For a second, they look at each other, and I feel like my blood stops pumping becauseI think he just asked her out.
Then I breathe again and hope no one noticed, because I don’t fucking care if Silas asks her out.I don’t care if they go on a date, I don’t care if they go home together, and I don’t care if they fuck and she whispers his name into his ear?—
“I can’t,” Clementine says.“I have to go back to work, I’m hosting a stargazing session for kids up at the mountaintop visitor’s center.”
I realize my hand’s gripped tightly on the arm of my plastic chair, and I let it go.
“That sounds cool,” Daniel offers.
“You could come up if you wanted,” she says.“We usually go pretty late, until eleven or so.Less alcohol, though.”
Maybe it’s my imagination, but I think she glances at me.
Clementine can do whatever she wants.We tried having a relationship.It didn’t work, and I’m smart enough to know that people don’t change, not really.Just because we’re older now doesn’t mean we won’t have the exact same problems.
I’m also pretty sure you can’t casually hook up with someone you once swore you’d love forever, even if you were young and dumb when you swore that.
Move on, I think.
“You around tonight for this one-bar pub crawl?”I ask Mandy.
“Sure!”she says brightly.
The Harried Bearisopen,in an old hotel in Lodgepole’s historic downtown.It’s got a huge, beautiful, polished wood bar with a mirror behind it, booths lining the walls, and black-and-white photos of Lodgepole’s mining town past all over the place.
To someone who spends a lot of his time in former mining towns deep in the mountains, this kind of bar feels like home.There’s something particularly western about it, like at any moment Billy the Kid could come through the doors, guns blazing.
“I just work in the office, actually,” Mandy says.The bar is pretty full and pretty loud, so she’s leaning in toward me, her hair tickling my neck so I can hear her.
“You don’t spend three weeks a month out in the wilderness?”I ask.
She laughs, putting one hand over her mouth.
“God, no,” she says.“I don’t knowhowthey do that.I feel gross if I go a whole day without showering.”
I said that once, but it was before I went to basic training and then spent months in the dust and dirt halfway across the world.After that, a few weeks without a shower wasn’t a big deal at all.I can’t imagine I smell good when I come in from the field, but I never notice.
“You get used to it,” I say, and take a drink of my beer.
Mandy’s nice.She’s cute.She’s into me, even if she’s not the most forward girl.Any other night she’d already be sitting in my lap, giggling, and in ten minutes we’d either be making out in the bathroom or going back to her place.
But tonight, I’m fighting the urge to ask her how Clementine is.What she’s been up to.What her favorite movie is these days.Dumb shit like that.
Mandy looks down at her drink, like it’ll tell her what to say next.
“So, is firefighting a full-time job year-round, or do you...”
The rest of her sentence gets lost as another woman bumps into me by accident, then turns and puts her hand on my arm.
“Sorry,” she says.
Then she does a double take, tilting her head a little to one side, her red lips just barely parting.
“Are you one of the Canyon Country Hotshots?”she asks, her voice suddenly getting lower, almost a purr.
She’s wearing a tight white t-shirt, tight jeans, high-heeled cowboy boots, and hashottest girl in a small townwritten all over her.
“Yes ma’am,” I say, turning on the charm without meaning to.
