“You’re targeted. You’re also miked.”
Ed got behind the camera. Joelle stepped closer with her clipboard. I rolled my shoulders once and set my gear in order: long skewers, plain graham crackers, milk chocolate, marshmallows, a small cast-iron grate, a flat stone I’d washed that morning, and a clean knife.
The setup looked plain beside Sunny’s table.
Hers looked like a dessert case had hiked up the mountain and decided to cause trouble. Square graham crackers with browned-butter edges. Chocolate disks in neat stacks. A jar of salted caramel the color of old amber. Huckleberries dark as summer dusk. Marshmallows dusted with something that smelled faintly like vanilla and smoke. Tiny flakes of salt in a little glass dish. Two squeeze bottles. Three spoons. Four towels.
A lot of fuss for something meant to be eaten beside a fire with sticky fingers.
Then Sunny touched one marshmallow, turned it, checked its surface, and set it in a new position near the heat. She didn’t waste motion. She didn’t fuss for the camera. She gave her setup the same attention I gave coals and wind, and the competence of it hit me harder than the red shirt or the apron had.
I shifted my stance in the dirt.
I’d grown up on this meadow. Not this exact clearing every day, but near enough that Cinder Ridge sat in my bones the way smoke lived in old canvas. My dad had taught me how wind ran along this slope before I knew how to drive. My uncles had dragged me up here to clear deadfall when I was thirteen and mad at the world. I’d eaten burned hot dogs near these pines, hauled water through this grass, watched lightning walk the far ridge, and learned that Fire Mountain didn’t care whether a person meant well.
Sunny didn’t belong to this place yet.
But she was paying attention now.
Ed lifted a hand. “Rolling.”
Caprice stood just off-camera. “Round One of the Get Fired Up! Cook-Off. Sunny, Flint, give me the stakes.”
Sunny looked straight into Ed’s lens and smiled.
There was the brand. Bright, polished, and sharp enough to cut if a man underestimated it.
“Yesterday, a man with a fire hose murdered my dessert table.”
“I stopped a spot fire,” I said.
She didn’t look away from the camera. “Today, I’ll be avenging twelve fallen shortcake cones with salted caramel huckleberry s’mores.”
Caprice pointed at me. “Flint?”
I held up a marshmallow. “I’m making s’mores.”
A beat of silence followed.
Ed lowered the camera a fraction. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Sunny pressed a hand to her chest. “I felt transported.”
“You’ll feel worse when I win.”
Her eyes cut to mine. “That’s the man with the hose.”
The challenge in her voice made my skin heat.
Caprice tapped her clipboard. “I need both of you to remember this is a food segment and not a county debate. Continue, but make the food visible.”
We started.
I built my first s’more the way I’d done it since I was old enough to stand near a fire without my mother threatening to tie me to a porch post. Marshmallow on the skewer. Not shoved straight into flame like amateurs did, but held near the coals where the heat rolled clean and even. Turn slow. Let the sugar swell. Wait for the surface to go glossy, then pale gold, then deeper.
Sunny, across from me, was working with a double skewer and a kind of focus that made the meadow narrow around her. She warmed her marshmallow high, then lowered it in stages, adjusting for the breeze before it had time to push smoke into her face.
