Together atop Sapphire Lookout by M. L. Buchman

Author:M. L. Buchman [Buchman, M. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Buchman Bookworks, Inc.

11

Six weeks without a word.

Lexi cleaned the windows of the cab one last time before re-hanging the heavy wooden shutters. The fire season was over. The first flurries had already painted the peaks white and the Forest Service was calling all of the lookouts back down. She didn’t know where to go or what to do. So she took it by the minute rather than the day, ignoring the tears that kept blurring her vision.

Her pack was full. No garbage left behind. She’d bagged the books she’d brought in Ziplocs so that they’d survive the winter for the next lookout. She took only the Bourne books because Danny had loved them so. She could even hear them now, read out in his deep warm voice.

Danny Chay and Jason Bourne, both men on a path to discovering their true identity. The irony of that only caught up with her now and it made her cry even more than she already was. He was out there somewhere doing just that…she was the one who was completely lost.

She padlocked the door and descended the stairs a final time. The Forest Service asked if she’d be back next summer. Unable to imagine how she could ever come back to all of these memories, she’d refused. Next summer was too far away to think about anyway.

Next season…Crap!

The next hour was almost too much.

She couldn’t even look at the tower as she walked away from it.

For three hours she descended the trail, hiking down into misery.

When she reached her Subaru Forester—“Lexi and Subaru Forester,” how sad was that as a life’s statement—and circled to the rear to stow her pack, the sight that awaited her didn’t make any sense. She dumped her pack on the ground.

A big pack was already leaning against the Subaru’s rear bumper. A pack that she knew because it had sat in the corner of her tower cab for a month. More battered. Snow crampons and an ice axe tied onto it, but still the same pack.

She spun around desperately searching…and saw Danny sitting on a fallen tree close beside the forest road.

Lexi didn’t walk, she flew. Her landing carried him backward right over the log and onto the forest floor covered in fall leaves and deep pine needles.

He held her tight while she wept anew. It was all she could do. Nothing had ever been so big in her life and she simply couldn’t hold it inside.

“You made it!” The first words she was able to gasp out.

“Mexico to Canada.” By his tone she could hear how doing that had changed him. Made him more complete.

No, it had shown him that he was as complete as she’d already known he was.

He climbed back up on the log and settled her in his lap but she couldn’t stop her hands from running over him.

“You’re here. You’re really here.”

“Surprised the shit out of me too,” he teased. “But after that place called Pintler Lookout, I could only think about one thing.” He kissed her nose and she just leaned into him.

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