Page 92 of Honeyfires

"—legs, man, those legs in the stockings at the station visit, I heard she came in and half the permanent guys couldn't—"

I walked back out.

The patio went instantly quiet. Rodriguez was at the grill. Jackson was mid-sentence at the cornhole bracket table. Miller's expression didn't change, but he went still, too.

Davids and Emerson were at the corner of the patio. Davids saw me first, and something in his face shifted. Emerson followed his eyeline and went pale.

I crossed the patio and set the bottles down on the nearest table and approached them, haughty, fast-footed.

"Finish that sentence," I said, and both men took a step back in shock.

The quiet of the patio changed. Vera was at the cornhole board, twenty feet away. She'd stopped moving.

"Alves—" Emerson started.

"That's a person," I said. My voice came out even. I'd expected it not to, and it had anyway. "She has been here for three hours being genuinely kind to every person at this barbecue. She learned people's names. She asked about Ortega's daughter's reading. She listened to the Painted Rock story without making anyone feel like they had to soften it. She won a cornhole tournament and didn't make anyone feel bad about losing." I stopped. Steadied. "And she did all of that as a person. Not as a body for you to discuss when you think she's left the room."

Davids opened his mouth.

"I'm not done," I said. "You've worked this crew for five seasons. You know what it means to have someone's back. You know what it means to be trusted. And you turned around and talked about her like she's scenery. Like the fact that she's here and she's kind and she's making this afternoon better for people is somehow incidental to what you actually noticed." My jaw was tight. The jaw thing Vera had mentioned. "That's not how you talk about someone. That's not how you talk about any person. And it is especially not how you talk about her."

Silence. Long enough that you could hear the Bluetooth speaker across the station parking lot.

Rodriguez was no longer at the grill. He was standing five feet away from Davids and Emerson with that stillness possessed only by a captain with twenty years of command authority, and when he spoke, his voice was very quiet.

"Apologize," he said. That was all.

The apologies came out stilted and inadequate, which apologies in those circumstances always were. Neither of them could look at Vera when they said them, which was its own kind of answer.

"We're going to head out," I said to Rodriguez. "Thanks for the barbecue, Cap."

Rodriguez looked at me. Then at Vera. Then back at me with the expression of a man who was calculating something. "Alves." He said it quietly. "You handled that right."

He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to.

I took Vera's hand. We walked to the truck.

I was shaking.

The drive home was quiet.

When we got home and stepped into our apartment, Vera turned to look at me.

"You didn't have to do that for me," she said.

"It wasn't for you," I said. "I mean—it was, technically. But it wasn't about protecting you from something you couldn't handle. It was about the fact that what they were saying was wrong." I set my keys on the hook she'd put by the door because I'd been losing them three times a week before she did. "You'd been nothing but good to those people all afternoon. Genuine. And they turned around and talked about you like you were furniture. Like all of that was incidental to what they actually saw." Something tightened in my chest. "That's not something I can watch and do nothing about."

She studied me. "You're still angry."

"Yeah." The anger was all over, boiling from my head to my toes. There was no desire to go back and escalate. Just this residue of something I believed with absolute clarity. "You deserve to be somewhere that treats you like a person. That's not asking for much."

She crossed the room and put her hand flat on my chest, over my heart. "I know." She looked up at me. "I know exactly what it was."

I covered her hand with mine and leaned down, kissing her forehead. "I'm sorry it happened. At something that was supposed to be—"

"Hey." She cut me off, gently. "You know what I'm thinking about right now?"

"What?"