Page 8 of Befriending the Bear (Forestville Silver Foxes #6)

CALLOWAY

T he text came on Thursday morning while I was staring at my laptop screen, cursor blinking mockingly on the same paragraph I’d been trying to write for three days now.

Fraser

I blew out a slow breath. He’d texted me the same thing four days in a row, mentioning he’d be at Brianna’s and inviting me to join him. Not too pushy, but also not giving up. Simply being patient, the same way he waited whenever I was fighting to get words out.

My thumbs hovered over the screen. It would be so easy to say no, to claim another headache or deadline or any of the dozen excuses I kept in reserve.

To stay here in my sanctuary, where I was protected and safe and never had to watch someone’s face shift from interest to impatience when my voice betrayed me.

But I thought about Friday night, about another book club discussion I had missed.

I’d sat in my dark living room, poetry book clutched in my lap, imagining what Fraser might have said about Maya Angelou’s voice and style.

Wondering if his eyes lit up when he talked about things he loved the way they had when he mentioned that wild and precious life line.

Questioning if I’d made the right choice or if I was the coward I accused myself of being in my more honest moments.

Five days of wondering. Five days of that folded paper with the Walt Whitman poems sitting on my kitchen table like an invitation to something I wasn’t brave enough to want.

Five days of coming up with excuse after excuse why meeting with Fraser was such a bad idea, but also questioning which poem to bring to book club.

Three days of staring at the texts Fraser had sent me, at those patient invitations that had gone unanswered.

Three days of going through an endless cycle of hope, despair, blame, and guilt.

And somehow, I found the courage this time.

I’ll try to make it.

Not a commitment, but not a no. My hands shook as I hit send.

His response came immediately.

That’s all anyone can do. Hope to see you.

I spent the next four hours accomplishing absolutely nothing. Every attempt to write devolved into imagining conversations, like what I might say if my voice cooperated, what Fraser might ask, how I could possibly explain seven years of self-imposed exile without sounding pathetic.

By two-thirty, I’d changed shirts three times and practiced saying “it’s only coffee” in the mirror until the words lost all meaning. This was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. A forty-eight-year-old man shouldn’t feel like a teenager before a first date.

Except it wasn’t a date. Fraser had been clear about that. It was coffee between potential friends. I could do that. I’d done it before, hadn’t I? Before Marcus, before grief rewired my brain and made every social interaction feel like navigating a minefield.

At a quarter to three, I made myself leave the house. The walk to Brianna’s had never felt simultaneously longer and shorter, with time playing tricks the way it did when you were heading toward something that might change everything or nothing at all.

The bell chimed as I entered, and there he was.

Back corner table, the one with the good light from the window.

A book was open in front of him, but I couldn’t see the title.

He’d dressed simply in a black T-shirt that brought out his eyes and well-worn jeans.

His cane rested against the table, and I was oddly grateful for it.

We both carried visible damage. Maybe that made this easier.

He looked up as I approached, and his smile was like a sunrise—slowly spreading and warm and impossible to look away from. “You came.”

I nodded, not trusting my voice yet, and slid into the chair across from him. Jamie appeared immediately, bless them, with my usual order. They must’ve been watching for me.

“Can I get you anything else?” they asked, their voice carefully neutral, but I caught the tiny smile at the corner of their mouth.

I shook my head, wrapping my hands around the warm mug like an anchor. The familiar ritual helped—the weight of ceramic, the bitter scent of coffee, the gentle bustle of the bakery around us. Normal things. Safe things.

“So,” Fraser said, marking his page and setting the book aside. “How’s the writing going? Eleanor mentioned you were working on a memoir.”

The question was so unexpected, so far from the usual small talk strangers attempted, that I answered honestly. “St-stuck. On a ch-chapter about—” I paused, took a breath.

He didn’t know. Or did he? Had someone told him? I couldn’t assume. Even so, he deserved to hear about Marcus from me.

“About l-loss,” I managed finally, the word hanging between us like smoke.

