Page 58 of Honeyfires

I stared at those two crossed-out letters.

I lo.

My pulse kicked up hard in my throat. She'd almost written it. Started it, gotten two letters in, crossed them out, written something safer instead, and then tucked it into my gear bag where I'd find it on a day when she wasn't there to see my face.

The words had been sitting in my own chest for weeks, pressing against my ribs like smoke pressure, threatening to escape every time she looked at me or laughed at something I said or reached for my hand without thinking about it.

"You good, Alves?" Stevens appeared from the rope cache, reading my expression with the alarming perceptiveness he occasionally displayed between bouts of stepping on his own hose lines.

"Yeah." I folded the note carefully and tucked it into my wallet, right behind my ID. "I'm good."

He looked at me for a moment. "You've got a face."

"I don't have a face."

"You have the face you make when you're thinking about Vera."

"I have one face. It's my face. It does what it wants."

"It's doing the Vera thing right now, specifically."

"Stevens."

"I'm just observing."

"Go observe somewhere else."

He went. But he was smiling, and I didn't have it in me to find that annoying.

Did I really have a Vera face?

Even Pressure, Petra

Chapter Ten

The cookie baking afternoon had been Vera's idea, which meant it had been inevitable from the moment she'd mentioned it.

She'd spent two days planning it with the kind of tenacity she brought to library programming. Typed ingredient list. Stations set up across her kitchen counter. Printed recipe cards in a font she'd chosen specifically because it was, and I am quoting directly, "legible but charming."

When the crew arrived on a shared day off, she greeted them at the door in a yellow apron with small strawberries on it, which was thematically consistent, naturally, and the expression of someone who had prepared for every contingency.

I was watching my girlfriend receive my fire crew in her apartment like she was hosting a state dinner. It was the most remarkable thing I had ever witnessed.

Stevens walked in and immediately touched something he wasn't supposed to.

"That's the brown butter," Vera said pleasantly, redirecting his hand without breaking eye contact. "It's not ready yet. Go wash your hands."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, with a deference I had personally never managed to inspire from him despite outranking him by several pay grades and once saving his life.

I was going to think about this for years.

Miller arrived last, precisely on time, carrying a bag. He took out a small bottle from inside it and set it on the counter without ceremony.

Vera looked at it. Then at him. Then at it again. "Is that Nielsen-Massey Mexican vanilla?"

"Best for snickerdoodles."

"It absolutely is." She beamed at him with the full force of her enthusiasm, and Miller's ears went slightly red, which was an image I was saving in a mental vault I intended to access on difficult days for the rest of my life. "You researched vanilla extract."