Page 8 of Tracking Wolfe

Because he wasn’t mine.

And he would never be mine.

2

TRACE

When I pulled back onto the SERA campus, it was already dark. After two days in the snowy backcountry and today’s six-hour hike through the snow and cold, I was past ready for a hot bath and sweet, milky tea. Despite my high-tech gear, my toes and fingers were cold, and my face was feeling chapped from the wind.

It had been a gorgeous weekend for a solo trek over Devil’s Backbone. My body had finally settled after the shit week I’d had, and I knew as soon as I sank into the deep tub in my bathroom, I’d be fighting sleep.

Which was exactly what I’d been going for after the stress of a quasi-breakup and the challenge of SERA’s most recent SaR cohort. Both had left me irrationally angry and out of sorts.

The Slingshot Emergency Rescue Academy had been the love child of my obsession with search and rescue and my sudden need to move out of the Bay Area six years ago. It had been the right decision, the necessary decision, but after weeks like this one, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would have been like if I’d stayed.

You couldn’t fucking stay.

I shuddered the thought away, deliberately replacing it with more productive ones, like what kind of tea I wanted with my bath, and whether or not I had a frozen meal I could nuke for dinner since the SERA cafeteria was closed between sessions.

But when I pulled past the other SERA buildings and into the gravel parking pad beside my cabin, I saw Patrick’s Jeep parked in my spot.

“Fucking Christ,” I muttered, throwing my truck into Park and resting my forehead on the steering wheel. “Fuck.”

I sucked in a deep breath, reminded myself of all the reasons Patrick and I didn’t work, and stepped out of the truck.

He was sitting in the shadows of my porch, his large, bulky frame shivering on the wooden swing. As much as I wanted to tell him to go the fuck home, the poor man looked miserable.

“Hey,” I said, tilting my head to the front door. “Want to come in and warm up?”

He nodded and stood. The lights from my truck were still on long enough to illuminate the tearstains on his stubbled cheeks. I held my breath to keep from audibly sighing. One of the things I’d liked about Patrick was the fact that the big guy was a teddy bear despite his huge, intimidating presence.

After opening the door and kicking off my boots, I shucked off several layers of gear and moved into the kitchen to start the kettle. “I don’t have any coffee,” I called back. “You want tea, hot chocolate, water?”

The only answer was a pathetic little sniffle before I heard him padding behind me into the kitchen. “I just want you.”

He leaned his forehead down onto the top of my head, but I shrugged him off gently. “That’s not happening,” I said as softly as I could. “Patrick, why are you here? We said everything we could have possibly said the other night.”

His eyes and nose were red. I resisted the urge to wipe his tears off with my thumbs and give him a big hug. This moment was for reconfirming our breakup, not being the one to give him comfort and affection.

“I want you to give me another chance. Give us another chance. Just tell me what you need me to do, and I’ll do it.”

I busied myself pulling mugs out of the cabinet and selecting a chamomile lemon tea for me and a hot chocolate packet for him. “I’m not going to have this conversation again. We already discussed it to death, and there’s nothing more to say.”

“But there is,” he cried. “You’re the first decent man I’ve met in years! I can’t stand losing you when I barely even had you.”

I inhaled carefully through my nose. “Maybe you need to find a way to meet more decent men,” I muttered. “Younger ones.”

“I’m a fucking lineman in small-town Montana, Trace. How the fuck do you suggest I meet decent gay men? And stop with the age bullshit. I’m twenty-eight. Hardly a kid. And you’re forty-six. Not an old man.”

The familiar sound of the hot water sloshing into my mug had a Pavlovian effect on my heart rate, calming me down as if the warm mug was already between my palms with its warm herbal aroma wafting up at me.

A conversation from six years ago tried nudging into my mind, one in which I’d sworn I’d never date anyone this much younger than I was.

“They need linemen everywhere,” I reminded him. “LA, Chicago, Atlanta… hell, even P-town.”

We both knew he’d never move out of Montana. He’d been born and raised in Joliet, and everything he loved was there.

Except maybe me.