Teague signs. She holds the pen like she's signing a lease.
"I'm Liz," the woman says. "If you need anything, I'm here all day. The main floor is through those doors. Locker rooms are on the left."
The boy on the floor looks up from his drawing. He's maybe seven, round face, focused. "Are you a firefighter?" he asks me.
I blink. "How did you know that?"
"You're wearing Station 11 shorts."
I look down. He's right. I'm wearing the training shorts Hayes gave me, gray with the station number on the hip. I didn't even think about it when I got dressed.
"Yeah," I say. "I am. Probationary."
"My mom's girlfriend is a firefighter. Torres. She drives the engine."
My brain does a fast, bright calculation. Liz. Charlie. Torres drives the engine. This is Torres's Liz. This is Torres's Charlie, the kid from the volcano project, the one Torres talks about at lunch with a specificity that means love.
"Torres is on my crew," I say, and my voice comes out a little too excited because this is a crossover and I love crossovers. "She's amazing."
Charlie nods seriously. "She lets me sit in the engine sometimes. But only when it's parked."
"Smart rule."
Liz is watching this exchange with a look I recognize from my own mother: the quiet assessment of whether someone is safe for her kid to talk to. Whatever she sees passes the test, because her posture relaxes.
"Maria talks about the new probie," Liz says. "You're the one with the cookies."
"That's me."
Liz smiles. "She says you're good."
Pride spreads through my chest. Torres said I'm good. Torres told Liz, who is telling me, and the gossip pipeline that runs through this crew and their partners is apparently also a compliment pipeline and I'm inside it.
"Okay." Teague shifts her weight beside me before putting a careful hand on my hip. "Can we go lift things now? Before the feelings multiply?"
Liz grins. She likes Teague. I can tell because the grin has surprise in it, the kind that happens when someone isn't what you expected and you're pleased about it.
We change in the locker room. Teague puts on the shorts and t-shirt I packed and looks at herself in the mirror with genuine confusion, like she's seeing a person she hasn't met. Without the jacket and the boots and the rings, she looks younger. The tattoos are more visible, the koi on her forearm, the geometric piece on her ribs showing under the shirt hem when she lifts her arms.
"I look like I teach spin class," she says.
"You look good."
"I look like I own a water bottle with a motivational quote on it."
"You look like my girlfriend who is at the gym with me because she likes me."
The word lands. Girlfriend. I said it without planning to, the way I say most things, and it's out there now, floating between us in the locker room with the fluorescent lights and the rubber floor mats and the faint smell of chlorine from somewhere.
Teague looks at me. Her face does the thing where she's processing something she didn't expect and she's choosing in real time what to do with it. The old Teague would have deflected. Made a joke. Said something dry about labels.
"Girlfriend," she says. Testing it.
"If you want."
"I didn't say I didn't want."
"So?"
