Under the Fire Tower

*I wanted to write a romance where the couple is already together but still discovering each other. The fire tower felt like the perfect place for two people to pause their busy lives and just breathe. Hope you enjoy the slow burn and the messiness of desire.*

Miri Voss was thirty-four years old and she had exactly one problem, which was that her life had gotten comfortable in a way that itched.

Not bad comfortable. She had a loft apartment with a radiator that clanked like a ghost in drag, she had callbacks maybe every other month, and she had a recurring role as a murder victim in a true crime podcast, which paid almost nothing and was somehow her favorite gig. And she had Robert. Six months of Robert now, all of it tucked into his downtown apartment between the hours of eight and midnight on whatever nights their schedules overlapped, which was more often than either of them admitted to anyone.

Robert was her boss, technically. Artistic director of the Cascadia Stage Company, forty years old, gray coming in at the temples in a way that made the younger stagehands call him Silver Fox behind his back and then go quiet when he walked past. He'd had some fling with a stage manager three years back, before Miri's time, and it had apparently ended so badly that the company still had a policy about it. Not a written policy. A vibe policy.

The vibe policy had not stopped them. It had just made them careful. Careful meant leaving his building separately. Careful meant never texting anything worse than a thumbs up. Careful meant that when he made her laugh so hard she snorted wine out her nose, she had to sit there with a paper towel on her face in his kitchen, and neither of them could tell anybody about it.

It was a Thursday in early October and she was sitting in the third row of the theater watching him run a scene, and the itch got so loud she almost said something out loud in front of the lighting designer.

Here was the rhythm, she thought. Rehearsal. Notes. His apartment. Thai food from the place on Ninth that always forgot the chili sauce. His bed. His alarm going off at six, because the man was a robot. Her walking out past the coffee shop where the barista knew his order and did not know hers, because she did not officially exist. Then two weeks of rehearsal where he gave her notes in his director voice, which was infuriatingly the same voice he used on her at midnight, and she would get flustered and he would pretend not to notice.

Six months of that. It was a good problem to have, obviously. Most of her friends would trade a kidney. But Miri had spent her whole adult life chasing the feeling of being genuinely unsettled, which is a fancy way of saying she got bored, and she was bored, and she was pretty sure Robert was bored too, in his polite robot way.

So on Thursday, after notes, she waited until the theater had emptied out to the sound of one intern dragging a ladder, and she walked into his office and shut the door.

"I have a proposal," she said.

Robert looked up from his budget spreadsheet. He had reading glasses on, which was unfair, honestly. "If it's about the second act, I already know. We're cutting the duet."

"Forget the duet. I want to take you somewhere."

He took the glasses off, slowly, like a man buying himself time. "Take me somewhere."

"A weekend. No phones, no scripts, no budget spreadsheets. You have a lodge or a cabin or something, right? You mentioned it once, some fire tower on your family's old hunting property, out in the pines."

"My father's lodge, yes. Near Ridgefield." He said it the way other people said root canal. "Miri, why?"

"Because I'm bored." She flopped into the chair across from his desk. "And I know you're bored, because last week you ate an entire sleeve of crackers during intermission and stared at the wall like it owed you money. Robert. When did you last do anything that wasn't this theater?"

"I hiked in August."

"You hiked. Wow. A man of adventure."

He leaned back and looked at the ceiling, which was his tell. She had learned all his tells in six months, which was either sweet or alarming depending on the day. "It's not that simple. If someone from the company saw us at a restaurant, fine, that's a lunch. A whole weekend at my family's lodge is a different animal."

"Nobody's going to see us. It's miles from anywhere." She was doing the thing with her hands now, the thing that had gotten her cast in three comedies. "Look, I'm not asking you to put a label on anything. I'm asking you to drive me into the woods for two days and cook me something over a fire. Is that so scandalous?"

"You realize this is exactly the kind of thing the vibe policy exists for."

"The vibe policy is not written down anywhere, which means it isn't real, which means I win."

He laughed at that, the real laugh, the one she only got in his apartment, and she counted it as a victory even before he said it.

"Fine," he said. "But we leave Friday after rehearsal, and we tell nobody, and if the roof has fallen in on that lodge, you're responsible for the hotel."

"The roof will be fine. You grew up there."

"I grew up visiting there, and the roof was already questionable in 2009." He was already rubbing his eyes, already regretting it, she could tell, and that was part of the fun. "Pack boots. There's no cell signal past the county road, and I mean none."

"Oh my god, no signal? That sounds incredible."

"That's the part you should be afraid of," he said, but he was smiling down at the spreadsheet, so.

---

The drive up was two and a half hours of her narrating every roadside attraction and him pretending to be annoyed by it. The last forty minutes were gravel, and the trees closed in overhead until the afternoon light went green and spotted, and Miri had her window down the whole way because the air smelled like pine sap and cold dirt and it was better than any stage fog she'd ever been paid to breathe.

The lodge appeared around a bend all at once, dark timber, a porch with a swing, a stone chimney, and behind it, up a bare green slope, the fire tower, square and steel-legged and ridiculous against the sky.

"It's perfect." She was out of the car before Robert had the engine off. "Robert, it's a whole movie set up here. I could direct a movie here. I could die here happily."

