Page 8 of Booked Up with the Mountain Man Firefighter

She locks the front door. Flips the sign. Dims the overhead lights until the shop is all warm shadows and the glow from the courtyard streetlamp coming through the front window. She straightens a display, runs her fingers along a row of spines to make sure they’re flush, and tucks a bookmark back into the register drawer. Every movement is small and precise and unhurried.

I got here an hour ago. Came in before her last customer left, picked up a book, did the bit. She played along. But the bit ran out fast today, and when the customer left and the shop went quiet, neither of us tried to start it up again.

I sat down on the floor because standing felt like too much, and she didn’t ask me to get up. She went back to her closing routine, I stayed where I was, and the silence between us turned into something I didn’t want to break.

She comes around the end of the shelf and looks down at me. “You’re still here.”

“I’m still here.”

She sits down across from me, her back against the opposite shelf, her knees pulled up. The aisle between us is narrow enough that if I stretched my legs out, my boots would touch hers.

“Can I tell you something?”

“You’ve been telling me things for three days.”

“Something important.”

She goes still. That careful look. The one that means she’s deciding how much to let in. Then she nods.

“I’m the oldest of four,” I say. “Two brothers, one sister. My dad worked pipeline, gone three weeks out of every month. My mom held everything together, but she held it together tight, and when things got tense I figured out early that if I said something funny, the room exhaled. Everybody relaxed. My mom’s shoulders would come down. My sister would stop crying. It worked every time.”

Ellie doesn’t say anything. She’s watching me with those amber-brown eyes without filling the silence or giving me an out.

“I brought it into the firehouse,” I say. “Every crew needs a guy who keeps things loose. I’m good at it. I’m great at it.”

I hear myself and I almost laugh, but I don’t, because she’s looking at me. I can’t hide behind the joke when she’s looking at me like that.

“There was a call last winter. Bad one. Afterward, one of the guys was sitting in the bay alone, and I went over and sat with him. Didn’t joke. Didn’t deflect. I told him it was a rough call and it was okay to not be okay.”

I stop. This is the part I don’t tell people.

“He looked at me and said, ‘I appreciate it, man, but can you get Holt?’”

The shop is so quiet, I can hear the courtyard streetlamp buzzing through the glass.

“He wasn’t being mean,” I say. “He just needed someone he trusted with the heavy stuff. And that’s not me. I’m the joke. I’m the comic relief. I’m the guy you want when you need the room to breathe, not the guy you want when you need someone to sit with you in the dark.”

Ellie is quiet for a long time.

“That’s not what I see,” she finally says.

“What do you see?”

She leans forward, and her knees almost touch mine. “I see someone who sat down anyway. Who showed up when it mattered. Who’s sitting on my floor right now telling me something he doesn’t tell anyone, and he’s not making a joke about it.” Her voice is low and steady, and it takes me apart. “You’re not the exhale, Mack. You’re the person who noticed someone needed one.”

I stare at her.

The grin is gone. I didn’t take it off. She did.

Nobody has ever said anything like that to me. Nobody has ever looked past the noise and saw what’s underneath it and made it sound like something worth being. She just did it in four sentences on the floor of a bookstore, and I don’t have a joke for this. I don’t want one.

I lean forward and kiss her.

Her lips are soft and warm, tasting faintly of the herbal tea she drank earlier. At first it’s gentle, almost careful—like we’re both testing whether this is real. Then she makes a small sound in the back of her throat and tilts her head, and everything ignites.

I slide my hand into her hair, cupping the back of her neck as the kiss deepens. Tongues touch, slow and exploratory, then urgent. She shifts closer.

I pull her nearer until she’s climbing into my lap, knees bracketing my hips as I lean back against the solid bookcase behind me. The poetry shelf digs into my shoulders, but I don’t care.