Page 33 of Light My Fire

My clothes are a crime scene by the door. The shirt's lost three buttons and the jeans are still wet through, and I start dressing in them anyway, cold denim peeling up my legs, ruined cotton sticking to my back.

“I have shirts,” she says, from the kitchen island. “Take one. Yours is evidence.”

She means it as a joke, the torn placket, her own handiwork, and on any other night I'd laugh and wear her shirt to the station and let Quinn draw her conclusions. Tonight I can't put her clothes on my body. Tonight the word evidence goes through me like a current, and I keep my face down over my buttons, the two I have left, and make myself sound easy.

“And let you repossess it next week? I know how you operate.” I get the jacket on and zip it to the throat over the gap. “I've got a dry uniform in my locker.”

She watches me from the island in her towel with her arms crossed, and there's a heat in it and an audit in it, both at once, the same look she had at the warehouse the night we met.

At the door, she catches my jacket zipper and reels me in by it, slow, asking, and I could no more refuse the kiss than refuse air, that's the truth I'll have to live with. Her mouth is soft and unhurried, my split lip stinging under it, and she takes her time, and when she lets the zipper go, she presses her thumb once to the corner of my mouth like she's setting a seal.

“Text me when you're off tour,” she says. “I still owe you bacon.”

“Yeah.” The hallway behind her runs back into the dark, six books, no photographs, a board that creaks. “You do.”

The elevator drops forty stories with my stomach hung somewhere around thirty, and the gloved concierge says good evening to a soaked woman in a buttonless shirt at eleven at night without moving one muscle of his face. Then I'm under the awning in the rain calling a rideshare because my truck is parked two blocks from the Blue Plate, on the other side of the river, in front of a booth where I held her hands while she shook.

The car smells of pine air freshener, and the driver mercifully wants nothing from me. I sit in the back with my forehead against the cold window and the city sliding by underwater, neon running long off the glass, and her perfume is still on my skin, faint, rising warm off my own collar every time I move, and I can't tell anymore which half of what's in my chest is fear and which half is want. On the curb outside the diner, I told myself I was walking into a fire I'd already read. I read it right. I walked in anyway, and now I'm carrying it out on my skin.

I keep seeing the dates in pencil, the four circles on the floor plate, the Calloway shot through a door she'd have had to badge or break to stand in. My hands were steady the whole time I held those pages, steadier than they are now, resting empty on my own knees in a stranger's car.

The truck is where I left it, hunched wet under the diner's lot light, and the Blue Plate is still lit, the counterman wiping down our booth like the world is a normal place. I get in and lock the doors and sit with both hands on the wheel, and the envelope is right there in the glovebox, names on both sides, the web with four burn holes in it, and all I'd have to add now is one line. I have seen the architect's hand. I could drive it to Val tonight and be done being two women.

I make myself walk it through, because I owe the badge that much. I hand Val the envelope and the name. Val moves at Val's speed, which is faster than anyone believes until they're inside it, and by the weekend there's tape across the door of a fortieth-floor apartment and a steel case sitting on an evidence table and a woman in a county jumpsuit who once breath-coached herself through her sister's name in front of me. The men in the cc lines hire more lawyers. The sealed docket stays sealed. The story becomes the arsonist, because the arsonist is the better headline, a beautiful unhinged woman against a row of gray men in suits, and Natalia, twelve years old, brave at a door nobody opened, becomes a paragraph at the bottom of somebody else's coverage.

And the other road. I keep her name to myself. I keep going back to a fortieth floor that smells of scotch. The fires keep coming, because they will, she's not done, the math under that floor isn't finished math, and sooner or later a date in pencil meets a man with a microwave dinner, and whatever burns after that burns on me.

There's no road where I get to keep both of us. I knew it in the booth and I drove to her apartment anyway.

I don't open the glovebox.

I drive. The streets blur like they do at the end of a long tour, rain and brake lights smearing into each other, wipers keeping their dumb time, and I run the whole night through my hands again like hose, the booth, her broken sentence, the door her sister found, the floor, her cry against my shoulder, the case, the pencil, the dates. Somewhere on the bridge, I hear myself make a sound that isn't crying and isn't laughing, one short, ugly bark of both, and I grip the wheel and let the rain have the rest.

Station 9 at midnight glows like it always glows, bay lights bleeding under the doors, somebody's radio playing low in the watch room. I let myself in the side door out of pure muscle memory, because home is home, and the apparatus floor smells of diesel, and Engine 9 sits there huge and patient, and my eyes sting so fast and hard I have to stop walking.

I stand there next to the engine with my hand flat on her cold red flank like she's a horse that knows me, and I breathe. Twelve years of my life live in this job, the best six of them in this building. My helmet's upstairs with my name taped across the back. The wall by the watch room has a photo of me at twenty-three with a fresh scar through my eyebrow and a grin like I'd won the lottery, because back then the job was simple: fire on one side, us on the other, and everybody knew which side they slept on. I came here tonight because there's nowhere else I belong, and I cross the floor knowing that the woman whose perfume is on my collar is the other side, and my feet keep walking anyway.

The locker room light is on.

Val's at her locker in turnout pants and a station tee, suiting up for a hydrant detail or a drill or whatever a chief tells herself she's up at midnight for, and her eyes come around when the door swings, and whatever's on me, the soaked civvies, the buttonless shirt under the half-zipped jacket, the split lip, the face, she takes it in like readings off a gauge.

I make it to the bench before my legs decide for me. I sit, and the bench is cold and familiar, and I put my head in my hands. She doesn't ask why I'm here on my night off. She doesn't ask why I'm soaked, or where my buttons went, or who split my lip, and her not asking is worse than any interrogation she's ever run on me, because Val only skips questions when she already has the answers penciled in. The room is quiet except for rain on the high windows and the building's old bones ticking. She closes her locker, soft, the click of it loud anyway, and Val doesn't move toward me and doesn't look away, and when her voice comes it's quieter than I've ever heard it.

“What did she do to you?”

18

ZARA

By eight on Thursday morning, I've run the night four times, and the numbers come back wrong every time.

I'm at the kitchen island with an untouched coffee in front of me, in the chair that faces the windows, and the storm has moved off east and left the city scrubbed and dripping, and I'm doing the only work I've ever been good at, which is reconstruction. I take an event apart hour by hour, lay the pieces out in order, and find where the burn started.

She refused the shirt.

That's the first piece. A woman with three buttons gone and soaked denim against her skin turned down dry clothes, and she did it lightly, with a joke about repossession, and her shoulders were a quarter inch higher than they'd been on the floor an hour before. I watched her dress in wet clothes when warm ones were an arm's length away, and at the time I read it as pride, and pride was the comfortable reading. Comfortable readings are how buildings burn.

The second piece is the kiss at the door. She gave it back to me, all of it, her mouth as honest as it's ever been, and her hands never came up to my waist or my hair or the towel. A woman kissed me goodbye with her hands hanging at her sides like they were holding things I couldn't see, and I stood there in my towel afterward feeling sealed and chosen, because I wanted to feel sealed and chosen.