"Don't die here. Cell signal, remember." He got out slowly and stood there with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the place the way you look at an old dog you haven't visited in a while. "The swing's new. That wasn't there."

"Your dad put it up?"

"Not unless he did it from the grave. My cousin, probably. Or a bear with a tool kit." He unlatched the tailgate and started hauling bags, and she left him to it because arguing over luggage was a waste of perfect porch time.

Inside, it was all wood stove and worn plaid and a kitchen with a hand pump that actually worked, which delighted her so much she pumped water into a jar just to watch it happen twice. There was a ladder to a loft, and in the loft, one bed. A real one, queen sized, under a slanted ceiling.

"One bed," she called down, very casually.

"It's my family's lodge, not a motel," he called back, and she could hear him trying not to smile. "What did you expect?"

"Nothing. I expected nothing. I'm just noting the layout for future reference."

He came up the ladder with an armload of firewood and stood in the low loft, ducking under the beam, and for a second he looked around at the bed and the little round window and the whole small world of it, and some of the office tension drained out of his shoulders so visibly that she almost said something about it.

She didn't. She was learning that Robert needed a minute with things before he admitted they were happening.

"Wood stove takes a while," he said. "You hungry?"

"Starving. What's the plan, chef?"

"There's a freezer chest downstairs with elk stew my father made in approximately the previous geological era, and there's a cast iron pan, and that's the whole menu." He was already heading for the ladder. "Come on. You can pump more water, since it's clearly the best thing that's ever happened to you."

"It really might be."

By dark the stove was ticking and the lodge smelled like woodsmoke and stew, and Robert had relaxed by maybe a third, which for Robert was practically a carnival. He'd found an old deck of cards in a drawer and they played rummy at the kitchen table with a lantern going, and he cheated, or she thought he cheated, and she accused him loudly and he said, "I would never cheat at rummy, I have standards," which made her laugh so hard she knocked her own cards off the table.

Then, around nine, he went quiet. He was looking at the fire with his jaw doing the thing it did when he was composing a sentence and rejecting it.

Miri dealt the cards out and waited. She was good at waiting. It was the one part of acting that had actually taught her something useful.

"Robert," she said finally. "Say the thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing you've been not saying since the gravel road."

He looked at her over the lantern light, and outside, far up the slope, the fire tower stood black against the stars, and he opened his mouth.

The thing, it turned out, was that the tower had a lock and he hadn't brought the key.

"There's a padlock," he said. "Has been since I was a kid. Dad got paranoid about teenagers after somebody spray painted it."

"So we can't go up."

"I didn't say that. I said there's a lock. The bolt cutters are in the shed."

Miri put her cards down. "You brought bolt cutters to a romantic getaway?"

"I brought bolt cutters because I'm forty years old and I own bolt cutters. That's just what happens."

"It's the most romantic thing I've ever heard," she said, and she meant it, or mostly meant it, which was close enough for October.

They went up the next morning, after coffee that Robert made in a dented percolator and that Miri drank three cups of because it was terrible in a way she wanted to keep tasting. The slope was steeper than it looked. She said so four times. He said nothing the first three times and the fourth time he offered a hand, which she took, because her boots had smooth soles and his did not, and that was the entire logic of it, practical, no further meaning.

The lock took two minutes and one curse word, and then they were climbing the tower stairs, which rattled under their feet like a trapdoor in a thriller, and then they were out on the platform and Miri forgot how to talk for a second.

Oh, but it was something.

The pines rolled out in every direction, miles of them, dark green and silver where the morning hit them, and the mountains stood up behind everything with snow already on them, and there was a river down there somewhere, you could see the pale line of it winding. The wind moved the whole view a little, or maybe it moved her, she couldn't tell.

"Okay," she said. "Okay, wow. I take back every complaint about the gravel."

"You'll take it back again on the way out."

"Robert, I could do King Lear up here. I could do anything up here. Look at it." She spread her arms. "This is what the word enormous is for."

He was leaning on the rail looking not at the view but at her, and when she turned and caught him at it, he didn't do his usual trick of finding something else to look at. That was new. Six months of careful, and here at the top of a steel tower over his dead father's forest, he just looked.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing. You like it here."

"I love it here. Why do you think I dragged us up a hill?"

"You didn't drag. I carried the bolt cutters."

She came over to stand beside him at the rail, close, because the wind was cold and because she wanted to, and for a while they just watched the trees move in long waves, like water only slower, like the forest was breathing on some schedule of its own.

"Last time I was up here I was twenty-two," he said. "My dad made me climb it to check something, some cable. I remember being up here thinking, this is it, this is the best view I'll ever have, and feeling sick about it. Like the peak was behind me at twenty-two."

Miri looked at him. Gray at the temples, jaw set against the wind, forty years old and still auditing his own life the way he audited a budget.

"And now?" she asked.

"Now I think twenty-two was an idiot." He shrugged. "The view's still here."

"That's the healthiest thing you've ever said. I want it on a plaque."

"I want royalties, then."

And then, because the wind was pushing her and the morning was too big to waste and she had spent six months being careful in his downtown apartment with the good wine and