Page 2 of Redwood Blaze
I scramble to upright the bottle and clean up the water. “Who… who is it?”
There’s a chuckle that I recognize on the other side. “You okay in there, boss?”
It’s Rusty…
He’s a different kind of problem. One that I don’t need, but find myself wanting.
And that’s what got me into trouble the first time. Plus, it’s against the unwritten rules. No fraternization is just smart. And I take any rules seriously. Someone has to.
I stand and grab my bag. “I’m fine.”
Now to believe it.
ONE
RUSTY
Canyou have a crush when you’re thirty-five years old?
Or maybe it’s just plain, old fashioned love and since my last relationship imploded hard, I’m trying to keep the distance. But the distance could be because she’s my boss.
And hot as original sin.
Is it against the Black Timber Peak Hotshots —BTP Hotshots, for short— rules to date a superior? Yes and… no. It’s happened in the past and mostly, the big wigs just look the other way. Hell, in these parts, finding someone to spend the rest of your life with is a feat in itself, but doing it while you’re fighting 800-degree fires, that’s the proverbial needle in a haystack.
And I feel like I’m getting both burned and poked when I’m around her.
Millie… the Supe.
Short for Superintendent. The one who’s responsible for supervising the BTP Hotshots crew. She leads and directs the crew, which typically consists of fifteen to twenty firefighters, including an assistant superintendent, squad leaders, and senior firefighters in the chain of command, but she’s on top.
Millie’s the one who takes the lead on incident assignment, certifying that the Hotshots crew is available for assignment to a fire and ensuring the crew is properly trained and equipped for the mission. And then she does the operational planning, resource management of equipment and supplies, and crew cohesion, building and maintaining a strong team culture and fostering good relationships within the crew.
Man, I’d love to have a really good relationship with her. And it’s not for a lack of trying, because I’ve tried.
As one of the frontline firefighters, I’m her subordinate. I’m under her.
Dang, I’ve gotta stop thinking about it like that.
I adjust my cock as he starts on a one-way trip to being as hard as the spruces in the forest. But that’s what the woman does to me. I think of her and my body ignites. I look at her and I can’t stand for five minutes. I talk to her and I’m in the shower putting out my own fire.
You’d think I was a teenager again. And I’ve tried to change my feelings.
Fuck, I even tried to get reassigned to the Diamond Ridge Mountains near Helena to get away, but my team —Lassiter, Beau, Bastian, Quinton, Sterling, and Aspen, to name a few— just wouldn’t let it happen.
But as a woman, Millie’s had to work harder than any man on the team. She’s a dynamo, but there’s something sad or nervous about her. Something I can’t quite put my finger on, but she’ll let the façade slip every once in a while. Like a couple of weeks ago I needed to get her signoff on something and knocked on her office door, which is never closed. When she opened it, I swear I saw true fear in her eyes. Like she’d seen a ghost. And she rubbed a black hunk on her necklace like it was wiping away some bad juju.
And I remember last year, when she and I decided to create a vegetable garden only for the single goal of making BLTs for the staff, only to have deer from the forest make the four-foot fence their hurdle and the lettuce and tomatoes their smorgasbord one night. Everything to the ground and sometimes pulled out of the ground.
She saw it and she laughed until she cried, and she doesn’t laugh often. But that time, I think it was more about the crying as it seemed to take some stress out of her and when I asked if she was alright, she said, “It’s hard to say, Rusty. Are any of us alright, especially with what we do?”
It’s true. Death and destruction are all around us. From late April until end of October, we’re all on high-alert during woodland fire season. But fires really have no season. We’ve been out in the dead of January when a particularly dry winter and a particularly stupid camper threw out a cigarette combined into a forty-acre blaze. And we’ve been out in November when lightning decided to wreak havoc, lighting a cabin on fire and then scorching ten acres. Those are the small ones. The summer ones can be triple digit to four-digit acres large. And sometimes you just have to let it burn and hope for rain or a miracle.
A hotshot’s job is never done and that’s why most of us live in the small town of Black Timber Peak at the foothills of the mountain. When we do get a month off during slow season, we don’t go too far. But seeing as it’s middle of May right now, and the season’s been slow —but don’t go tellin’ Mother Nature that— as it’s the kiss of death to having a full-blown Armageddon. That woman is more fickle than my grandma and she went through six husbands in twenty-two years before she finally said that men weren’t the trouble and she was declaring herself celibate.
She did that for another sixty years, dying at the age of a hundred and one years old with only one child, my dad. Her dadwas a hotshot, my dad was a hotshot, and I guess it’s just in my genes to be one, too.
I walk into the kitchen, my stomach wanting a late afternoon, pre-dinner warm-up snack. When we’re working we burn just under six-thousand calories a day, and when we’re not in the mountains, we have to stay as fit as elite athletes. I run five miles a day and lift for an hour in the gym that’s attached to the BTP Cabin on the northeast outskirts of Black Timber Peak. I like being fit, and Millie does too. I think she probably does eight to ten miles a day and lifts for ninety minutes or longer. The woman is a beast, even if she’s not in the field, she could be. She could take over the position of any one of us. She’s that good.
