Jump Point - Ophelia Sexton Page 0,6
a second chance.
That evening, after finishing a sixteen-hour shift, she refueled with a lukewarm dinner of Beef Stroganoff Meal Ready to Eat, or MRE, before she crawled into her sleeping bag and fell asleep almost immediately.
If the breakup that had haunted her thoughts all day pursued her into her dreams, Kara couldn't remember it when she woke stiff and sore in the cold gray light of dawn.
Because of the extreme fire danger in the park, the smokejumpers had been told not to light any campfires. Which meant no hot coffee. Dammit.
After downing a cold instant coffee beverage and a breakfast MRE of cinnamon-apple oatmeal and peanut butter crackers, Kara took her place in the line of her fellow smokejumpers and got back to work.
Normally, she spent the hours of digging line joking and exchanging sarcastic banter with the other smokejumpers in her vicinity. But today, her thoughts occupied by analyzing the failure of her latest relationship, she didn't have the mental energy to spare.
She fell into a silent, almost meditative state as she dug and scraped, dug and scraped.
The other jumpers on her team noticed that something was up, of course. You couldn't hide anything from shifters.
Thor and Steve, being guys, did what Mike had done earlier. They asked Kara if she was okay and then left her alone when she growled that she was fine.
But Felicia Concolor, a tawny-haired cougar shifter and the only other female smokejumper in the Rocky Mountain Smokejumpers, didn't let Kara off the hook so easily.
Kara dodged most of Felicia's questions while they were digging line side-by-side, but she finally broke down over their second night's dinner of Chicken Fettucine MREs.
They were seated on stumps around a large LED lantern that subbed as a campfire. Kara was just happy that the MREs each came with their own chemical heating packs, though the entrees never actually got very hot.
Overhead, the sky was filled with the dense, sparkling carpet of stars that you never saw anywhere outside of the wilderness.
All around them, tired firefighters dressed in dusty, sooty yellow fire shirts were seated around other lanterns, eating and talking and playing cards. Someone had hooked up a pocket-sized speaker to their phone, and the sound of a classic rock n' roll song drifted through the camp. Their enemy, a line of red and orange fire, traced the outline of steep slopes east of the campground.
Acutely aware of the many listening ears nearby, Kara told Felicia about the breakup.
Felicia immediately put down her food, turned on her seat, and gave Kara a hug.
"Oh, Kara, that sucks," she said softly into Kara's hair. "I know this doesn't help now, but back in high school, whenever a boy broke my heart, my grandmother would always tell me, 'If he doesn't want you, he can't have you.' Well, Ed's a fool if he didn't want you."
Her hug turned fierce before she released Kara and turned back to retrieve her half-eaten dinner.
Kara sighed. "I don't want to have to choose between smokejumping and finding a mate," she said. "I mean, look at Thor. Why can't I find a mate like he's got?"
She had always wondered how Thor had managed to spend long period of time away from his mate over the past two fire seasons. Cassandra Long-Swanson was a graduate student at University of Colorado at Denver, so Kara imagined that between teaching undergraduate biochemistry classes and working on her doctoral thesis, Cassie managed to keep herself busy in Thor's absences.
"I know what you mean," Felicia sighed. "But I believe that if it's meant to happen, it will. You've just got to have faith, Kara."
The next eight days passed in a mind-numbing cycle of dig, eat, sleep, repeat.
Having spent a day-and-a-half chewing over everything that had happened and holding mental arguments with an imaginary Ed, Kara slowly began to emerge from her post-breakup funk. He began to fade from her thoughts, banished by the sheer physical effort required to dig line from first light until it got too dark to see.
And Kara drew comfort from Mike's quiet, steady presence as he dug line next to her.
In the evenings, they usually ended up sitting together by one of the lanterns, eating MREs and playing cards with the other smokejumpers.
Mercifully, despite some searching glances, Mike didn't ask any further questions about how she was doing. Instead, he spent mealtimes staring down at his e-reader, usually propped up against a rock or a stump, and steadily shoveled food into his mouth.
Kara was glad of his