“Not from here,” I say.
“I’m gonna put on pants and radio it in,” she says, hopping off the crate.
I turn and watch her walk across the lookout, blatantly checking out her ass.
“Why would you put on pants?”I ask.“They can’tseeyou.”
“I’ll know,” she says, laughing.“I don’t want to talk to my boss without pants on.It’s weird.”
My boss has seen me naked more than once, but when you camp with two dozen guys for half the year, privacy is one of the first things to go.
“Suit yourself,” I say, and finally get out of bed.
ChapterSeventeen
Clementine
I put my pants on.I know perfectly well that Mike and Jennifer, or whoever’s manning the radio this morning can’t see me, but it feels unprofessional to call in a forest fire with nothing on but underwear.
Hunter gets up and starts making instant coffee still buck-ass naked, standing in front of the propane stove with his arms crossed while he waits for the water to boil.
“You want some?”he asks.
I just hold up the mug I made while he was still asleep, and he nods.I take a sip and walk to the Osborne Firefinder.It’s a circular, spinning map in the center of the lookout, mounted on a chest-height table.I haven’t used one in a couple of years, since I first did my fire lookout training, and I frown at it.
“You’re on your own with that thing,” Hunter says.
“Shouldn’t you be better at this than me?”I ask, spinning it.It’s got a vertical column with a narrow sight mounted on both sides of the circle, and I squint through them, lining up the column of smoke in the crosshairs.
“I don’tfindfires,” he says.
“Yeah, I know, you put firesout,” I finish for him.
Even if I’m not using it quite right, it looks like the fire is over in the direction of the Spires, a series of sharp granite peaks a good twenty miles off.The Spires themselves are impossible to scale unless you’re anadvancedrock climber, but they’re also nearly impossible to get to, in the middle of a maze of steep mountains and sharp canyons.
I’ve never even been to the foot of the Spires.There’s one trail in, and it’s steep, rocky, treacherous, and the first fifteen miles of it doesn’t have a single place where you could possibly camp.More than one person has died, falling off a ledge or something, after getting stuck on Spinside Trail after dark.
“You figure out where it is?”Hunter asks, coming up behind me.He blows on his coffee in one hand, peeking over my shoulder, his other hand casually on my hip.
“Not exactly,” I say.“But it might be in the Spires.It’s at least in that direction.”
We both look at the map for a moment, Hunter studying it over my shoulder.
“You ever been there?”he asks.
I shake my head.
“You?”
“I took the trail in once,” he says.“When I got back from the Marines, my parentssuggestedI join this local veterans’ support group that did a lot of wilderness shit since it was supposed to help uscenter ourselvesand readjust to society.”
He takes a sip.
“Though they never really discussed how being with a couple of other guys in the middle of nowhere for a week was supposed to help me readjust to regular life,” he says dryly.
“Spineside Trail,” I say, trying to steer him back on track.
He’s stroking my hip with one thumb, distractedly.I don’t think he knows he’s doing it, but it feels so familiar andtenderthat I’m having a hard time thinking about anything else, becausethisis what I want it to be like with us.