Fraser’s expression didn’t change, but something in his eyes deepened. “Those are the hardest chapters. The ones where you have to decide how much truth you’re ready to face.”

It was such a perfect response—acknowledging without prying, understanding without presuming—that I felt my shoulders drop from their defensive hunch.

“D-did you ever…?” I started, then stopped, appalled at myself for nearly asking such a personal question. But when he sent me an encouraging nod, I finished my sentence. “…w-write?”

He tilted his head, considering. “Not yet. But I’ve been thinking about it. My career gifted me thirty years of stories, but the hardest one is why I’m not telling them around a firehouse kitchen anymore.”

The parallel wasn’t lost on me. We were both trying to write ourselves into new chapters while the old ones kept bleeding through the pages. “Sometimes I th-think about…” I made a gesture like tearing paper. “Starting over. N-new story.”

“But then you’d lose all the good chapters too. And from what I can see, there must’ve been some beautiful ones.”

My throat tightened. How did he do that? How did he see straight through to the heart of things? “M-Marcus,” I said, his name feeling strange and sacred on my tongue after so long. “His name was M-Marcus. We were together f-f-fifteen years.”

Fraser’s hand twitched on the table like he wanted to reach out but thought better of it. “That’s a lot of chapters.”

“He d-died seven years ago. S-sudden. I found him—” The words locked up completely, my jaw working uselessly. This was why I didn’t talk about it. This was why I stayed home.

“Hey.” Fraser’s voice was low, steady. “You don’t have to tell me everything today. Or ever, if you don’t want to. We’re simply having coffee.”

We were friends having coffee. The simplicity of it let me breathe again.

I took a sip, using the movement to collect myself.

When I looked back up, Fraser was watching me with those patient eyes, no judgment or pity in them.

“I d-don’t date,” I said, needing him to understand. “I c-c-can’t… I w-won’t.”

“I know, and I meant what I said. All I want is a friend. Someone who gets that sometimes, the hardest stories are the ones worth telling, even if we’re not ready to tell them yet.”

The thing was, I believed him. Something about Fraser made me want to believe in possibilities I’d written off years ago. Not romance. God, I couldn’t even think that word without feeling like I was betraying Marcus’s memory. But friendship? Maybe I could manage that.

“W-what are you reading?” I asked, desperate to shift the conversation to safer ground.

His smile suggested he knew exactly what I was doing but was willing to go along with it. He held up his book. “ The Hour of the Land . It’s a beautiful plea to keep our lands wild.”

I’d heard of it but hadn’t read it. “You l-l-like nature.”

“I do. I’ve always been an outdoors guy, even as a teenager.”

“W-w-where did you g-grow up?”

“Montana. I’m the youngest of four boys, and my old man put us to work in his logging business from when we were ten or so. I joined the forest service as soon as they would accept me, then did the training to become a hotshot.”

“H-hots-s-shot?”

“A specialized wildfire firefighter. They’re called hotshot crews.”

“Y-you were a f-f-firefighter?”

He nodded. “I ended up as a smokejumper.”

Smokejumper? He’d been one of those guys who jumped out of an airplane into the middle of big forest fires? I couldn’t think of anything scarier than that. “C-c-c…” I swallowed. The word “courageous” wouldn’t come. “B-brave,” I said instead.

“The first few times, yes. After that, your training and experience kick in and you simply do what needs to be done.” A moment of raw grief passed over his face. “Until you can’t anymore.”

I knew that kind of pain. “I’m s-sorry.”

He blew out a long breath. “I would’ve had to retire soon anyway, but I would’ve preferred to do it on my own terms rather than becoming physically unable to do the job.”

The silence that followed was thick yet not uncomfortable. More like a pause in which we both acknowledged the pain that we shared.

But I wanted to give him an out of this topic that had gotten so much heavier than I had intended. “What p-poem will you b-bring to b-b-book club?”

“I don’t know yet. Eleanor said it had to be a poem that spoke to your soul…

” he said, gracefully going along with the change of topic.

“That’s a tough assignment. Other than Mary Oliver, I haven’t read that much poetry.

