Page 6 of Smokin' Situation

“I’m just here to help people get set up and prove that I can handle being on duty.”

“Mm hmm, sure. Not here to ogle pretty brunettes that blush the moment you make eye contact at all. But for real, don’t let Chief’s restrictions get to you, he just wants to make sure you’ve got a second to breathe before he metaphorically—well, maybe literally—throws you back into the fire.”

“I’ve had more than enough seconds to breathe over the last four months. Sitting around on my ass has only made it harder to move past it,” I gritted out, my jaw tense.

“Well, then, since you’re not sitting on your ass anymore, go make yourself useful.” Leave it to Baker to give me some tough love. At least he had a permanent position in the department. He didn’t have to worry about the politics of trying to earn your spot. Not that I was sure I really wanted a full-time spot if one miraculously opened in this tiny ass town.

“Yes, Lieutenant,” I quipped sarcastically and headed back to the festival coordinator for my next assignment.

The first two months I’d been trapped in my brother’s place had been torture. It hurt to breathe, every minute stretch of my damaged skin felt like being stabbed with needles. I was constantly exhausted. And I hated all I could do was lay on my stomach in the bed in his tiny guest room and watch countless hours of streaming shows I didn’t give a shit about.

When the forestry service had cut me loose with a fat severance check early in the spring, I’d fallen into a depression that I was still finding it hard to shake. I’d been on a crew of jumpers for over a decade. I lived, ate and breathed the job, and to suddenly not have a purpose was excruciating. What was even harder was realizing that there was nothing keeping me in Wyoming. That I’d spent a significant chunk of my life building a career with nothing to show outside of the job. Only the stinging reminder I was aliability.

Most of my friends were other jumpers or worked for the forestry service, and while their lives had moved on, mine had come to an abrupt halt. A few had texted me since I’d left, but I was having a hard time letting go of the lingering anger, which meant keeping in contact rarely happened. They had done nothing wrong, and it made me feel like shit, but they were living the life I wanted while mine had gone in reverse.

Which meant after more than a decade after leaving Sage Springs, I was forced to come back to the tiny ass community I’d grown up in with nothing to show for myself other than the scars I now wore on my back and a few duffel bags worth of belongings.

I’d left a young, idealistic man ready to prove himself, but had returned a scarred shell of myself. From the outside, everythingseemed fine, but with every ounce of gratitude and praise from the people who found out about my career serving others, it just drove home the fact that part of my life was over.

Financial stability wasn’t a problem either. It wasn’t hard to save money when you got hazard pay and didn’t have a social life. The problem was that there wasn’t much of a career pivot available for a smoke jumper who’d been grounded. Permanently.

One who woke up in the middle of the night covered with sweat and had panic attacks when he let the memories of that day creep in. There weren’t enough deep breathing exercises in the world that’d help you forget the feeling of being trapped like I’d been. There wasn’t a sleeping pill strong enough to block out the phantom feeling of a wildfire out of control and threatening to consume not only the surrounding landscape, but your own body as well.

When my dad had reached out to the county fire chief on my behalf, I’d been pissed. But it got my foot in the door. I just had to decide if I wanted to continue to be a firefighter. This career wasn’t one you easily walked away from. Over the years, it became a part of me, a calling I felt compelled to fulfill. An unshakable sense of duty that permeated the fiber of my being.

I’d appreciated that he was trying to help me find a place to land, but it’d just felt like an epic fucking demotion. Being a probationary officer on a volunteer squad was like hitting rewind on my career and starting at the bottom again. Actually, since my first assignment had been ground support in a full-time position for the forestry service, it was below the bottom.

Sure, it was career adjacent to what I’d spent more than the last decade doing, but I couldn’t survive on a volunteer firefighter’s meager earnings. At this point, I only got paid a fraction of what I’d been paid before, and while the health insurance I’d negotiated was decent, my passion for jumping wasn’t in my job description anymore. And it likely never would be again. I’d lost faith in my ability to make quick decisions, and in this line of work, it was a skill that meant life or death.

But along with my career trajectory being thrown in reverse, I’d also been forced to branch out to support myself. Which brought my new coworkers endless entertainment. They’d started calling mecowboysince I’d taken a ranch manager position at one of the local horse ranches. So now I babysat junior ranch hands and tourists who wanted to try their hand at ranching before they went back to their cushy lives at the end of their stay.

It wasn’t a terrible job so far, and it got me out of my brother’s place since they gave me a small cabin to live in as a part of my salary, but it wasn’t the life I’d envisioned for myself. Being back here wasn’t part of what I’d imagined for my future.

Although surveying the way the community was coming together to put on this festival, maybe I just wasn’t giving it a fair shot. Growing up here had been idyllic, but it’d never been part of my plan to stay here long term. I’d wanted more for myself, to make my mark on the world.

Shaking my head to clear the constant anxiety that seemed to be my new companion, I refocused on what I was getting paid to be here to do, not on the things I couldn’t control anymore.

Asthedaywenton, I realized the pretty brunette who’d been lingering in my thoughts had been right; it was hot as fuck. And I was itching, literally, to pull off the long-sleeved shirt I’d carefully pulled on this morning, but with the sun high overhead, I couldn’t risk it.

While I’d been lucky enough to only need spot graphs where the fire did the most damage along the back of my neck and under my arms, I couldn’t risk further scarring or graft site rejection by getting sunburned. It was bad enough that I’d wear the marks of one split-second decision on the skin for the rest of my life. Evenif that decision had ensured someone else had got to experience the rest of theirs.

Wiping sweat from my brow, I pulled my water bottle from the side pocket of my pants, trying—and failing—to keep my eyes away from the tent on the other side of the town square. The line at her booth was wrapping around the side of the aisle, blocking a few of the booths to her side, and even though the owners of said booths didn’t seem bothered by the line blocking a clear path to them, I was duty bound to clear the traffic obstruction.

At least that’s what I told myself when my feet started carrying me through the dense crowd and straight toward the person I’d been trying to ignore all morning. Baker’s vague warnings about her complicated social life weren’t at the forefront of my mind, because I wasn’t interested in doing anything other than helping her clear the line at her booth.

It didn’t matter that my eyes were laser focused on the small dimples that flashed when she smiled or laughed as she poured drinks. Or that I could see small droplets of sweat on the side of her neck that my depraved mind envisioned licking off while she rocked in my lap.

Fuck.

Getting a hard on in public probably wouldn’t endear the new probie to the Chief, so I shut down those thoughts and navigated my way through the crowd.

Walking past the beer tent, I paused, surprised, as I watched my cousin filling a table full of glasses from a tapped keg. I knew Reid helped his best friend Hudson at the bar sometimes, but I hadn’t realized that he’d also apparently helped himself to his buddy’s little sister, who looked wildly different all grown up. Hazel had been in middle school when I’d left town and seeing her now made me suddenly feel old as fuck.

I probably should’ve made time to see him since I’d been back in town, but I’d hidden away in Jay’s apartment for the last few months. My parents had tolerated my turning down invitations to family gatherings while I was still recovering, but with the annualfamily barbecue for the fourth approaching, I knew I’d have to bite the bullet and start showing up. Especially since my aunt and uncle lived down the road from the ranch.

“You going in?” a deep voice startled me, and I paused, looking over my shoulder into Baker’s highly amused face.

“Fuck off,” I laughed while he bounced his eyebrows, tilting his head toward the distillery booth. “Her line is becoming a problem, just trying to do what the Chief asked me to do and manage crowd control.”

---