Page 41 of Honeyfires

She set the coffee down. She took off her glasses and cleaned them, which I'd learned was her tell for I'm feeling something and I need three seconds. Then she put them back on and looked at me with those clear, direct blue eyes.

"I haven't wanted to see anyone else," she said. "Since approximately the hallway."

"Since Preppy."

"Don't." She pointed. "That was my best guess. But yes." Her chin tilted up slightly. "I've been yours since before I understood what that meant. That's the honest version."

The reference desk between us felt suddenly very irrelevant as a concept.

"Mine," I said.

"Yours." Steady. Sure. And then, with the particular composure of someone aware they're making me insane, she said, "So. Are we doing this with a name?"

"We've been doing this."

"I mean officially."

Three weeks of her toothbrush next to mine and her dresses in my closet and her Post-its in my jacket pocket. Three weeks of onion rings and carrot corrections and Tuesday coffee through the staff entrance. Three weeks of her pressed against my kitchen wall and her voice in the dark saying I've got you and her sleep-warm and certain beside me every morning I'd been lucky enough to wake up to her.

"Yeah," I said. "We're doing this with a name."

The smile that came over her face was slow and luminous and worth every single word.

"Then, for the record," she said, picking her coffee back up with that preternatural composure, "Petra Alves is my girlfriend. As of today. Logged, filed, and cross-referenced under best decision I've made in San Jacinto and see also: the Le Guin section."

"Vera Montgomery is my girlfriend," I said. "Also logged."

"The system has been updated."

"Is Mrs. Martinez going to hear about this?"

"Mrs. Martinez is going to be thrilled. She's going to bring tamales." She paused. "Multiple tamales. We're talking a significant quantity of celebratory tamales."

"I'm not opposed to that outcome."

"Neither am I." She looked at me over her coffee mug, warm and bright and entirely mine, and said, very softly, "Hi, girlfriend."

I grinned. "Hi yourself."

I walked back to my table and sat down and opened my gear manual and read exactly nothing for the next twenty minutes.

Vera, at the reference desk, was smiling at nothing in particular and every time I looked up and saw it, I looked back down at my manual and felt something flop in my stomach in that same ridiculous way it had been doing for three weeks.

Outside the windows, San Jacinto conducted its afternoon without fanfare, entirely indifferent to the fact that something had just been named that had been true for twenty-one days.

The desert light came through the tall windows and settled over the shelves and the books and Vera at her desk, amber and ordinary and exactly right.

I was going to be so useless for this gear report.

It was the best I'd felt in years.

It's Extremely Romantic, and I Won't Hear Otherwise

Chapter Eight

I woke in Vera's comfortable bed with the sunset-pink sheets to the sound of the shower running and lay still for a moment, processing. Sunlight filtered through the butter-yellow curtains, the smell of coffee already made, the distant off-key humming of someone who had no idea how loud she was in the morning and genuinely could not have cared less.

I pulled on my boxer briefs and went to start the coffee, then discovered she'd already started it. My mug, two sugars already laid out on the counter. Hers with a splash of cream and one sugar waiting.