Page 12 of Booked Up with the Mountain Man Firefighter

He’s crossing the courtyard, and he’s in his station uniform. Dark tee with the Copper Peak Fire Protection District logo across the chest, navy pants, boots. He didn’t change. He didn’t go home first. There’s a smudge on his forearm that could be grease or soot, and his hair is pushed back like he’s been running his hands through it. He looks like he walked out of the firehouse and came straight here without stopping to think about what he’d say.

He doesn’t look loud right now. He doesn’t look like the guy who fills rooms. He looks like a man who left work in the middle of something because he couldn’t wait.

He pushes the door open. The bell rings. He doesn’t go to the display. He doesn’t go to the counter. He walks straight to the aisle between poetry and literary fiction and sits down on the floor.

Right where we were last night.

I stand behind the counter and stare at the empty space where he was just standing. My heart is hammering so hard, I can feel it in my fingertips.

I walk to the end of the aisle and look down at him. He’s sitting with his back against the poetry shelf, his knees up, his forearms resting on them. The station logo stretches across his chest. He looks up at me and his face is open and serious.

“I don’t have a joke,” he says.

I don’t say anything.

“I thought about coming in here and being funny. Picking up a book, doing the bit, making you laugh again. I’m good at that. I know how to make a room breathe. I know how to get people to relax.” He pauses. “But that’s not going to work with you, because you already know what’s behind it.”

I grip the edge of the shelf beside me.

“You said something to me last night,” he says. “You told me I wasn’t the exhale. You told me I was the person who noticed someone needed one. And I’ve been sitting at the station replaying it because nobody has ever said anything like that to me. Nobody has ever looked past the noise and found something worth naming.” He holds my gaze. “You did. And then you called last night ‘nice.’”

My throat tightens.

“I don’t know who made you believe you’re the background, Ellie. But you’re the most interesting person I’ve ever met, and I’m sitting on your floor in my work clothes because I couldn’t make it through a shift without telling you that.” He swallows. “You saw me. The real version. And I’m not letting you talk yourself into believing it didn’t matter.”

The bookstore is silent. The courtyard is still through the window. My hands are shaking on the shelf.

He doesn’t reach for me. Doesn’t stand up, doesn’t close the distance, doesn’t pull me in. He stays where he is, on the floor, looking up at me, and waits.

Everything hits at once. The window. The mornings behind the glass. Connor saying “restful” and meaning it kindly and burying me with it. My sisters, bright and loud and filling every room while I sat in the corner with a book and told myself I preferred it there. Laurelle’s flowers, Lea’s coffee, Kendall’s gear walls—all the versions of useful I’ve measured myself against and come up short.

And then last night cuts through all of it. The floor. His face when I told him who he really was. The grin disappearing, and what was left behind being better than anything he’s ever put on for a room.

I sit down.

Not because he pulled me. Not because the speech was perfect. Because I’m tired of watching from behind the glass, and the person I was last night—the one who sees him, the one who laughed out loud for the first time in longer than she wants to admit—is more me than the version at the counter ever was.

I sit down across from him, my back against the literary fiction shelf, my knees almost touching his. “It wasn’t nice. That’s not the right word.”

“I know.”

“I got scared.”

“I know that too.”

“I’m not good at this. I’m not loud, I’m not exciting, I’m not the person who—” I stop. Swallow. “A guy I dated in college told me I was ‘restful.’ He said being with me was like coming home to a quiet house. He meant it as a compliment.”

“It wasn’t one.”

“No. It wasn’t.” My voice is steady, but my hands aren’t. “And then he left. Not all at once. He just stopped showing up. And I told myself that was fine, because that’s what happens when you’re the quiet one. People stop coming home.”

Mack is looking at me with that serious expression—the one without the grin, the one I first saw when I made him laugh in the bookstore and the performance fell away.

“You saw me,” he says. “On this floor, last night, you looked at me and told me who I was, and I believed you. Nobody has ever made me believe it before.” He reaches across the narrow aisle and takes my hand. “That’s not restful, Ellie. That’s everything.”

The word comes back to me different than it left. He picked it up and turned it over and gave it a new meaning, and I can feel the old one cracking under the weight of what he’s saying.

I lace my fingers through his. His hand is warm and rough and solid, and I can feel the calluses on his palm from the work he does—real work, the kind that leaves marks.