this one was. The team would be called in today, for sure. If luck was with him, the call would come before he’d spent himself on the rookie field, while he still had enough energy to give Treadwell a reason to stop looking at him like he was the embodiment of all human disappointment.
The radio crackled and he stopped en route to the coolers, but no report followed. Maybe luck wouldn’t be with him. It certainly hadn’t been with him last season.
He grabbed a drink and joined the others, half listening to Treadwell go over the next exercise, the other tuned into the earpiece. It was the first day, and his attention was rightly divided. He didn’t need to hear the physical requirements, he remembered them. Listening for the call was an act of team spirit, for his true team. Not these rookies. Besides, no one was a spirited teammate on day one. Team-building took more than a day.
He worked better alone anyway—fewer distractions. Fewer people to worry about. Something that hadn’t been a problem until last season. One mistake had turned the chief’s opinion of him upside down.
Turned him upside down too. Getting back out there today would help in a way that four months tending his forest territory had somehow failed to help.
If his chief didn’t also take the rookies every year, he might not have even had the opportunity to try again, and he wasn’t ready to picture a future where this wasn’t his job. That meant he had to show up, do whatever Treadwell demanded for the next several weeks. Wear his rookie badge. Take his lumps.
Be like Autry.
She stood so straight and stiff she might as well have been in a muster, her attention narrowed on the chief with laser precision. Though none of what he said could’ve been news to her, the physical requirements were public information. Requirements that included the height minimum, so she’d certainly have read them.
As if feeling his gaze, she turned his direction, and met his steady examination with folded arms and a churlish bent to her brows. Still annoyed.
Whatever. He looked back at the radio because of another round of crackling static, and the next he knew, she was at his side.
“They stuck you with the new recruits?”
Her breathing had already leveled out, the only evidence of her prior exertion the pinkness of her cheeks. She’d run as if chased by wolves, but looked none the worse for wear. He should probably ask what had happened to last year, but that would only encourage conversation. And questions in return.
“Looks like it,” he muttered, and turned up the volume on the single earpiece as a quick buzz announced an incoming report.
“What are you listening to?”
“Reports.”
“Reports on what?”
He narrowed his eyes at the middle distance, feigning concentration, and pressed the earpiece into his ear, glad for a reason to tune out.
Not glad there was such a monstrous fire so early in the season, but he wanted to get at it. He was still on the team. If Treadwell went, he’d go too. His yellow badge was penance.
She finally took his silence for the hint it was and stopped prodding him for answers. There were plenty of other people to pester, and she didn’t know the report had long since ended and now he pretended to listen to dead air.
Treadwell began calling names again, dividing his group into three, and Beck found himself sorted to the bar, along with Autry, who was now busy introducing herself to the others in their team, making friends. Smiling. Showing her team spirit.
“Ellison’s not new,” he heard her say, calling his attention back to the newly formed subgroup. “He made it a couple years ago. But...uh... I guess he got stuck with us because he was late.”
Wrong.
“This is Alvarez, Finnegan, and Wyler.”
Still talking to him. No longer annoyed. She actually looked excited, a brightness in her eyes out of step with what was actually happening. Push-ups. Pull-ups. Sit-ups... Not exactly a party.
Treadwell called his name, saving him from making nice, and he stepped to the bar, pausing only long enough to deposit his radio on the ground and free his hands. The chief’s gaze wordlessly followed him and Beck said two words before reaching for the bar to pull himself up. “It’s bigger.”
A frown and a nod were his only acknowledgments, and Treadwell began to count as Beck got on with it. As soon as he’d passed the minimum number of pull-ups, he dropped down for sit-ups, then rolled to push-ups, stopping each time he’d passed the required amount, leaving himself room to “improve” as camp continued.
Treadwell’s arched brow? Beck shrugged a touch. “Conserving energy.”
His muscles buzzing, he pulled himself off the ground, retrieved his radio, then went for another drink so he could sit on the grass to watch the others work their way through as he listened.
Still no new reports to free him.
Autry had been in the middle of the five, but as he watched, she talked herself to the rear of the group.
She’d learn soon enough how to survive these days: go early, get it over with, don’t waste energy showing off. Take all opportunities to rest.
Or not. Maybe it was better for him if she kept doing whatever she was doing. If she finished too soon, she’d be there beside him, asking questions. Making a nuisance of herself with her newbie enthusiasm.
THE INSTANT THE call for more crews came over the radio, Beck sprang to his feet.
Finally. Time to get out of this. He headed for Treadwell, who stood with clipboard in hand, counting the reps of another rookie.
The chatter he’d expect from Autry had never come when she’d gotten done with her turn at the bar. Treadwell had stopped her from showing off by making her finish her reps when it became clear she had no idea what a reasonable number was. She’d been sitting on the grass, sulking, ever since, her formerly animated brow becoming a little ledge above her pretty green eyes.
Pretty?
He mentally shook himself. They were striking, an evergreen ring around a pale center. If anything, they were unusual and therefore compelling. Him fixating on eye color meant he needed to get out of there. Had spent too much time alone in the woods, lost in his own head.
Then again, no one lurked in the forest to constantly remind him of this nonsense about him undoing core tenets of his personality over a few short weeks. People went to years of therapy to change habits and outlooks acquired over a lifetime, and he had no interest in that either.
“Chief.” He interrupted the rookie doing push-ups with one word and a meaningful waggle of his radio, indicating the call had come.
Treadwell’s gaze narrowed and he nodded, but held up one hand in Beck’s direction and told the man on the ground he could stop.
He
