Page 13 of Heat Advisory

I followed her downstairs to the kitchen. We sat down at the dinner table, Cora across from me, and I felt a swell of confidence and victory as she told my parents about my test score.

Despite everyone chiming in about my grades, the food, and our days in general, my focus rarely left the girl across from me. She was so close, yet not close enough.

It was torture, but I loved every minute of it.

5

“Waterspouts are like past lovers—they lift you up and then drop you somewhere you don’t recognize.”

—It’s science

Cora

I didn’t know what I did wrong in a past life, but it was clearly catching up to me now.

Specifically, this week, when I saw two guys from my past—two of whom I’d had a romantic interest with.

Six months ago, I had broken up with a guy—Darren—who I’d been seeing for about four months. He was the epitome of “don’t judge a book by the cover”—cute on the outside, but a huge dickhead on the inside.

At first, he was nice and pleasant to be around. He was a scientist as well, and we had several other interests in common. But then he changed.

It started with simple comments about how I had to work weekends or holidays and I never had time for him. He worked as a professor at the local university, so he had weekends and all major holidays off, as well as all the random holidays only teachers, bankers, and politicians got to have. Well, I didn’t have that luxury.

Mother Nature didn’t take a chill pill simply because it was a Sunday or Thanksgiving, or even two in the morning on St. Patrick’s Day an hour after you went to sleep after drinking your body weight in green beer.

It made me work weird hours, but I loved my job. Darren hadn’t understood that, so I finally got smart and dumped his ass.

So, it was easy to understand why I hadn’t been thrilled to walk up to the scene of a wildfire assessment earlier today and see my ex standing there.

Seriously, two guys in one week?

“Darren, what are you doing here?” I asked him.

“Cora, what a surprise!” Darren said, looking at me like this was anything but a surprise. “I work for BAER Teams now.”

I paused, completely stunned by what he had just said. “You left your teaching job?”

“Yep,” he replied as though it were that simple.

“You left your stable teaching job…with holidays and weekends off…to take a job working for the Burned Area Emergency Response Teams?” I repeated slowly, knowing I couldn’t possibly have heard him correctly.

“That’s what I just said,” he said, looking at me like I was stupid. “My background as a soil scientist with experience in forestry management made me an ideal candidate. This will allow me to be a part of restoring these beautiful forests to the best they can be after fires.”

What the absolute fuck?

So, I guessed when I worked weekends, it was a bad thing, but when he did it, then it was okay?

God, I was so happy I broke up with his stupid ass.

“Hi, I’m Jade,” said my coworker, who had been watching the interaction, introducing herself to Darren. “I work with Cora.”

While I mostly did these assessments on my own, today’s had been one of what was suspected to be part of a string of arsons, so I’d brought someone else from our office along to assist. My job wasn’t to determine who’d started the fire, but to evaluate how severe the burn impacts were onto the soil when it came to landscape stability. Things like that were used to predict floods, debris flows, and water contamination.

“I’m Darren Derikson,” he responded, smiling at Jade. “I work with BAER, and I’m happy to help you with anything you might need.”

God, what a douche-canoe. It took everything in me not to roll my eyes at his comment.

“That’s so sweet of you,” she replied with a smile. “Thank you so much.”