Page 9 of Honeyfires

"So you're reading it," she said. "The fire. Like text."

"I guess, yeah."

She pointed at me. "Narrative rescue," she said. "We're the same."

I almost smiled. "We are not the same. One of us rappels from helicopters."

"And one of us handles the Tuesday ghost neighbor. We all have our community burdens." She sipped her coffee. "I'm serious, though. You read patterns to stop destruction. I read people to find them what they need. Both of those things are just—paying attention." She turned her mug in her hands. "Most people don't."

I looked at her across the table, this woman who had walked into my apartment building's hallway in Mary Janes and proceeded to take me completely apart one observation at a time, and thought: this is the kind of encounter that happens once. Maybe twice if the universe is feeling generous. Not to people like me, usually.

But sometimes.

The diner emptied around us, and the waitress had begun deploying significant glances in our direction. When Vera finally looked at her watch, her eyes went wide.

"Oh my god, it's almost ten."

"Don't apologize."

"I was going to say I'm impressed with myself, actually." She reached for the check before I could. I reached too. We had a brief, dignified disagreement.

"I asked you out," she said firmly. "I pay."

"That's not—"

"Petra." She gave me a look of remarkable patience, steady as bedrock. "I'm not letting you pay because you're wearing boy clothes. You're still a girl, just like me. Arguably more girl than me in some respects, given that I once cried at a hardware store commercial."

"You—what?"

"There was a dad teaching his daughter to fix things." She didn't blink. "It was very touching. Focus."

She paid. I let her, mostly because I was still processing the hardware store commercial. It was so genuinely, specifically absurd that it looped around into being one of the most endearing things I'd ever heard, and I kept my expression neutral only through years of military discipline that had never anticipated needing to be deployed for this exact situation.

"The commercial," I said, as we stood to leave.

"We don't have to—"

"What brand?"

She looked at me for a moment. "Home Depot."

"Home Depot made you cry."

"It was a very good ad."

"Home Depot."

"The daughter fixed a birdhouse, Petra. With her dad's guidance. And then the birds came." She pulled on her Antique Bridal Whisper cardigan. "I'm not made of stone."

I held the door open for her and followed her out into the night, and I was smiling so hard it was starting to constitute a serious concern.

Outside, the desert air had cooled into sage and distant rain and the dry mineral smell of land that had been hot all day and was only now exhaling. Vera pulled her cardigan tighter as we walked to the parking lot. My motorcycle glinted silver and black in the moonlight, the red and orange flames painted along the tank catching the light like a fire still burning.

"I had a really good time," she said.

"Me too."

We stood there, neither of us quite ready to break the particular spell of a night that had gone better than either of us had any right to expect. The space between us hummed quietly. San Jacinto had that quality sometimes, the desert around it enormous and dark and ancient, the sky thick with stars out this far from the big cities of Arizona. The kind of sky that made you feel both very small and somehow, inexplicably, enormous.