"It's in everything. Hayes says it takes three days to really get rid of it. She says you learn to live with it."
"I can live with it."
Zoe looks at me. Her eyes are doing the thing, the full-volume thing where everything she feels is right there on her face and she doesn't try to hide it because hiding is not in her vocabulary.
"You were worried," she says.
I don't confirm it. I don't deny it. I stand behind my bar with my rings on and my jacket hanging on the hook behind the safe and the Clash poster above it and the neon going blue-pink-blue, and I let her read my silence the way she's always read my silence, fluently, without needing me to translate.
"I'm going to do this again," she says. "This is my job. I'm going to go inside burning buildings and I'm going to come here after and tell you about it and you're going to worry and I need you to know that I'm good at this. Hayes says I'm good at this. Cap says I'm on course. I checked the crib. I stayed on the wall. I followed the system."
"I know."
"So you can't freak out every time. I am always going to come back here. You're not getting rid of me that easily."
I almost smile. She sees it. She always sees it, the almost-smiles I try to catch before they land, and she lets me know she sees them by grinning back, and her grin is wide and tired and proud and alive and I'm looking at a person who walked through fire today and came out the other side and is sitting in my bar telling me about it with copper mug in her hands and smoke in her hair.
"Come here," I say.
"You're behind the bar."
"I know where I am."
She comes around. The bar isn't that long. She walks around the end, past the PBR taps and the well bottles and the stack of clean towels, and she stands in front of me in my space, behind my bar, and she's close enough that I can smell the smoke and the soap and the ginger beer on her breath.
I put my hands on her face. Both hands. Rings against her jaw. I hold her there and I look at her and she looks at me and the bar is half-full and people are watching and I don't care, which is new, which is everything.
"You went inside," I say.
She smiles at me. "I went inside."
"And you came out."
"And I came out." Her voice has gone softer, no more teasing.
"Come out every time."
"That's the plan."
I kiss her. In the bar, behind the counter, in front of Jeff and the Wednesday crowd and the flickering neon and the Clash poster and everything I built on purpose. I kiss her and she tastes like ginger and lime and she smells like smoke and her face is warm under my hands and she's here.
Someone at the bar whistles. I don't look.
Zoe pulls back. She's smiling so wide and her eyes are bright and her hands are on my waist and she's standing in my bar behind my counter and she fits here. She fits in my apartment and at the gym and in my chair at Vanessa's and behind my bar. She fits everywhere I am because she doesn't wait for an invitation.
"I have to get back to work," I say.
She doesn’t let go of my waist.
"Sit down. I'll make you another mule."
"Okay." She starts to walk back around the bar. Stops. Turns. "Teague."
"What."
"I love you."
She says it the way she says everything. Without planning. Without editing. Without checking first to see if the ground will hold. She just says it, standing in my bar with smoke in her hair, and it lands in me like a key turning in a lock I didn't know I'd left open.
