Spark and Scale

Farah sits at the corner table by the window of the lakefront bar and counts what she has left. One night. A duffel bag packed in Krystal's spare room. A job starting at ten tomorrow morning four hundred miles south, a fire crew in a city big enough that nobody will know her name for the first year. Twenty-two years old, and she is about to drive away from the town she has called home for the past year.

She turns her glass on the coaster and watches the fairy lights strung along the window frame blur a little. She is not sad, exactly. She made the right call. Small towns are for people who want their whole life decided by the time they turn twenty-five, and Farah wants to see what else is out there before the map closes in on her. Six months ago she ended a two-month thing with a guy from her old crew in Timber Ridge, amicable as anything, and since then she has been single and lighter for it. Free. That is the word she keeps landing on. Free, with one night left to spend.

The bar is half full on a Thursday, mostly lodge staff and a few patrol guys drying out their boots by the woodstove. The volcano sits dark above the tree line, not doing anything, the way it has not done anything for four thousand years, and yet everyone in town still talks about it like a coworker with a bad temper. Farah likes that about Timber Ridge. The mountain gets more gossip than the mayor.

Krystal slides onto the bench across from her with two fresh drinks and that look on her face. Farah has known Krystal since she arrived in town a year ago, a full year, and that look has never once led anywhere good.

"No," Farah says.

"I haven't said anything."

"You're winding up to say something. I can see the propeller spinning."

Krystal pushes a glass at her and grins. "Okay, so there's a guy at the end of the bar."

"There's always a guy at the end of the bar."

"This one's different. Maintenance up at the lodge. Big shoulders, quiet, keeps to himself, and every woman who comes through this town in ski season asks Howard about him and Howard just laughs."

Farah sips her drink and does not look toward the end of the bar, because looking would be admitting interest, and admitting interest would be handing Krystal a win. "I leave at dawn, Krystal."

"Yeah. I know." Krystal says it easily, like it is the whole point. "That's why tonight and not next month. One good night, no strings, no awkward Monday at work, no town gossip with a week to grow. It's the perfect math. You're a numbers girl, right? Firefighters love math."

"Firefighters love naps," Farah says. "But go on."

"He's over there. Sergei. Go say hi, or don't, and spend your last night in Timber Ridge talking to me about moving boxes, which, wow, what a treat that would be for you."

Farah laughs despite herself and finally lets her eyes drift down the bar. She finds him on the second try because the first thing she notices is not a face but a build, a man sitting on a stool like the stool is lucky to have him, forearms resting on the wood, a short glass untouched in front of him. Dark hair, a jaw that looks drawn with a heavy hand, and when he turns his head a little toward the window light she catches his eyes and something in her chest does a thing she does not authorize.

Okay, she thinks. Okay, that is not nothing.

He is, she would guess, in his early thirties, and he has the stillness of a person who works with his hands all day and does not need to perform anything for anybody. There is a faded flannel over a gray shirt and there is sawdust, maybe, or something like it, ground into the creases of his sleeves. Farah has spent a year around men who run into burning buildings and she knows what confidence looks like on a body. This is different. This is a man who is not trying to be seen and is seen anyway.

"He's looking over," Krystal says, way too pleased.

"He is not."

"He absolutely is. Farah. He's walking over. Oh my god, act normal."

"Get out of the booth, you're crowding me," Farah hisses, and Krystal scrambles off with her drink and vanishes toward the jukebox like a criminal leaving a scene.

Then he is there, standing at the corner of her table with a grin that starts small and gets bigger like he is letting her in on a joke he has been holding all evening. Up close he is worse for her plans. Broad through the chest, warm-eyed, with a scar running through one eyebrow that she wants to ask about and also wants to stop looking at.

"Krystal bribed me with a free beer to come say hi," he says. "I figure honesty is the right way to start. Sergei."

"Farah." She shakes his hand and his palm is rough and warm and she lets go a half beat later than she meant to. "So you can be bought. Good to know."

"Absolutely. Cheap, too. Krystal drives a hard bargain."

"Sit down before I feel like a charity case."

He drops into Krystal's vacated spot and stretches his legs under the table, and Farah registers with some irritation that even the way he sits is attractive. There ought to be a law. There is probably a fire code about it.

"So Krystal says you do maintenance up at the lodge," she says.

"Among other things. Fixing pipes, shoveling roofs, keeping the hot tubs hot. What about you? She said something about fire."

"Firefighter. Urban rescue out of the station on Mill Street. I start with a new crew down south in the morning, actually."

Something flickers across his face, there and gone, too fast for her to name it. "Huh. Then tonight's a bad night to waste on small talk."

"Is that what this is? Small talk?"

"This?" He gestures at the table, the drinks, the fairy lights. "This is me working up the nerve to ask you a question that's going to sound insane."

Farah leans back and crosses her arms, mostly so her hands have something to do. "Try me. I've heard every insane question a mountain town can produce."

