Page 13 of Smoked

We walk across the yard, the grass soft under our shoes. The truck is a big dark shape against the tree line, cab glinting where the string lights shine nearby. I grab the keys from my pocket and unlock the driver’s side door, then pull it open.

I hit the interior lights. "It's a long way up,” I warn her. "Three steps. Grab the handle here."

She grabs the handle, puts a foot on the first step, and I realize about half a second too late that I should've gone up first. Instead, I'm standing below her with my hand hovering near her mighty fine ass in case she slips.

I take a breath, waiting until she climbs up. Then I go around to the passenger side and get in.

“This is so cool," she says, looking around, the dome light shining above.

It's not much to see. The sleeper's behind the seats—a narrow bunk I've spent more nights in than I'd like to count—and the dash is a wall of gauges and the mounted phone holder. The cord for the Bluetooth speaker I run my audiobooks through completes it all.

Tess’s eyes land on the manuals wedged near the passenger seat. She reaches back and pulls out Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto with the barbecue sauce thumbprint on the cover and about forty Post-it tabs protruding from it.

"You take these with you?"

"Mostly. I've got a couple more at the house, but those are the ones I use on the road. Something about a long stretch of highway makes me want to rethink my brine ratios."

She flips through it, smiling at the margin notes. Then she sets it down and studies the phone mount, the speaker, and the cord.

"So what do you do while you’re driving? Just…stare at wheat?"

I chuckle. “I listen to stuff.”

"Stuff."

"Audiobooks." I scratch my jaw.

She grins. “Oh, so you’re a reader.”

"That's not reading. That's…listening."

She frowns slightly. “Listening to audiobooks is definitely reading, Wade. What are you listening to right now?"

I should probably not tell the junior Honors English teacher at Deepwood Mountain High that I’m into a series about a man and his talking cat fighting their way through a post-apocalyptic dungeon game show. But I can’t lie.

"Dungeon Crawler Carl," I say.

She turns in the seat to face me. "Matt Dinniman?"

I stare at her. "You know it?"

"I know of it. A student did a book report on it last spring and I had to approve the selection. The writing is genuinely good, even though there's a scene involving a—actually, I don’t want to spoil it for you. Where are you in the series?"

"Book four. Carl just—” I stop myself, because I'm about to explain a plot point that she doesn’t need to hear. "Never mind. I borrow them from the Deepwood library," I say, as if that's a defense. "Through the app. It's free."

"I know. I make it mandatory for my students to download if they prefer audiobooks." She taps the sauce-stained manual between us. "Wade. You listen to audiobooks all day and you've got a stack of these that you've read so many times the pages are falling out. You’re a reader.”

"I thought you had to sit down and read literature."

"I'm an English teacher. And I'm telling you that your brain is doing the same work whether your eyes are on a page reading a manual or your ears are taking in a fictional story. You're following a narrative, tracking characters, making predictions, engaging with language. The delivery system is different. The reading isn't."

I grunt and shift in the seat because I never thought about it that way.

"We should check the fire," I finally say.

I climb down first, then go around to the driver’s side and reach up for her. She puts her hands on my shoulders and steps down, and for about two seconds her gorgeous body is pressed against me—her weight coming off the last step, my hands on her waist steadying her, and then she's on the ground and she's right there, looking up at me.

Her hands start sliding down from my shoulders over my chest, and god, I don’t want to move.