Page 14 of Light My Fire

She's in the corner booth with her back to the wall, which I pretend not to notice, and she's traded the gala silk for a black sweater and her hair down, and the sight of her hair down does something to my breathing that I'd report to a medic if I respected myself less. There's a glass of scotch in front of her and a beer across the table, waiting, my side already chosen for me, and when I slide in, she doesn't say hello. She looks. She starts at my eyes and goes down, over my mouth, my throat, the henley, the bare forearms on the table, all of it slow and unembarrassed and one-directional, like I'm a building she's been given the keys to, and by the time she comes back up I'm holding my beer too hard and my face is heating high on the cheekbones, where everyone can see it.

“Want me to turn around?” I say.

“Give me a minute.” She turns her glass a quarter-turn on the wood, in no hurry at all.

So that's how it's going to be. Good. I take a drink to buy my mouth a second, and the beer is the brand I drink, which I never told her, and I decide to find that charming instead of terrifying, a decision I make consciously, like deciding which way to breach a door.

“Long tour?” she asks.

“Four nights. Two medical calls, a car fire, a kid stuck in a drainage pipe chasing a phone.” I flex my right hand, where the soot never fully comes out of the knuckle creases no matter what the brush says. “He kept the phone. Tough negotiation.”

She listens the same way she looks, with her whole attention, no phone on the table, no glancing at the door she's already facing. The jukebox hands off from one sad song to another, and the bartender polishes a glass that was already clean, and somewhere out past the dark windows a tugboat calls one long note to another tugboat. I haven't been listened to like this in years. It's better than the beer, and the beer is good.

“And the Calloway?” Her eyes don't move from mine. “Closed yet?”

“Marshal's office took it. Above my pay grade now.” Which is true, and which leaves out the part where I dream about that snugged-down valve, and she watches me leave it out, and she nods once, like she's marked the spot for later.

She asks about the job then, and here's what nobody warns you about beautiful liars—they're wonderful to talk to. She wants to know how a tour actually runs, hour by hour, who cooks, who can't, whether the alarm drops you out of sleep like a trapdoor or whether you hear it coming. She asks what I check first walking into a burning room, and when I say the ceiling, she asks why, and leans in for the answer. Nobody civilian asks why. They ask if I've ever been scared, or they make the joke about carrying them out of a fire, and she asks load-path questions with her chin on her laced fingers and her knee a half-inch from mine under the table, and I talk too much, and her mouth does the rough-draft smile, and I keep talking just to keep it there.

Once, describing a car fire, I say the paint was alligatoring before we got water on it, and she says, “Char patterns do that too, don't they? Different scale on different temperatures,” conversational, like it's a normal sentence for a woman in cashmere to produce, and I stop with my beer halfway up.

“You know char patterns?”

“I read accident reports for a living.” She lifts one shoulder. “Liability work. You'd be amazed what insurers fight about.”

The answer arrives smooth and reasonable and a half-second late, and the half-second is the part I notice, like a hairline crack over a door frame. I let it go like you let a small kitchen fire convince you it's out, and I drink my beer, and the crack stays where cracks stay, which is in the building.

“And your chief,” she says, somewhere in the second round. “Mercer. What's she like to work for?”

“Why do you ask?”

The jukebox changes songs while she considers me, and I get the feeling, not for the first time tonight, that my answer is going somewhere to be kept.

“Because everything I read calls her untouchable.” She says the word like she's quoting someone she hates. “And you say her name like she's standing behind you.”

I laugh, and it comes out true, and that's the problem with this woman, she keeps catching the exact seam of it. “Val's the best fire officer I've ever seen. She rebuilt Station 9 from a punchline into the house everybody wants. First through the door her whole career. You'd follow her into anything, and I have.”

“That sounds like the recruiting poster.” Zara's thumb moves along the side of her glass. “What's the footnote?”

The footnote is Come to me first. The footnote is a chief who wants a private phone call about a woman the marshal hasn't identified, and how the locker room empties around her without being told. I look at the woman across the booth, this stranger asking sharper questions about my chief than Internal Affairs ever has, and a cold drop of professional sense falls somewhere under my ribs and is immediately outvoted.

“The footnote's mine,” I say. “You don't get the footnote on a first date.”

“Is that what this is?”

“You bought my beer before I walked in. You tell me.”

She concedes that with a tip of her head, and the rope lights catch her eyes thawing a degree, amusement maybe, or appetite, and under the table her knee closes the half-inch and stays there, one line of warm contact through two layers of fabric, and neither of us mentions it, and I lose the thread of the jukebox entirely.

I try her side of the net twice. The first time, I ask what she does, and she says consulting, risk and liability, mostly fires, which I already half-knew from how she talks. When I ask who she's consulting for these days, she turns it in one move, asks whether the department ever hires outside eyes, and I'm halfway through answering before I notice I'm the one talking again. I ask where she's from, and she says east, originally, and then she asks about the scar through my eyebrow, and I tell her the story, ladder, ice, age twenty-three, and it's only later, walking to the restroom past the jukebox, that I count the score from two hours of talking. She knows my tour schedule, my coffee order, my mother's opinion of my career, the name of the kid in the drainage pipe. I know she drinks scotch and sits facing the door.

I should care more than I do. I stand at the sink and tell the mirror to care, and the mirror has my mother's eyes and doesn't believe me either, because the truth is the mystery doesn't repel me, it pulls. Every door in this woman is marked private, and I'm a person who runs into buildings specifically because somebody might be behind the door, and she knows that about me, and I'd bet next month's pay she's counting on it, and I dry my hands and go back to the booth anyway.

The last round, she moves to my side of the table to show me an article on her phone, some puff piece ranking the city's worst landlords, an excuse so thin it's flattering, and she doesn't move back. Her thigh settles a careful inch from mine on the bench, and somewhere in the middle of my sentence about response times her hand finds my hand in the dark under the table. She doesn't hold it. She turns it over, slow, like a page, and traces the creases of my knuckles one at a time with one fingertip, the seams where the soot never fully washes out, following each line like she's reading my last four nights off my skin. My sentence dies somewhere around the word hydrant. Neither of us picks it up.

“Occupational ink,” she says quietly, watching her own finger move. “It suits you.”

When the bartender stacks chairs, we take the hint. Outside, the rain that's been threatening all week has finally committed, hard and straight down, beating the pier road into a black mirror, drumming the awning over the door, and the neon sign for the bar across the lot bleeds red and blue across the wet like a slow emergency. Zara stops under the awning's edge. The cold makes her breath show and the rain makes a silver noise around us, and her sweater's getting flecked and she doesn't seem to mind, and I'm about to offer my jacket like it's 1955 when I catch her looking at me again.