She pulls my face to hers and kisses me, and I can taste salt and realize she's crying.
"You're everything," I breathe, the words unplanned. "You know that? Every fucking thing, Lily."
I hate every tear she sheds just as much as I love her, which is completely, catastrophically, without any hope of recovery.
Her hand is over my heart, her fingers drawing patterns I can't follow. Some secret language written on my skin that only she knows how to read.
"Rome will come around," she murmurs against my chest.
"I know."
"He's just scared."
"I know."
"Are you scared?"
I press my lips to her hair and breathe her in.
"Terrified," I admit.
She tips her head back and meets my eyes, her eyes still damp.
“Me too."
I kiss her forehead as she leans back against me.
Her small apartment is warm and quiet and ours for a few more hours. Outside, winter presses against the windows, waiting for morning to make everything real again. But in here, morning feels very far away.
I'm not sorry. I'm not sorry for a single second with her. Not for the sneaking or the lying or the promises I broke. I'm not sorry for falling in love with her, even knowing it's going to end, even knowing I'll have to let her go.
I close my eyes and listen to her fall asleep in my arms, which is and has always been the only sound that makes my whole body go quiet.
I hold on. For now, I hold on.
And burn.
31
CAL
February is a month I get through. Other people have months they love. Lily told me once that she loves September, how summer loosens its grip and everything feels like it's starting over.
I don't have a month. I have eleven months that are fine and one that I survive. I keep busy. Take extra shifts. Don't look at the calendar too hard. Get to March.
It's the first week of February now, and the firehouse is uneventful. A slow day, the kind where you clean things that are already clean and reorganize supplies that don't need reorganizing.
I'm restocking the medical kit on the second floor when I hear the bay door open and then her voice, bright and carrying, talking to whoever's on duty downstairs. Then her footsteps on the stairs, fast, taking them two at a time like walking at a normal pace is a waste of perfectly good momentum.
She comes through the door with flushed cheeks and flying hair and that grin that always precedes chaos.
"Hi."
She's already moving toward me before the word leaves her mouth. I catch her, my arms going around her waist on instinct, and I hold her there a few seconds longer than is smart because she smells like cold air and that shampoo I've started associating with safety, and I'm weak for her in February more than any other month.
"Hi," I murmur against her hair.
I set her down, but she stays close, face tipped up, a smile so warm it almost hurts. I have to take a deep breath to keep from telling her I love her right here in the hallway of a government building.
