Page 3 of Second Alarm
"Yeah."
She crosses her arms. "This is — this is a thing that happened at the fire academy. You're going to go back to Copper Ridge and meet somebody else. I'm going to go to Portland and meet somebody else, and we're going to look back at this in ten years and laugh, and it's going to be a funny story."
I file that one away. Ten years. Laugh. Funny story. I file it because it's the kind of thing you remember later, when you want to look back at it and confirm exactly how wrong you were about yourself.
"Okay."
She drops her arms. "Don't just say okay."
"What do you want me to say, Hanna?"
"I don't know."
"Yeah."
She drops her hand from the zipper. She crosses the room. She's still in my shirt, and she still doesn't know the shirt is inside out, and I still don't tell her, because if I tell her she'll change it and she'll never again be in my clothes in the wrong way, and I can't stop the hoarding of small things tonight. She puts her hands on my shoulders. Her palms are warm. She's been biting her thumbnail.
"I'm not the person who stays."
"I know."
"I don't know how to do it. I watched my mom do it. I watched her — " She stops. She does the thing with her jaw. "I watched her wait up every time my dad was on shift. I watched her pretend it didn't cost her anything. And then one day it cost her everything, and the whole house just — Ty. I know what you're going to say. I'm about to strap a radio on, too. I'm going to be the one climbing into the back of a rig in the middle of the night. I get it. That's why I know. I'm going to be the one making somebody wait up, and I'm going to be the one who has to wait up, too, because the job doesn't stop for either of us. It just doubles. And I can't be my mother. I can't be my father. I can't be both of them in the same house. I'm not going to sit at a kitchen table for the rest of my life waiting to see if the man I love walks back through the door, and I'm not going to be the one making him do it either."
"Hanna—" I reach toward her.
"Don't." She shakes her head.
"I was going to say okay."
"Say it like you mean it."
"Okay." I mean it. I don't know how else to mean it.
She kisses me. It's not a goodbye kiss. It's the kind of kiss a person gives you when they're still trying to talk themselves out of leaving and know they're going to fail. It lasts longer than it should. When she pulls back, her eyes are wet, and she isn't going to let them be wet for long, because Hanna Larsen isn't that kind of woman.
She pulls back first. "Cal can't ever know."
"Okay."
"I mean it, Ty. Ever. Not in a year, not in ten, not ever." Her hands tighten on my shoulders for just a second before she lets go.
"Okay."
"Promise me."
There's a specific silence in the world that comes right before you make a promise you shouldn't make. It has a pitch. I've heard it twice in my life, and both times involved a woman I was in love with.
"I promise."
She picks up the duffel. She slings it over her shoulder. The backwards logo is over her heart, and the tag is at the back of her neck, and she's beautiful in a way that's going to take me a long time to recover from, and she doesn't look back when she opens the door.
She pauses.
"For the record." Her voice is quiet, aimed at the door frame rather than me. "I'd have said yes. If you'd asked me at sixteen. If you'd asked me in my mom's kitchen the summer I finally got taller than her. If you'd been brave then."
I stare at the back of her head. "I didn't know you were interested."
"I know."
