Page 85 of Honeyfires

"You did it. I supervised."

"We're a team." She turned in my arms, not caring about the flour on both of us. "Everything's better when we do it together, you know."

I kissed her. She tasted like butter and flour and an ordinary Wednesday evening, which was, I was discovering, the best possible thing to taste like.

The next day at the station, Rodriguez found me checking rappel lines in the equipment bay and leaned against Engine 19 with the questionable, suspicious posture of a man who had something to say.

"You seem different," he said.

"Different how."

"Relaxed. Present." He studied me. "Living with the librarian agrees with you."

"We make it work," I said, which was the understatement of my current life.

"Good. Fire season's coming. Driest spring in a decade. You've never seen it this bad in San Jacinto, but I have. I need everyone sharp."

"I'm always sharp, Cap."

"I know you are." He pushed off the engine. "I just need to make sure more happy doesn't become less sharp."

"It won't."

He nodded and walked away, and Jackson materialized approximately four seconds later from behind Engine 19 in a way that strongly suggested he had been there the whole time.

"Were you listening to that conversation?" I asked.

"I was performing maintenance in the vicinity of a conversation," he said. "Different thing."

"Jackson."

"He's wrong, for the record." He fell into step beside me. "You're not softer. You're—" He thought about it. "You're more you. Like you finally have a reason to be all the way here instead of just most of the way here."

I looked at him. Jackson, who had talked me out of doing something catastrophically stupid after the Painted Rock fire two seasons ago by simply sitting next to me in the parking lot for forty-five minutes without saying anything. Jackson, who knew when to talk and when not to, which was rarer than it sounded.

"She made my grandmother's biscuits last night," I said. "Because it was something I mentioned once offhand, like a week ago."

Jackson was quiet for a moment. "Yeah," he said. "That's the thing, isn't it?"

"What thing?"

"The thing that makes you more careful up there." He nodded toward the helipad, toward the Bell 212 gleaming in the morning sun. "Back when you didn't have much to come home to, you didn't think about coming home as much. Now you do." He glanced at me sideways. "That's not a weakness, Petra. That's a reason."

I thought about Vera on Sunday mornings. About biscuits and flour-covered kitchens and a woman who put books on my boots as an act of love.

"Yeah," I said. "It is."

Stevens appeared from around the corner of the equipment bay. "Are you guys having a moment? Because I can come back. I just wanted to tell Alves that Vera texted me the brown butter variation for chocolate chip and it's—" He stopped, reading the atmosphere. "Is this a moment?"

"We're done," Jackson said.

"Great." Stevens looked at me with bright, uncomplicated sincerity. "Vera is the best person you've ever dated, and we're all really glad she exists."

"Stevens—"

"I'm just saying what everyone's thinking." He held up his phone. "Also, she sent a text that says Brandon, the secret is to brown the butter until it smells nutty but not burnt, and you should trust yourself. And I just want you to know that personally, that really—" He stopped. "It really got me. A little bit."

I stared at him.