Page 12 of Befriending the Bear
“D-did you ever…?” I started, then stopped, appalled at myself for nearly asking such a personal question. But when he sent me an encouraging nod, I finished my sentence. “…w-write?”
He tilted his head, considering. “Not yet. But I’ve been thinking about it. My career gifted me thirty years of stories, but the hardest one is why I’m not telling them around a firehouse kitchen anymore.”
The parallel wasn’t lost on me. We were both trying to write ourselves into new chapters while the old ones kept bleeding through the pages. “Sometimes I th-think about…” I made a gesture like tearing paper. “Starting over. N-new story.”
“But then you’d lose all the good chapters too. And from what I can see, there must’ve been some beautiful ones.”
My throat tightened. How did he do that? How did he see straight through to the heart of things? “M-Marcus,” I said, his name feeling strange and sacred on my tongue after so long. “His name was M-Marcus. We were together f-f-fifteen years.”
Fraser’s hand twitched on the table like he wanted to reach out but thought better of it. “That’s a lot of chapters.”
“He d-died seven years ago. S-sudden. I found him—” The words locked up completely, my jaw working uselessly. This was why I didn’t talk about it. This was why I stayed home.
“Hey.” Fraser’s voice was low, steady. “You don’t have to tell me everything today. Or ever, if you don’t want to. We’re simply having coffee.”
We were friends having coffee. The simplicity of it let me breathe again. I took a sip, using the movement to collect myself. When I looked back up, Fraser was watching me with those patient eyes, no judgment or pity in them. “I d-don’t date,” I said, needing him to understand. “I c-c-can’t… I w-won’t.”
“I know, and I meant what I said. All I want is a friend. Someone who gets that sometimes, the hardest stories are the ones worth telling, even if we’re not ready to tell them yet.”
The thing was, I believed him. Something about Fraser made me want to believe in possibilities I’d written off years ago. Not romance. God, I couldn’t even think that word without feeling like I was betraying Marcus’s memory. But friendship? Maybe I could manage that.
“W-what are you reading?” I asked, desperate to shift the conversation to safer ground.
His smile suggested he knew exactly what I was doing but was willing to go along with it. He held up his book. “The Hour of the Land. It’s a beautiful plea to keep our lands wild.”
I’d heard of it but hadn’t read it. “You l-l-like nature.”
“I do. I’ve always been an outdoors guy, even as a teenager.”
“W-w-where did you g-grow up?”
“Montana. I’m the youngest of four boys, and my old man put us to work in his logging business from when we were ten or so. I joined the forest service as soon as they would accept me, then did the training to become a hotshot.”
“H-hots-s-shot?”
“A specialized wildfire firefighter. They’re called hotshot crews.”
“Y-you were a f-f-firefighter?”
He nodded. “I ended up as a smokejumper.”
Smokejumper? He’d been one of those guys who jumped out of an airplane into the middle of big forest fires? I couldn’t think of anything scarier than that. “C-c-c…” I swallowed. The word “courageous” wouldn’t come. “B-brave,” I said instead.
“The first few times, yes. After that, your training and experience kick in and you simply do what needs to be done.” A moment of raw grief passed over his face. “Until you can’t anymore.”
I knew that kind of pain. “I’m s-sorry.”
He blew out a long breath. “I would’ve had to retire soon anyway, but I would’ve preferred to do it on my own terms rather than becoming physically unable to do the job.”
The silence that followed was thick yet not uncomfortable. More like a pause in which we both acknowledged the pain that we shared.
But I wanted to give him an out of this topic that had gotten so much heavier than I had intended. “What p-poem will you b-bring to b-b-book club?”
“I don’t know yet. Eleanor said it had to be a poem that spoke to your soul…” he said, gracefully going along with the change of topic. “That’s a tough assignment. Other than Mary Oliver, I haven’t read that much poetry. And I don’t want to bring something cliché, like Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken.’”
I gave a one-shoulder shrug. “It’s c-cliché for a r-reason. P-p-people love it. It sp-speaks to them.” I could easily see how that one would speak to him. He was at a crossroads of sorts, wasn’t he?
“I don’t like being like everyone else,” he said, shooting me an easy grin. Without thinking, I smiled back at him. His eyes widened, and he swallowed, as if my smile had shocked him. Come to think of it, maybe it had.
