Page 6 of Light My Fire

The first slow stroke over my clit pulls a sound out of me that I bite down to nothing. I brace my free hand flat on the tile and keep my touch light, circling, teasing myself like I've got patience, and in my head she's behind me in the steam, not touching me anywhere except the two fingers she's drawn down my spine, watching over my shoulder. That's the part that does it, that she'd watch. She wouldn't fumble or rush or ask if this was okay, she'd lean against the tile wall with her arms crossed and that level expression and she'd say keep going in the same voice she used for the roof.

So I keep going. I slide two fingers lower and push inside myself, slow, my own wet heat clenches around them, and the sound I swallow this time has her name in it, except I don't have her name, so it's nothing, a vowel, steam. In my head, her mouth comes close to my ear without touching it. She tells me I'm doing well in that flat unhurried voice, and the praise goes through me like a current, which is its own embarrassing discovery, one more fact about myself I didn't know until a stranger sat still in a fire.

I work myself deeper, heel of my hand grinding my clit, hips starting to move with it, chasing my own fingers, and the fantasy slips with the rhythm. Her hands replace mine. Her thigh slides between my legs. The cool of her against all this heat, her teeth at the side of my throat where my pulse is slamming, both of us soaked and her still completely in control of it, in control of me, setting a pace and making me hold it.

My fingers speed up. I'm not teasing anymore.

In my head, I turn around and she looks at my mouth like she did under the lights, and I get her out of that expensive coat one button at a time. Her skin is cool like mine never is, and she lets me back her into the tile and then somehow it flips, it flips like a current changing, her hand closing in my wet hair, my own name said low against my jaw like an instruction. That's wrong, I don't go under for anyone, I never have, and my body doesn't care what I don't do. My thighs are starting to shake. I work my clit in tight fast circles and press my forehead hard against the tile and let the picture run, her mouth at my ear, keep going, the steam, the calm of her, the absolute nerve of being that calm while I come apart.

I come so hard my knees buckle.

I catch myself on the wall with a forearm, biting my own bicep to stay quiet, hips still moving against my hand in slow, involuntary pulses while it rolls through me in waves—one, another, a third one that surprises me—until I'm standing in the spray shaking like a probie on her first roof and laughing at myself silently because, God. Okay. So that's where I am.

I rinse off and stand there one more minute under the spray, palms flat on the tile, letting my heart find its way down.

A stranger from a fire scene. A weird, beautiful, wrong stranger from a crime scene, and I haven't come like that over an actual person in two years, and I'm sure, the way I'm sure inside a building, that this is going to be a problem.

I towel off and dress in my spare uniform shirt. I'm still flushed across the chest when I push out of the stall, which is fine, showers are hot, nobody's looking.

Val is leaning against the lockers.

Chief Valentina Mercer, in uniform so crisp it looks armored, silver-dark hair perfect at seven in the morning, reading her phone and in no hurry about it, because nothing in this station starts until she's ready. The locker room empties around her without anyone being told to leave. It's a gift she has.

“Serrano.” She doesn't look up right away. “Good save last night.”

“Thank you, Chief.”

My heart, which had just gotten down to a normal floor, climbs three flights back up. There's no reason for the chief to be in the locker room at end of shift. There's a chain of command and a morning briefing and an office with her name on it, but instead she's here, and her eyes come off the phone and land on me with that green-gray weight that makes grown firefighters check their boots.

“The civilian you pulled out,” she says. “Tell me about her.”

Of everything she could've led with, the roof, my freelancing, which Warren absolutely reported, she's led with her.

“It's in my statement,” I say, and then, because Val just waits, “Late twenties, early thirties. Blonde. She was sitting next to the second seat of fire like it was a campfire. Asked me which way I came in. Asked if the roof was compromised.”

“Asked.” Val turns the word over once, like she's checking the underside of it. “Calm, then.”

“Calm isn't the word.” I rub the towel over the back of my neck, buying a second. “Everybody's something in a fire, Chief. Screaming, frozen, praying. She was nothing. She was taking notes without a pen.”

Something moves behind Val's eyes, there and gone, like a fish under ice. She puts the phone away, which from Val is the equivalent of grabbing my collar.

“The marshal's office is calling it undetermined,” she says, which isn't what the marshal's office told us this morning, which means she's had a conversation since. “Leaning accidental. Transient activity.” Her voice puts no weight on any of it, which from Val is the same as putting weight on all of it. “You said three seats.”

“I said what I saw, Chief.”

“You usually do.” She lets that sit just long enough that I can't tell if it was a compliment. “Description?”

I give it. Height, build, the neat hair, the coat she didn't have, which Val catches, no coat, November, and banks without comment. I keep my voice flat and professional and I leave out the rest of it, that her eyes are the palest blue I've ever had aimed at me, that she looked at my mouth like she was weighing a decision, that I just came against my own hand with her voice in my head not ten minutes ago. My pulse is sitting in my throat the whole time. If Val sees it, and Val sees everything, she'll read it as adrenaline and a long night, because there's no version of reality where sensible Dani Serrano is anything else.

“She declined transport,” Val says. “No name. Walked off a scene she should've died at.” It isn't a question, so I don't answer it. She looks at me for a moment with an expression I've never been able to read, the one that feels like a hand on my shoulder and a checked box at the same time. “If she turns up again, at a scene, anywhere, you come to me. Not the marshal. Me first.”

And there it is, the question about Val that I've spent six years not asking. The marshal's office exists. The arson unit exists. There's a whole apparatus in this city for exactly this, and my chief wants a private phone call, and every firefighter at Station 9 knows you say yes to Val, and we all tell ourselves it's loyalty, and most days I even believe it.

“Yes, Chief.” It comes out steadier than it has any right to.

“Get some sleep.” She's already moving, unhurried, the conversation over because she's done with it.

At the door, she stops with one hand on the frame and doesn't turn around. The locker room has gone so quiet I can hear the day crew's TV through two walls.