Page 21 of Honeyfires

"You're distributing it more evenly."

"I'm doing my best." She stepped back and inspected her work and winced. "Okay. You might need a mirror."

I cracked an entirely involuntary grin. "Worth it."

She looked up at me with those ink-dark pupils and the ruins of her lipstick and smiled back, slow and private, just for me, the smile that had no other audience and didn't need one. "Yeah," she said softly. "Worth it."

She straightened my jacket lapels with both hands and smoothed them down, the way she probably handled a library acquisition she was particularly pleased about. Then she glanced at her watch, and her whole face changed.

"It's almost noon."

"Is it now."

"My lunch break is in ten minutes." She looked up. "There's a café on Second. The Fitzgerald. Good prosciutto. And there's a used bookstore next door I've been meaning to go into for two months, but every time I walk past it, someone inside looks at me through the window and I feel like I need a better reason than I was nearby."

"What reason would be good enough?"

"Someone to go with. So it's less like a haunting and more like browsing."

"I'm an excellent browsing companion."

"You've been in a library for eleven minutes and you're already holding the wrong book right side up."

"Progress," I said.

She pressed her lips together. Losing. "And—sorry. You probably have somewhere to be."

"I have exactly nowhere to be." I watched her try to tuck the escaped curl back into the chignon and fail twice. "Let it down."

"My hair?"

"You've got lipstick on your chin, your hair is losing an argument with Newton's law of gravity itself, and you look like someone knocked over a card catalog." I reached up and pulled the pin holding the chignon, and her hair fell in a gold wave over her shoulders. "There. Now you look like you meant to."

She blinked at me.

"Like you meant all of it," I said, and held the pin out.

The smile that crossed her face was slow and luminous and struck me right in the heart.

She reached out and took the pin from my fingers.

"Petra Alves," she said.

"Vera Montgomery."

"You absolutely have to take me to lunch."

I smiled. "Copy that."

Move With Me

Chapter Six

The café was exactly as charming as Vera had promised. Exposed brick, hanging plants, sandwiches with literary names on a chalkboard menu. I ordered something. I'm sure it was fine.

I have no memory of eating any of it.

All I could focus on was Vera touching her lips every few minutes, absent and unconscious, like she kept forgetting and then remembering. The way her eyes would find mine across the small table and darken in that distracting way, pupils swallowing the blue every time our knees bumped beneath it—which was happening with a frequency that had long since exceeded coincidence.