Page 39 of Light My Fire

“You already have the answer.”

“I want it in your voice.” She takes one step, the ash not even whispering under her, that silent walk I've never once heard coming. “I sat on my kitchen floor and I begged the ceiling for a lie—that's what you've brought me to—and the lie never came, and so now I want the truth in your voice in the building where you carried me out, because I think that's the only place either of us has ever been honest.”

The anger arrives like a backdraft, no warning, every seam I've kept shut letting go at once.

“You want it in my voice.” I cross half the distance between us before I know I've moved. “Fine. Yes. It was me. I stood at a command truck at dawn with your fire still cooking behind me and I gave Val Mercer your name, because you burned a building with a guard in it and your fire jumped its own lines, because your beautiful math is coming apart and the next mistake kills a guard or a crew or you. And I cannot stand over your body. I can't do it. I decided I'd rather lose you, and I lost you, and it hasn't even saved anybody yet.” My voice cracks down the middle and I keep going through the crack. “And you, you put your whole confession under a floorboard and let me sleep forty feet from it. You let me fall for you with my eyes taped shut. You want truth in this building? You're the liar, I'm the rat, and we're both standing in the church where we met like that's going to fix it.”

“It's not a church.” She's close now, and I never saw her move. “It's the scene of the crime.”

I hear how low my voice has dropped, and I don't fix it.

“Which crime?”

“Pick one,” she says, and her control goes, and I watch it go, the auditor leaving the body right in front of me, and what's left underneath is a woman with wet eyes and a locked jaw. “Pick whichever one of us you can stand.”

I should be confronting her. I have the whole speech somewhere, the one about turning herself in, the one about the boxes on the sidewalk being enough, the one where I'm a firefighter first. I built it on the drive over, point by point, and I can feel it leaving me with every breath of char and rust and her, this close, in this building, where she stood in the smoke and ruined me the first time.

She sees the turn before I make it. Of course she does. She reads rooms.

“Dani.” It's one word, low, half warning and half prayer, and her eyes drop to my mouth and come back up, and that's the spark gap closing, that's all it ever takes with us.

I kiss her like an accusation.

She takes it like one, mouth opening under mine with a sound that's more grief than pleasure, and her hands come off her sides and grip my jacket like the building's moving, and we go back two staggering steps into the brick of the loading office, her shoulders meeting the wall hard enough to knock dust loose. There's nothing soft anywhere in it. Her teeth catch my lip where it's still tender and I push into the sting, the taste of copper rising between us for the second time in a week, and I get my thigh between hers and she comes down on it with a broken sound, grinding, no negotiation, both of us past the part of the night where anybody pretends.

This is wrong, runs the one channel of my head still broadcasting, and it doesn't mean her mouth, her mouth has never once lied to me. Wrong because I came here to end it and I'm starting it again, wrong because there's an unanswered speech in my chest and my hands are under her shirt instead, spanning the warm small of her back, dragging her against my thigh, swallowing the sounds she makes. I know exactly what I should be doing and I want this more. That's the whole confession. And nobody's making me; I'm the one with her pinned to the brick, I'm the one unzipping her jacket and putting my mouth on her throat where her pulse is slamming.

“Tell me to stop,” she manages, hands fisted in my hair, holding me to her throat, the opposite of stopping, “and I'll stop. I need you to know that. Whatever else I am.”

“I know what you are.” I lift my head and make her look at me. “Yes is the answer. Yes anyway. God help me.”

She surges off the brick and takes my mouth and we trade the wall, my back hitting it now, and her hands run down my body relearning it at speed, breast, ribs, hips, and when she pulls my shirt loose and gets her cold palms on my bare waist, I make a noise into her mouth that comes back off the standing water somewhere in the dark. Her thigh replaces mine, pressure exactly where I'm screaming for it, and I ride it shameless, gripping her hips, dragging her closer, and her fingers find the button of my jeans and have it open in a second, and her hand slides flat down my belly under the denim, under everything, and stops there, a held note, her forehead dropping to mine, both of us shaking like the building in a wind.

“I dreamed about this,” she says against my lips, ragged. “In between hating you. I'd hate you for an hour and then I'd be back in that shower hearing you walk my floor and wanting your hands, both at once, all night. It doesn't turn off—you don't turn off.”

“I know.” Her fingertips move, one slow stroke through how ready I am, and white static eats the warehouse, my hips chasing her hand, my fingers biting into her shoulders. “I know, I've got the same disease, I watched your building burn and counted exits for you.”

Her breath breaks against my jaw. She strokes me again, slower, like we have a year, and my head goes back against the brick, and through the hole in the roof there's one orange column of city glow standing in the ash like the ghost of the fire we met in, and that's what does it. The fire we met in. The fire she set.

The fire she set with people's names in pencil, and the men on the twelfth floor, and the guard at Castellan walking out alone, and Val's corkboard with brown paper taped over the name, and Lena's grip on my neck, come back, whatever else you do.

I came here for the truth. I'm about thirty seconds from letting her stroke me past caring whether I ever get it, and that's not her crime, that one's mine. I'm doing it with my own hips and my own hands and my own yes. Wanting her isn't the problem. The timing is the problem. There's a speech dying in my chest and a question I drove here to ask, and if I let this finish first, I'll never trust a single word that comes after, hers or mine, because everything after will be the pillow talk of two people who chose not to know each other.

“Stop.” It comes out half air, so I say it again, full voice, my hand closing around her wrist through the denim. “Stop.”

She stops, total and instant, like a thrown breaker: her hand goes still and then withdraws, both palms come up to my shoulders and then off me entirely, and she steps back into the column of glow with her chest heaving and her mouth swollen and her eyes terrified. She doesn't ask what she did wrong. She doesn't say anything. She stands there in the wreck of the first fire holding herself by the elbows and waits for whatever I do next, and that, more than the kiss, more than any of it, is how I know she meant the text. She's standing in front of me with nothing left in her hands.

I do my jeans up. My fingers are shaking and I let them shake.

“Not like this,” I say. “Not before. I didn't come here for this, I came here because you owe me the truth in your voice, in this building, your words, and if we finish what we started first then neither of us will ever say it.” I step out of the wall's shadow into the light with her, close enough to touch and not touching, and I take her hand, just her hand, the burned palm, and I hold it like I held it in that booth. Her fingers close around mine like they've been waiting all their lives. “So talk. Now. All of it, Zara. Start with the warehouse and don't stop until I know everything you've done.”

22

ZARA

Her hand closes around mine, the grip warm and certain over the old burn, and she says start with the warehouse and don't stop, and eleven years of silence come to the end of their lease in the building where she carried me out.

I've rehearsed this confession my whole adult life, in the versions where it goes to a judge, to a journalist, to my mother, to the dark. I never rehearsed the version where the audience is a firefighter with her shirt still untucked from my hands, standing in the ash of my own first Redwater fire, holding my hand like the truth is a ledge she's talked me back from. There's no clever way to do it. There never was. So I stand back, and I give her room, and while she straightens what I pulled loose, I keep my eyes on hers, because she should get to watch the face that says it.