Page 1 of Honeyfires

Prologue

She wiped the starlight from my eyes.

How we'd gone from strangers to this, tangled in the evening light, fingers linked, each other's names on our lips, I didn't know. I only knew how her fingertips felt on my cheeks, only knew that the hollowness in my eyes had filled with the weight of her and her cinnamon words. Her bare body pressed against mine, spent, satisfied, solid beneath me.

I was always half-prepared to lose her.

Half-prepared for the emptiness to return, to the lonely nights beneath the Arizonan sky, cold desert air outside my window, somehow still tasting of dust and sun and wildflowers. Of lying awake, staring up at the popcorn ceiling with eyes that had seen far too much, enduring a lifetime of heavy, torrential rains of nothingness. So much nothing it soaked through my clothes, so much nothing I oozed of it, so much nothing it consumed me.

Then along came Vera. Her smile powered something in me, like a million tiny, scattered lightbulbs all over my skin, so bright they should've burned, but they didn't. Nothing about her hurt.

I remember the day we met.

The Superbloom

Chapter One

The open-air hallway ran the length of the building, overlooking the parking lot below. There had been a superbloom at Devil's Canyon, on the outskirts of the small Arizonan town of San Jacinto, a dot on the map that seemed so inconsequential, yet nearly my entire life had played out here. Memories and moments and the mist of every unshed tear, every scream still trapped inside me.

Then I'd seen her for the first time, standing there at the end of the hallway of my apartment building, and I—opened. Like every flower of the superbloom, blossoming simply from the sight of her.

Cornflower blue eyes behind vintage black cat-eye glasses, gold-spun hair the color of daisies, standing there in her pink floral-print dress, white Mary Janes clad on petite feet, stockings rising halfway up her toned thighs like they were personally designed to test my self-control.

God, I needed to look away.

I did a bad job at it.

I stuck my key into the lock, grocery bags hanging low on the same hand that held tight to my motorcycle helmet, sweat beading on my forehead. I couldn't look at her the way I was looking at her. Not like some wounded animal who felt owed something from the world.

"Hiya, neighbor."

My head jerked up. Her voice was like a rushing glacial stream, sweet and clean and cold, but not in a bad way. The way ice cream tasted on a hot day, actually. It moved through me the same way. Sudden and clarifying, a temperature I hadn't known I needed.

I opened my mouth. My brain, normally a sensibly functional organ, went completely thoughtless, one circuit at a time, like power failing in a storm.

"Hi," I said stupidly.

Groundbreaking. Someone alert the linguists.

"I-I'm Vera Montgomery," she said, with a slight stutter I found positively adorable. She walked over, those Mary Janes tap-tapping on the concrete floor, and stuck her hand out. She smiled at me, and the world tilted sideways.

I was not okay. I was so not going to be okay during this interaction.

I locked my muscles and stiffly shook her hand. Warm. Tiny. Manicured nails.

"Last name's Alves," I said slowly, like I was trying to communicate with an extraterrestrial. "My Portuguese-immigrant parents cruelly named me Perpetua at the hospital in Braga where I was born thirty-four years ago, but no one, not even my parents in moments of extreme disappointment, actually uses that name."

"That does seem unkind of them." She tilted her head. The hallway light caught the gold in her hair and made something magical of it. "Can I guess what they call you instead?"

"You can try."

"Perri."

"No."

"Pippa."

"No."