Page 63 of Honeyfires

"My grandmother taught me. She saved all her patterns." She held up a pattern envelope. "McCall's 1954. Authentic vintage." Her voice went quiet the way it did when she talked about her grandmother. "When I was little, she'd let me play with her button box for hours. I'd sort them by color, by size, make up stories about where each one came from." She held up a pearl button. "Her wedding dress. And this one—" a bright red button "—first date with my grandfather."

"You're using her actual buttons."

"Just for special things." She threaded a needle with the ease of someone who had done it ten thousand times. "I like making things. There's something satisfying about starting with raw material and ending up with something that fits exactly right."

I watched her hands work and thought about all the words I was not yet saying, and wondered, with some urgency, how much longer I was going to maintain this particular strategy.

"Can I watch?" I asked.

She looked up, genuinely surprised. "Watch me sew? It's not very exciting."

"I like watching you do things you're good at."

She blushed that blush she had when I said something she hadn't expected. Throat first, then upward. "Okay. But I'm not responsible for you falling asleep."

I did not fall asleep.

I sat beside her for two hours, close enough that our shoulders touched, and neither of us moved away. She explained things as she went: French seams and the philosophy of her grandmother's construction methods and the satisfaction of appliqué work done by hand—and I listened with the full attention I gave to things that mattered, which was the same attention I gave fire behavior briefings and rope inspections and Vera talking about literally anything.

At a certain point she held up the bodice to show me a seam, leaned across me to reach something, and the vanilla-coconut smell of her hair was briefly very close to my face. I looked at the wall. I looked at the wall for several seconds. I was a person with self-control.

She did not appear to notice, but she was probably noticing.

"Can I help?" I asked, when I'd recovered.

"Do you know how to sew?"

"No."

"Then yes," she said, "I'll teach you."

She taught me to sew on a button. It took an hour. Her hands over mine, her voice patient through the third and fourth time I stabbed myself, until I produced a button that was crooked and lumpy and, technically, attached.

She examined it with a very diplomatic expression.

"You're terrible at this," she said with genuine affection in her voice.

"Years of training to rappel from helicopters, undone by a—a button."

"Different skill set." She kissed my cheek; a quick, warm press of her mouth that made the button entirely worth every drop of blood it had cost me. "Can I keep it?"

"I was going to ask if we could keep it."

She looked up at me. "Yeah?"

"First thing I ever sewed." I felt suddenly embarrassed. "That's stupid, probably."

"No." Her voice went thick. "It's really not." She wrapped it carefully in tissue paper, tucked it in the small box with her grandmother's buttons, and I watched her do it and thought I love you directly at the back of her head.

It continued to not result in her hearing it, because that was not how things worked.

But I was running out of time to say it the real way. I could feel it.

Soon, I told myself.

Very, very soon.

It was a Tuesday. Grocery store. Produce section. A man in his mid-forties was blocking the aisle, and had, apparently, opinions about my Station 19 shirt and what women who wore it were and weren't capable of.