Page 8 of Bonfire with the Mountain Man

I chose this. Start to finish.

We don’t move for a long time. His eyes are closed, both of us breathing hard, his hands still spread warm across my back like he’s not ready to let the cold have me. The bulb hums overhead. Somewhere behind us, the last of the press drips into the carboy—slow now, nearly done.

My legs won’t hold weight yet, but I don’t care. I stay up on the barrel with him standing in the circle of me and let myself have it—this one impossible thing—before the world comes back.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Yes.”

And I am. That’s the strange part. I’m more okay than I’ve been in longer than I can say.

He helps me down, steadying me when my knees wobble. Then he finds my T-shirt and hands it over without making a moment of it. Kind in the small ways. Kind in the way that’s harder to do than the grand version.

I get dressed in the oak-smell and the low light, and I watch him top off the carboy and cap it, easy in his own space. Something cools in me that isn’t the room.

Because this ends. That’s what I know, standing here half-glowing and already bracing. In a day, the apples are pressed, the check is written, and I drive back up the pass. A man like this—a man who saves condemned buildings and resurrects dead recipes and makes a stranger feel chosen at two in the morning—that man goes back to his beautiful reclaimed life. And I’ll have been one more thing he took in because it was going cheap.

I want to be wrong, but I never am. Every time I’ve braced to be left, I’ve been left.

He turns and catches me watching, and whatever’s on my face, he sees it. He crosses the room. He doesn’t ask what’s wrong. He just takes my hand, threads his fingers through mine, and holds on.

“Still turning,” he says quietly. “Those apples.”

It startles a small laugh out of me. “There’s barely any left.”

“Then we finish them.” He lifts our joined hands, pressing his mouth to the back of mine. “And then we’re not done. Not the apples. Us. I want that clear.”

I want to believe him. That’s not the same as believing him.

But I let him keep my hand, and we go back to the last of the fruit. I don’t say the thing I’m thinking. Which is that everything I’ve ever wanted, I’ve had to give back.

5

BOONE

She’s still here when the sun comes up. I don’t take that for granted.

We finished the fruit somewhere past three, the last crate pressed and the fermenter sealed, and neither of us had a drive left in us. There’s a cot in the back office I keep for the long fermentation nights. I offered it. She didn’t pretend she wanted to make the pass in the dark. We slept a few hours on it, her back against my chest, both of us too spent to make it anywhere better.

Half a ton, nearly done. One more push and the fruit’s saved.

“Your Arkansas Blacks pulled the gravity right where you’d want it,” she says, not looking up. “You’re going to get a good brandy out of this. Better than last year.”

“That’s you.”

“That’s the fruit.” She taps the hydrometer. “I just grew it.”

I let it go. She doesn’t take a compliment any easier than she takes a no, and I’m learning that. I’m learning her the way I’ve wanted to for three autumns.

She goes out to the flatbed for the last crates, and I hear the truck before she comes back in. Not the engine. The starter clicking, catching nothing. Click, silence, click. Then her boots and her voice from the alley, flat.

“Boone. It won’t turn over.”

I go out. She has the hood up, glaring at the engine like it personally betrayed her. I know before I look what it is because I’ve been listening to that rattle come down the pass for three years. The truck’s been dying by degrees the whole time.

“Solenoid, probably,” I say. “Starter’s not far behind. It’s been telling you for a while.”

“It ran fine yesterday.”