Page 5 of Spellbound By the Firefighter

The sentence will not sink in. My eyes run the line, then slide off and go to the window—up the hill, to the orange smear lying low over the ridge. Back to the page. Off it again. There’s a fear in the room with me tonight, and it didn’t come from a book, and I can’t find the cover to close it.

He’s up there. In that.

The shop still smells like him—woodsmoke worked into everything he had on—and it’s in the air now, on the chair, on me. I keep breathing it, since it’s the only part of him still in the building.

Time does something ugly when you’re watching a window. It pools. I check my phone, and eleven minutes have passed since the truck left. I check again, and somehow only nine have passed, which can’t be right. A car goes by, and my whole body comes up out of the chair before I see it’s a hatchback with a fogged windshield—some kid driving home in a vampire cape. I sit back down and give my hands the book to hold.

This is the kind of fear I don’t do. This fear came outside of a book. It snuck its way in when a man I don’t know drove uphill into a fire, and there’s no cover to shut on it.

My hands have gone cold around the paperback I can’t read. I won’t breathe right until I watch him come back down.

That’s the part that has my knuckles white around the spine. Not that he might not come back. That I already fear what I’ll feel when he finally does.

So I watch. That’s the whole job I’ve given myself now—watch that black shoulder of rock and wait for it to tell me he’s alright.

The hours don’t pass so much as erode. The last bar on Prospect goes dark. A stray pair of headlights crawls by, and I’m up before I clock it isn’t a truck, just some straggler bound for home. The orange smear on the ridge thins, breaking apart into a few dull coals I have to squint to find. Thinner is better. Thinner means the fire is dying, and I hold onto that.

My phone says two. Later, it says three, and I’ve lost the hour in between to the dark and watching. My eyes burn. I’ve pulled my knees up into the chair, the black skirts bunched around me, and I’ve quit pretending to read—I hold the window instead.

Somewhere past three, the last coal on the ridge winks out. The whole shoulder of it goes dark. And I’m still here, wide awake, learning a fear that doesn’t quit when the danger does—it just settles in to wait with you.

Then, high up the grade, headlights.

I’m on my feet. Two beams swing down off the grade onto Prospect, and the form behind them resolves into the engine—red gone dull under the streetlights. The truck isn’t racing. Racing would mean something’s still wrong. It comes down the middle of the empty street toward the station, and I press my forehead against the cold glass and count.

I squint, trying to find him behind the windshield, but I can’t. Four men in helmets, and any of them could be him, but I have no way to know.

I’m good at this. That’s the terrible part. Keeping people at arm’s length, faces I never bother to really learn, everyone a comfortable stranger I can set down and walk away from. It’s kept me safe for years. Tonight, it means the one man I’d give anything to see is forty feet away and I can’t pick him out of a truck. I did that. I built the distance myself, and now I’m drowning in it.

The engine passes. Rounds the bend toward the house. Gone.

And I’m still at the glass, not knowing, and the not-knowing is worse than the watching was. I make myself sit. Make myself breathe. Tell myself the smoke’s already thinner over the ridge, that an easy-rolling engine means it’s done, that he said he’d come back and tell me, and a man like that keeps the small promises.

The bell over the door doesn’t ring because I locked it. What comes instead is a knock. Three of them, slow and spaced.

I know that knock. Three of them, slow, patient—the same knock I read aloud hours ago, a full room leaning in to hear it. My own scary story, come to the door for real.

I’m across the shop before I decide to move, getting the deadbolt on the second try and pulling the door open. The cold blasts in through the opening.

Tanner. Still in his gear, all of it, soot gone to a paste at his hairline, a fresh char-smell rolling off him that wasn’t there before. Filthy. Here.

“It’s out,” he says. “Wind laid it back down on the black. Nothing came off the scar.”

He doesn’t step in. He stands on the threshold with one hand on the frame—the same as the first time—and he looks down at himself, at the soot and char, the mess of the mountain all over him, then past me at the clean bright shop.

“I’d have cleaned up first.” His voice is wrecked from the smoke. “Didn’t want to make you wait to hear it was fine.”

“You came straight here.”

“You were at the window.” Not a question. He came down a whole mountain and found the one lit window on Prospect, twice in one night. “Didn’t want you waiting in here, worried.”

Something in me gives way, quiet and total.

“You’re getting soot on the floor,” I tell him.

“I’ll go.”

“You will not.”