Page 42 of Honeyfires

I filled the mugs and leaned against the counter and listened to her hum and thought: That's my girlfriend in there, singing like a scratched-up record dipped in honey. That's my girlfriend, who last night had pressed her wrists into the headboard and kept them there for a full ten minutes on nothing but her own will, because I'd asked her to, and had looked at me after like I'd wrangled and lassoed her the moon.

That was a woman worth waking up early for.

The bathroom door opened, releasing a cloud of vanilla-scented steam and the rest of the song, which turned out to be a very committed rendition of a Billie Holiday number that was almost certainly not bathroom-acoustics appropriate. Vera emerged in a towel, her hair dripping, skin flushed pink. She was still humming. She was always still humming.

"Oh, you made—" She clocked the mugs on the counter, coffee recently poured and steaming. "You're perfect."

"I know when you need your coffee. It's basic retention."

"It's not basic." She crossed the room and kissed me, soft and minty. "It's extremely romantic, and I won't hear otherwise." She took her mug, wrapped both hands around it, and gave me the look. The one that made my pulse kick up like an engine turning over. "What are you thinking about?"

"Nothing."

"You're doing the face."

"I don't have a face."

"You have several. This one means you're thinking something you've decided not to say." She took a sip, watching me over the rim. "What is it?"

I looked at her, at the towel, wet hair, fogged-up cat-eye glasses she'd somehow already put on. She was making a face herself, that dreamy expression she got on the first sip of good coffee, the same expression she made in entirely different contexts, which she was completely aware of and deployed without conscience.

"I have to bring lunch to the station today," I said instead. "Equipment check before fire season. My turn to buy."

Vera straightened immediately. "Can I come?"

"To the fire station?"

"I could bring the lunch. I make good sandwiches. Well, I assemble good sandwiches since the deli does the actual work, but I have excellent curatorial instincts." The slightest uncertainty crossed her face. "Unless that's—I mean, if work is work, I understand."

I set my mug down and pulled her in by the waist. She came willingly, mug still in hand, tucking herself against me with the ease of someone who'd decided this was her spot and wasn't accepting counterarguments.

"I'd love for you to come."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." I kissed her hair. "Fair warning. They're going to interrogate you."

She pulled back to look at me. "I handle difficult patrons for a living. I once talked a man through a three-hour dispute about whether Moby Dick counted as a novel or an extended metaphor while he was hoarding overdue library books he refused to return." She patted my chest. "I can handle a few firefighters."

"That is not the same thing."

"It's the same energy." Another pat, more decisive. "I'll be fine."

I looked at her, my girlfriend, in a towel, in the kitchen, radiating the calm confidence of someone who had never met a room she couldn't win.

She was absolutely going to be fine. The crew was the one that needed warning.

Station 19 sat on the edge of town where the last of the residential streets gave way to open scrubland, a low concrete building with a wide apparatus bay, a crew quarters wing, a training yard around the back, and the helipad out to the side, set apart from everything else the way a flight deck was always in its own domain.

The Bell 212 sat on the pad in the afternoon sun. Seventy-some feet of rotor diameter, twin turboshaft engines, red-and-white paint that Station 19 kept clean enough to reflect the sky. She wasn't flashy. She was a workhorse. Forty-plus years of airframe design that had survived Vietnam, oil platforms, and several decades of being dropped into the worst terrain in the American West. She looked exactly like what she was: reliable past the point of argument.

Vera got out of her Beetle in a yellow sundress with tiny white daisies, carrying a large paper bag from the deli, and stopped walking the moment she saw the helicopter.

"That's the helicopter," she said.

"That's the helicopter."

"It's bigger than I pictured."