire in circles, frowning at teens and reprimanding their inappropriate behavior.

  “Hey,” says Hunter.

  “Are you gonna ask me to make out?” I say.

  “I was gonna ask if you wanted to get inappropriate,” he says.

  “Maybe if you put your jacket over your lap I can give you a hand job without anyone noticing,” I say, laughing.

  I’m slightly more tempted by the idea than I should be.

  “Or you could sit on my dick and pretend you’re just sitting on my lap,” he suggests, grinning up at me.

  “Solid plan,” I tease. “It’ll fool everyone.”

  Another Lady of the Auxiliary walks by, glaring. Hunter and I wave slightly, and she nods at us. We both go quiet for a little while, watching the fire. After a few minutes he sits up and puts his arm around me and I lean against him, our positions reversed, his thumb slowly stroking my shoulder.

  “I really like this,” he says quietly.

  “The bonfire?”

  “Everything,” he says, slowly. “I like the festival, I like living in Lodgepole. I like being with you.”

  I snuggle into him a little more.

  “I like it too,” I say. “We didn’t even get into that fight in the corn maze.”

  He considers the fire for a moment.

  “What about our sex life would we be arguing about?” he says, mostly teasing.

  I laugh.

  “That was a joke,” I say. “Though I was really annoyed two weeks ago when you had a cold and wouldn’t have sex with me.”

  “I was afraid I’d sneeze and cover you in a layer of snot,” he says.

  “Ew,” I say.

  “Exactly,” Hunter says.

  Another pause.

  “So my plan worked,” he says. “I had sex with you until you decided this was an okay idea.”

  “It sounds really terrible when you put it that way,” I say.

  “I need one of those Orgasm Donor t-shirts,” he says.

  “If you got that shirt this relationship would be a less okay idea,” I say, and Hunter laughs.

  It took him all of a week to find a job as the Lift Operations Supervisor at a nearby ski resort. The words “veteran” and “firefighter” came out of his mouth, and he got hired because of course he did.

  Once he had a job, it was another five days before he found a studio apartment above a clothing boutique on Lodgepole’s tiny Main Street. Technically, he was living with me for fifteen days, but we had another house meeting and decided not to charge him rent for that last twenty-four hours.

  “You know, I thought it would be harder,” he says. “Not just the job and the apartment, but with us. And it hasn’t been hard.”

  “Hunter, are you calling me easy?” I ask.

  “You did offer to give me a public hand job five minutes ago,” he says into my hair.

  I laugh.

  “I am spectacularly bad at turning you down,” I say. “I was twenty minutes late for work the other day.”

  “I misread the clock and thought it said five-thirty,” he says. “That was an accident.”

  “Every time you don’t want me going somewhere, you just whip your dick out and I climb right on,” I tease.

  An Auxiliary Lady walks past and glares at me. I smile innocently.

  “That’s not true,” Hunter says. “I would never use my dick for nefarious purposes, only for good.”

  “Well, that’s the problem,” I say. “If it weren’t good, it wouldn’t make me late for things.”

  “Maybe you just need willpower,” Hunter teases.

  I laugh. He pulls me a little closer, and I can feel him swallow, then take a deep breath.

  “What I’m trying to say is I love you,” he says. “You probably think it’s too soon, and it’s okay if—”

  I put my hand over his mouth and sit up straighter, looking right into his face, my heart beating wildly.

  I suddenly feel reckless, almost like this is dangerous to say out loud. But it’s true, so fuck it.

  “I love you too,” I say.

  He smiles under my hand, so I take it off his mouth.

  “I promise not to take it back this time,” he says, his forehead against mine.

  I don’t know what to say, so I kiss him, and even though there are teenagers making weird noises all around us, it feels secret and intimate, just us and this bonfire and the chilly October air. He sneaks his hand up under my shirt and I wind my fingers through his hair, my tongue in his mouth, and then we’re definitely making out.

  Hunter pulls back a little.

  “There’s a chaperone,” he says.

  I’m half on top of him and not too far from suggesting that we sneak back into the corn maze, where at least it’s dark.

  “It’s okay, we’re in love,” I say, and Hunter grins.

  The chaperone walks on past. We don’t stop making out.

  Epilogue: Clementine

  Christmas Eve

  Jennifer looks up and down the long table, biting her lip, looking very serious.

  “I want the tiara,” she finally says.

  “You can’t have the tiara,” Lucy says, her words just a little mushy-sounding. “It’s already been traded twice. I am the final owner of the tiara.”

  Her face is perfectly straight as she places the tiara on her head, staring down Jennifer.

  Jennifer sighs, her shoulders slumping. Her husband Carl pats her on the back.

  “Okay, what’s actually available?” she asks for at least the third time.

  “Not this,” Lucy says, pointing at her head.

  “I know,” Jennifer says.

  “Don’t confuse the situation any more than it’s already done been confused,” says Mike, who’s drunk enough to get folksy.

  Since it’s nine o’clock the night before Christmas, the Rusty Beaver is empty except for us. Actually, I think they might have intended to close at eight, but the bartender and the single waitress seem like they’re enjoying this show.

  We were supposed to have our office holiday party a week ago, but a black bear went rogue in the National Forest and we had to deal with it. The bear is fine, just relocated, and now we’re doing this on Christmas Eve.

  “This is available,” Mandy says, holding up a twelve-pack of toilet paper. “It’s available and useful.”

  “It’s utilitarian as fuck,” I say.

  “Jennifer,” Hunter says. “Jennifer. Jennifer.”

  “What,” she says.

  “Have you ever played with these,” he says, holding up a package of what looks like multi-colored pills. “When you put them in water, they turn into dinosaurs, and I’m not even kidding.”

  Jennifer just rolls h
er eyes and keeps looking.

  “This is all bullshit,” she says after a minute. “I want a new one.”

  She reaches for the pile and grabs a hastily-wrapped present from the pile, as allowed by the somewhat-complicated rules of our annual workplace gift exchange.

  There are two easy rules, though: one, the gift cannot cost more than ten dollars, and two, the exchange must take place at the Rusty Beaver.

  She rips the paper off, revealing a metal sign, and starts laughing hysterically. We shout at her to turn it around, so the whole table can see.

  There’s a moment of silence, and then we start laughing.

  On the metal sign is a cartoon bear, skiing down a mountain, its front paws over its genital region, and the bear looks either sultry or embarrassed. It’s surprisingly hard to tell.

  Across the bottom, the sign reads BEAR NAKED SKIING.

  “But why?” Mandy gasps.

  “It’s beautiful,” Mike says.

  “Bears are always naked,” says Mandy. “Why’s it embarrassed?”

  “Maybe it’s embarrassed that it’s skiing,” Lucy says, tiara still on her head.

  I turn to Hunter, laughing so hard I can barely talk.

  “Did you steal this from the ski resort gift store?” I ask.

  “No, I bought it from the ski resort gift store with my employee discount, thank you very much,” he says.

  “Hunter,” Jennifer says, pointing. “You’re my new favorite. Did I tell you guys about the dog door? Gertrude can get in and out but not the raccoons.”

  “Babe, I’m right here,” Carl says dryly.

  Jennifer kisses him quickly, and we all aww because of alcohol.

  “Babe, I know you’re the father of my children, but you didn’t fix the dog door,” Jennifer explains.

  “Good to know what the hierarchy is,” Carl says.

  “Whose turn is it?” Mike asks.

  Carl holds up his slip of paper with the number five on it.

  “I’d take the sign but it’s coming home with me anyway,” he says.