Page 15 of Light My Fire

It's a different look. The booth look took its time and enjoyed itself. This one has a decision in it.

We're close under the awning, closer than the awning requires. The rain has shrunk the world to a few square feet of dry and the two of us standing in it, and I can see the fine drops caught in her hair at the temple, and the place at her throat where her pulse has picked up speed, and I think about pointing that out, medically, the way she once swallowed for me on a curb, and don't.

“I had a plan tonight,” she says, half to herself, barely over the rain.

“What was the plan?”

“To behave like a person who makes good decisions,” she says, and grabs the front of my henley with one fist and pulls.

Her mouth lands on mine and the whole pier road goes simple at once. The wall of the bar hits my shoulder blades, brick and old paint, her hand still knotted in my shirt like I might be the one who runs, and she kisses me hard, no diplomacy in it, scotch-warm and rain-cold at the same time, and the sound I make into her mouth would end my career if Quinn ever heard it. I get one hand up into all that loose hair, finally, two days of wondering, and it's heavier than it looks, rain-damp silk wrapping my fingers, and when I pull, just a little, just an experiment, she makes a sound back, low in her throat, furious about itself, and bites my lower lip, once, hard enough to mean it.

The rain gets into everything. Her sweater under my palm at her waist is soaked through in seconds and so am I, the henley pasted to my back, water running off the awning lip an inch from our faces, cold where it splashes my neck while her mouth stays burning. We trade the kiss back and forth against the brick until my knees are unreliable and her cold fingers have found the bare strip of skin above my belt and pressed there, flat, claiming a handhold. She tastes like her scotch and kisses like an argument she intends to win, and I stop being a firefighter or a suspicious person or anybody's subordinate and become one long line of yes against a brick wall, and I am fully prepared to die at this bar.

Then she stops.

She doesn't ease off, doesn't taper. She stops the kiss clean, like closing a valve, and sets her forehead against mine for one breath with her eyes shut, rain loud on the awning, both of us steaming, her fist still holding my shirt like the last thing she'll let go of.

“Goodnight, Dani,” she says, wrecked and quiet.

Then her hands are gone, both at once, and she steps backward into the rain like it isn't raining, and she walks away up the pier road, no umbrella, no hurry, no look back, hair flattening dark against her shoulders, and a parked car two blocks up wakes its lights for her, and she's gone.

I stand under the awning with my heart going like a second alarm and my shirt holding the shape of her fist. The rain keeps coming. The neon across the lot buzzes through its colors, red, blue, red, and two blocks up the car's taillights pull out and slide away into the wet city with the woman who just rearranged my whole nervous system riding behind tinted glass, and I never even saw the make.

“Okay,” I tell the rain.

The drive home doesn't fix me. The wipers slap, the streets shine, my mouth tastes like her scotch, and my brain runs its two channels at full volume. The one that's still against that wall catalogues the exact pressure of her thumb above my belt, the pull in my hips when she bit me, the sound she made when I pulled her hair, how close I came to saying come home with me into a stranger's mouth. The other channel, the one with the clipboard, quietly notes that in three hours of conversation the woman I'm now soaked over asked one hundred questions and answered four, that she knows Station 9's roster better than some of our probies, that she produced the words char patterns over a second beer and explained it away in one smooth practiced motion. And she said the word untouchable about my chief like a person who had personally tested it.

At a red light on Brennan, with the rain drumming the roof and my thumbs restless on the wheel, I think about calling Lena, because Lena's the person I call, and I know exactly how that conversation goes. She'd listen the whole way through with her phone tucked into her shoulder, and at the end she'd say one sentence, the right one, the one I don't want yet, and so I don't call, and that's new too, and I notice myself not calling like I noticed the valve.

I look at my own eyes in the rearview and conduct the shortest internal hearing of my life.

She might be everything you think she is, says the clipboard.

I know, says the rest of me.

The light goes green.

I get home, shower, and fall into bed, and my phone glows once on the nightstand before I'm even horizontal. There's one message, no greeting, no emoji, eight words.

Next time I won't behave. Sleep well, firefighter.

I lie in the dark with the rain still coming down somewhere over the harbor, holding the phone against my sternum like a kid hiding a flashlight, grinning at my own ceiling like a fool, scared in a brand-new way I can't put a name to. The last thought I have before sleep takes me under is that I still don't know her last name, and tonight I had three hours to ask, and I didn't.

8

ZARA

Three blocks from the Saltbox I notice I'm not breathing right, and two blocks later I stop pretending the rain is the reason.

The car's heater ticks and the wipers swing as the city smears past in long ribbons of wet light. I run a damage assessment with all the professionalism of a teenager. My mouth is swollen. My hair is dripping on very nice upholstery. There's a low electric wire pulled tight from my throat to my hips that no amount of posture is fixing, and somewhere under the wire, worse than the wire, there's the sound she made when I pulled her shirt, that punched-out broken sound, like I'd found a wall switch nobody else knew the building had.

I kissed a firefighter outside a bar with my whole body, and then I walked away from her in the rain, and the walking away took more out of me than the gala took, and that's the assessment.

I wanted to stay. That's the part I turn over while the bridge lights strobe through the car. Not wanted in the manageable sense, the kind you note and shelve. I had her against that wall, rain running off both of us, her hand wrapped up in my hair, pulling, an experiment she'll repeat—God help me, because it worked—and every cell I own voted to take her home. I left because winning the vote matters, because discipline is the muscle and the muscle holds, and I sat in this car proud of myself for nine entire seconds before I started composing the text I swore I wouldn't send and sent it.

Next time I won't behave. Sleep well, firefighter.

An arsonist under active investigation by two separate agencies just texted next time to a member of Station 9. I watch the city slide by and try to summon the woman who'd be alarmed by that, and she's in here somewhere, filing motions, and I overrule her with a swollen mouth.