"What's the protocol," he says, dead serious, "when a firefighter meets a dragon?"

She stares at him for three full seconds. Then it clicks, the story Krystal half-told her months ago over cheap tacos, the lodge worker with the strange eyes, the whole town joke that everybody knows and nobody says out loud. She laughs, a real one, surprised out of her.

"Wait. You're the dragon guy. You're actually the dragon guy."

"Guilty." He spreads his hands like he is showing her an empty deck. "Dormant volcano, dormant dragon. Poetic, right? Howard thinks it's hilarious."

"Okay, so answer it then. What is the protocol? Because honestly, the training manual never covered it."

"Depends," Sergei says, and the grin comes back, slower this time. "Is the firefighter planning to put the dragon out, or does she want to see what he can do with all that heat?"

Farah picks up her drink so he cannot see how wide she is smiling, which does not work at all. Outside the window the mountain sits quiet and black against the stars, patient as a held breath, and for the first time all week she is not thinking about the highway at all.

"Krystal's watching from the jukebox," Farah says. "We should give her a show. Buy me a drink and tell me how a dragon ends up fixing hot tubs."

"That's a long story."

"I've got one night."

They end up in a booth in the back corner, the one under the string of fairy lights that half the town complains about and nobody actually wants taken down. Sergei carries the drinks over like it is the most natural thing in the world, and Farah slides in across from him and tells herself the heat in her chest is just the beer. It is not the beer. She has had beer before. This is something else, a low warm pull toward a man she met eleven minutes ago, and she is twenty-two years old and honest enough with herself to name it. Lust, plain and simple, the reckless kind that shows up right when a sensible person would be checking the time.

Sergei talks with his hands when he finally gets going, which surprises her, because she had him pegged as a shrugs-and-one-word man. The lodge story comes out in pieces. He came to Timber Ridge six years ago with no plan and a truck that died on the mountain road, and the old owner gave him a room in exchange for fixing the boiler, and the boiler turned into the roof and the roof turned into everything else. He does not say where he came from before that. He looks at the mountain when he almost says it, and then he takes a slow drink and changes the subject to her, which is a move she has seen a hundred men fake and maybe three pull off genuinely.

The talk rolls along easy until it does not, until the bar noise thins out around them and the question she has been holding since the jukebox comes up her throat. She sets her glass down and looks at him straight.

"So the dragon thing. Krystal swore it was a joke. Half the town swears it's a joke. The other half swears it isn't. Which is it?"

Sergei goes quiet in a way that is not awkward. He studies her face like he is reading a gauge, checking for fear or mockery, and whatever he finds there seems to settle something in him. He glances once toward the jukebox where Krystal is pretending very badly to pick a song, and then he hooks one finger into the collar of his flannel and pulls it down.

The skin below his collarbone shimmers. That is the only word for it. For a second it looks like light moving under the surface of dark water, and then it hardens, catches the fairy lights, and throws them back in a band of deep green-red scales the size of thumbnails, running from his shoulder toward his chest before they smooth back into plain human skin. The whole thing takes less time than a blink. Farah's breath does something complicated and comes back out as a sound she does not bother to hide.

"Holy hell," she says, and leans across the table before she thinks about it, her hand hovering over the spot. "Can I?"

"Go ahead."

The skin is warm. Warmer than it should be, warmer than a man sitting over a beer has any business being, and smooth, and ordinary, like the scales were a trick of the light except she watched them happen. She sits back and looks at him and waits for the fear to arrive. It does not. What arrives instead is curiosity, big and bright and slightly unhinged, and under that the same heat as before, only worse now, because the impossible man across from her is also the most attractive man she has met in a year and the combination feels like cheating at something.

"You're really him," she says. "The mountain thing. Four thousand years dormant and there's been a dragon living at the base the whole time, drinking cheap beer and unclogging toilets."

"Dragons appreciate a functioning hot tub. You'd be surprised."

Farah laughs again, and somewhere behind her Krystal makes a noise of pure victory that Sergei pretends not to hear. The thing about it, the thing she turns over while he tells her some edited-down version of the volcano story, is that Timber Ridge has been sitting on top of a sleeping dragon the entire time she has been falling in love with it, and somehow that feels right. Of course the town has a dragon. Of course he fixes the lodge pipes. Of course he is here on her last night, of all nights, wearing sawdust and a scar and a grin that keeps getting her in trouble.

The trouble with the grin is that it makes her forget the time. It is only when Krystal finally gives up on the jukebox and comes over to drop off another round that Farah glances at the clock over the bar and feels the whole evening tilt sideways. Ten forty. The duffel bag is packed in Krystal's spare room. The truck is loaded, more or less. Four hundred miles of highway sit between this booth and a new fire crew in a city she has never seen, and her shift starts at ten, which means wheels on the road no later than four in the morning.

The good mood goes out of her like heat through an open door. She must make a face, because Krystal pats her shoulder once and retreats with actual tact, which for Krystal is unprecedented, and Sergei sets his glass