Page 103 of Honeyfires

Helen looked concerned. She gestured subtly toward me, and Vera's posture shifted, her shoulders back, chin up. Defensive.

Sarah joined them, adding something to the conversation, and she too gestured in my direction. Her expression was harder than Helen's, more judgmental, and I saw Vera's jaw tighten.

I knew that look on those women’s faces. The are you sure about her look. The she seems dangerous look. I'd seen it before in the Army when I came back different, hollowed out and rough-edged in ways that made command nervous. At the VA, when they diagnosed me with PTSD and looked at me like a bomb that might detonate. From people who could sense the violence I carried tucked beneath my knuckles, the capacity for destruction coming from years of learning how to survive in places designed to kill you.

They weren't wrong.

I was intense. I did carry trauma like a loaded fucking weapon. I probably wasn't the safe choice for someone like Vera, someone soft and whole and unbroken by war.

But Vera was still talking, her hands moving emphatically now, and whatever she was saying made Helen's expression soften slightly. Sarah still looked unconvinced, but Vera wasn't backing down.

I turned away, focusing on the task at hand, and tried to ignore the knot forming in my stomach.

The drive home in Vera's Beetle was quiet at first. She navigated the empty streets of San Jacinto with an ease that made little proper sense, considering she wasn’t native to the town. Big city Pheonix girl bumping along to soft jazz on the radio, her hands steady on the wheel as she hummed along.

But I could feel the tension radiating off her. It was clear in the set of her shoulders.

"What did Helen say?" I finally asked.

She sighed, her grip tightening on the steering wheel, knuckles flexing. "She's worried about you being 'intense.' Her word, not mine."

"And Sarah?"

"Sarah thinks..." She paused, choosing her words carefully. "Sarah thinks you might be unstable. Because of the Army and your job. Because you run toward danger instead of away from it."

My stomach dropped, not because it was unexpected, but because hearing it confirmed hurt more than I'd thought it would. "She's not wrong."

"Petra—"

"I do have trauma. I have nightmares. My hands shake after bad fires. I drink too much sometimes when the memories get bad." The words came out flat, factual. "They can see what you don't want to see. I don’t blame them. Honestly."

"I see all of that,” Vera said fiercely. "I see all of it, Petra. And I love you anyway."

"Why?" The question escaped before I could stop it, small and helpless in the dim interior of the car.

She pulled into our apartment complex parking lot but didn't get out. Instead, she turned to face me, her beautiful blue eyes bright even in the darkness.

"Because everyone has something. Your trauma doesn't make you broken or unworthy of love. It just makes you human, baby."

"I'm not safe," I said under my breath. "You know that, right? I'm not the safe choice. I'm not gentle or easy or uncomplicated. I'm broken edges and nightmares and a woman who runs into burning buildings for a living. Sarah's right to be concerned."

"I don't want safe." Vera reached across the console, grabbing the lapels of my suit and tugging me closer. "I want you. All of you. The broken edges and the nightmares and the woman who's brave enough to run toward danger when everyone else is running away. I want the person who defends me without hesitation, who makes me feel protected and cherished and seen. I want exactly who you are, Petra. Trauma and all."

My throat tightened, the emotions suffocating me. "You deserve better."

"I deserve someone who loves me completely. Someone who shows up even when it's uncomfortable. Someone who sits through literary discussions she doesn't care about because she knows it matters to me." She tugged me closer by my jacket. "I deserve you. And you deserve to be loved without conditions, without having to hide your wounds or pretend you're something you're not."

I looked at her across the tight space between us, this woman who saw all my jagged pieces and called them beautiful, and something in me just… tore. I kissed her, desperate and broken and needy and entirely sure this was where I was meant to be.

"Come inside," I said roughly. "I need to tell you something. About after. About what it was like coming home."

We climbed the stairs to our apartment and let ourselves inside. We settled on the couch, Vera curled against my side, her head on my shoulder, her hand resting over my heart. The apartment was quiet around us, just the distant sounds of the town and our breathing. I stared at the ceiling, gathering my thoughts, trying to figure out how to explain years of darkness in a way that wouldn't send her running.

"The funerals were the worst part," I started shakily. "Worse than the explosion itself, worse than watching them die. Lucas's was first. Three days after we got back stateside."

I could still see it. The flag-draped coffin. The honor guard. Johnson's wife, Amanda, holding their six-year-old daughter, who kept asking why Daddy was sleeping in the box.

"His wife asked me to speak. Said Lucas always talked about me, about our plans for after deployment. So I stood up there in my dress uniform and tried to find words that would make sense of the senseless. Tried to explain to a room full of grieving people that Lucas died a hero when the truth was he died because I froze."