Page 55 of Honeyfires

Vera had made the reservation three weeks in advance. I'd ironed a shirt.

Let that sink in. I, Perpetua Alves, who miraculously owned one iron and used it approximately never, had stood in my kitchen at six-fifteen in the morning running it over a dark gray button-down with the kind of focus I normally reserved for rope inspections. My nicest slacks. The black leather boots Vera had once described, unprompted and with genuine conviction, as making me look like a disgustingly hot biker chick.

I would be thinking about that for the rest of my natural life.

She was worth every second of the ironing.

She sat across from me in a vintage A-line cocktail dress the color of a winter sky. Her golden hair fell in soft barrel curls that caught the candlelight like she'd arranged it that way on purpose. I'd never seen anything so beautiful in my life.

I had eaten relatively none of my food.

"—and I'm thinking we do it in two age brackets," she was saying, hands moving expressively, eyes lit up the way they got when she was in the middle of an idea she loved. "Six to nine, and ten to twelve. Different books, different discussion formats. The older ones can do a proper book club structure, but the younger one—"

I was staring at her mouth.

"Petra."

"The younger ones," I said immediately.

She tilted her head. "You weren't listening."

"I was listening. You said two age brackets."

"And then?"

"And then I got distracted."

"By what?"

"You."

She blinked. The color rose in her cheeks in that particular way it did, starting at the throat and moving upward, and she looked down at her plate with a smile she was clearly trying to contain and failing at completely. "You can't just say things like that."

"Why not?"

"Because we're in a restaurant and I have nowhere to put it."

"Put what?"

She looked up at me with those blue eyes darkened several shades. "The way you look at me sometimes."

I opened my mouth.

My phone buzzed.

I ignored it. She was biting her lower lip, and the candlelight was doing something criminal to her collarbones, and I was not—

It buzzed again.

"You should check that," she said softly.

"It can wait."

Third buzz. Fourth and fifth in quick succession.

I turned it over. Rodriguez.

Lightning strike near Salvador Ridge. All hands.