Page 55 of Second Alarm
"Can I — "
"Yeah."
She kisses me.
She kisses me the way she kissed me in the supply closet at twenty-three — like a woman who isn't sure she's made the right choice and is going to make it anyway. Her hands slide frommy shoulders up to my jaw, her thumbs finding the corners of my mouth like she's been missing the specific topography of my face for a decade, which I happen to know she has. Her hair smells like Harrison's sandwich and the station and the specific shampoo she's been using since the academy. She's taller than I remember, or I've forgotten how to judge height, or both.
I kiss her back.
I kiss her back with the discipline I don't have, with my hands still smelling like dish soap — one braced on the counter, one on the small of her back over her station blues, over the place where a decade ago I'd put my hand when I wanted her to know I was there. She knows this hand. She makes a small sound against my mouth that's acknowledgment, and I'm thirty-three years old, and for the first time in ten years I'm kissing the woman I'm in love with and not a stand-in.
She pulls back.
Her forehead is on my sternum, hands gripping the front of my uniform shirt. I can feel her breathing.
"Oh my god."
"Yeah."
"We're at the station." She doesn't lift her head.
"Yeah."
"Cal is sixty feet away in the bunks."
"Yeah."
"We — "
"Yeah."
She steps back with the abrupt motion of a person who needs immediate distance between herself and a fire, leans on the opposite counter, puts both hands over her face, and laughs — the real laugh — and I watch it. I've been very good at discipline for a very long time and I'm done being good.
"I'm going to lose my entire career," she says into her hands.
"You aren't."
"I'm going to — "
"Hanna."
"What."
"Look at me."
"No. I'm going to cry."
"Okay."
"I'm a paramedic. We don't cry at work. It's in the handbook."
"I know."
She looks at me anyway. She's a little bit crying — barely, jaw set, eyes very bright, still half-laughing. Comedy and emotion integrated in one face, pushing each other out of the way for primacy, landing somewhere in the middle as the expression of a woman who's just made an irrevocable decision in a station kitchen.
"Come here."
"Ty — "
