Page 38 of Honeyfires

"The heat," I said carefully, "is fine."

"You're getting that look."

"What look?"

"The one you get when you're deciding whether to put down the spatula and put your tongue between my thighs." She bit the pepper, watching me. "For the record, I'm not opposed to dinner being delayed."

I put down the spatula. She looked extremely unsurprised, and also immediately slid off the counter, and I had her against the wall inside of four seconds.

"Dinner's going to burn," she informed me breathlessly, ten seconds later.

"I turned the heat down."

"You did," she allowed. "Very competent. Very—" I found the spot below her ear. "—oh—very—"

The pepper situation on the stove received a brief intermission. It was fine. The vegetables were fine. Everything was, in the end, fine.

We ate twenty minutes later, slightly rumpled, not discussing the delay, which was its own form of communication we'd developed.

Two weeks later, I showed up at the library on my lunch break with a paper bag from Rosie's and the explicit intention of disrupting her afternoon.

"You can't eat in the library," she said without looking up from the cart she was shelving.

"It's a bag. I'm not eating yet."

"The bag smells like onion rings."

"The bag contains onion rings."

She looked up. Looked at the bag. Looked at me. Tracked her gaze from the bag to my face in a way that was doing something that was not purely about the onion rings. "You brought me onion rings."

"I brought myself onion rings. You're welcome to some if you take a break."

She took a break.

We sat on the bench outside the library's side entrance in the shade of the climbing ivy, the afternoon hot and dry and quiet, and she ate exactly half my onion rings with the comfortable, unguarded appetite of someone who'd stopped performing indifference around me sometime around day four.

"Mrs. Martinez asked about you," she said.

"What about?"

"She saw you drop me off last Tuesday and came directly to the desk to ask if the motorcycle woman was my girlfriend." She dipped an onion ring in ranch. "I told her you were my neighbor."

I looked at her. "Your neighbor."

"My very good neighbor." She took a bite. "She didn't look convinced."

"Mrs. Martinez is a perceptive woman."

"She's sixty-three and she told me you have very nice arms." Vera ate the onion ring with perfect composure. "Exact words: sixty-three, not dead."

I laughed. "I like Mrs. Martinez."

"Everyone likes Mrs. Martinez." She glanced at me sideways. "For the record. I didn't know what to call you. When she asked."

"You could've called me what I am."

"And what's that?"