And I don’t want to bring something cliché, like Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken.’”

I gave a one-shoulder shrug. “It’s c-cliché for a r-reason. P-p-people love it. It sp-speaks to them.” I could easily see how that one would speak to him. He was at a crossroads of sorts, wasn’t he?

“I don’t like being like everyone else,” he said, shooting me an easy grin. Without thinking, I smiled back at him. His eyes widened, and he swallowed, as if my smile had shocked him. Come to think of it, maybe it had.

“Does it speak to you as well?” he asked.

We fell into discussing the poem, then moved on to more famous poems, and I relaxed incrementally. This I could do, talk about poetry, about books, about the way writers built meaning from words.

Fraser occasionally asked questions that showed he’d been thinking deeply about the text, and I leaned forward, my stutter lessening as we traded interpretations.

“How many books do you own?” Fraser asked when I mentioned my home library.

“T-three thousand.” I cringed a little. “Too many.”

“Too many? I don’t think there’s such a thing as too many books. If you can afford it and have space for it, then why stop?”

The space was becoming debatable, but money wasn’t the issue. Marcus had left me enough to not have to work for the rest of my life. “I t-try to be more s-selective. To only buy what f-feels necessary.”

“I know exactly what you mean.” He finished his coffee, which had to be cold by now. “Some books you read, and some books you need.”

The way he said it, like he understood the difference viscerally, made me brave enough to ask, “W-what do you need right now?”

Fraser considered this, his fingers drumming lightly on the table. “Honestly? I’ve been reading a lot of books about transformation, about change. Trying to figure out how to become someone new without losing who I was.”

“M-maybe that’s the wrong q-question,” I said before I could stop myself.

His eyebrows rose. “Oh?”

“What if you’re l-looking at this wrong? What if you don’t n-n-need to become someone new? Maybe you need to f-figure out who you were before the job t-took over.”

I was thinking of myself as much as him. Who had I been before grief froze me in place? And more importantly, could I ever be that person again, or someone resembling him? I had no answers.

Fraser was quiet for a long moment, and I worried I’d overstepped. Then he smiled, soft and a little wondering. “You might be onto something there.”

Jamie appeared at our table. “We’re closing in fifteen minutes, gentlemen. Can I get you anything else?”

I startled, glancing at the clock. It was nearly five. We’d been talking for two hours. How had that happened?

“Just the check,” Fraser said, already reaching for his wallet.

“N-no. I c-can?—”

“My invitation, my treat,” he said firmly. “You can get the next one.”

The next one. Like this was going to happen again. Like I hadn’t spent two hours talking with a near-stranger about poetry and transformation and who we really were. Like my stutter hadn’t mattered at all.

We gathered our things slowly, neither seeming eager to end the conversation. Outside, the evening was cool, the sun slanting low through the trees. Fraser adjusted his grip on his cane, and I noticed the way he favored his right leg more than he had earlier.

“You okay?” The question slipped out before I could catch it.

He glanced at me. “Nothing a hot bath won’t fix.”

I thought about offering to walk with him, but that felt too much like something people did when they were…more than whatever we were. Instead, I said, “Th-thank you. For the coffee. And the c-conversation.”

“Thank you for coming. See you at book club tomorrow?”

The automatic “no” rose in my throat, but what came out was, “I’ll t-t-try to be there.”

His smile could’ve powered the streetlights that were beginning to flicker on. “I really hope you’ll make it.”

We parted ways at the corner, him heading west toward the river, me turning east toward home.

I walked slowly, trying to process what had happened.

I’d spent two hours in public, talking with someone new, and the world hadn’t ended.

My stutter hadn’t driven him away. He’d listened—really listened—to my thoughts about poetry and loss and becoming.

More than that, he’d shared his own struggles.

The careful way he’d talked about transformation, about needing to find himself after losing his career…

I recognized that particular grief. It was different from losing a person, but loss was loss.

It carved you hollow and left you to figure out how to fill the space.

Fraser and I had so much more in common than I had expected…and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.