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The kitchen eventually goes quiet except for her breathing and mine and the refrigerator's small dumb hum and my fingers slowly slide out of her. The morning light has moved one full counter tile, and I rest my cheek against the inside of her thigh, feeling the pulse still slamming there, and her fingers come loose in my hair and start moving through it, slow, petting me, and I close my eyes and let her do that too. There's a piece of broken glass somewhere to my left foot and a column of smoke over Camden with her boot prints in it, and I stand in the middle of all of it with my face against a firefighter and feel, for one unforgivable minute, at peace.

“Come up here,” she says, hoarse.

She pulls me in between her thighs and kisses me, and she finds the taste of herself in my mouth and doesn't shy from it, hums into it like a discovery. We stay there trading slow kisses in the ruins of my kitchen, her ankles crossed behind me, my hands at rest on her bare hips, two women who should be running from each other in opposite directions standing absolutely still.

“You're shaking,” she says against my mouth.

“You're cold.” Neither sentence is the truth and both are. “Bed's down the hall.”

She pulls back enough to look at me, and her eyes go past my shoulder, down the hallway, to the door that doesn't match the others, and come back. The count is running behind them. It's always running, I know that now, even with her taste in my mouth and her thighs bare against my sides.

“The hall with the locked door.”

“The hall with the bed,” I say, and she watches me a second longer with those dark exhausted eyes, and then she slides off my counter, takes my hand, and lets me lead her past the one door in my life I keep locked, into the room where I sleep alone.

She won't sleep alone in it. I know that now and can't unknow it, walking her down my hallway with her boots left behind in the kitchen and her hand warm and rough in mine. Whatever I am, whatever she suspects, whatever's coming for us both with sirens on, as of twelve minutes to eight this morning there's a version of this apartment with her in it, and every other version just became the fire damage.

11

DANI

Her sheets are money-soft, softer than anything I own, and I'm lying in them at nine in the morning with my heart rate refusing to file its report, watching a stripe of harbor light move on the ceiling of a woman I accused of arson three hours ago.

We lie side by side, not touching, both of us breathing like we finished a job, and the not-touching is its own conversation. My body is wrung out in the specific marvelous fashion I haven't been wrung out in since long before the academy, every muscle paid in full, my mouth tender, four crescent marks on my hip from her counter and her grip. When I shift my leg against the sheet the whole morning replays in one hot flash and my breath goes ragged all over again. Beside me, without looking, she says, “Stop that,” and I can hear the smile in it, and none of that is the problem. The problem is quieter and worse. The problem is that I'm lying in an arsonist's bed—maybe, allegedly, unproven—and what I want isn't another round, though I want that too. What I want is to know what she eats when nobody's watching. I want the story of the scar I found on her knee with my thumb. I want Sunday. That's the want that should send me out the door with my boots in my hand, and instead it pins me flat to eight hundred dollars of cotton like a roof beam.

She rolls onto her side and studies me like she studied me across the booth, like I'm the suspicious one in this bed, and then she crawls up over me, all that loose hair coming down around both our faces, and kisses me once, slow, thorough, a signature on the morning.

“It's been a long day,” she says, which is true in fourteen ways. “Sleep.”

“It's nine a.m.”

“You've been awake since two yesterday. Sleep, firefighter.” And she settles in against my side with her head on my shoulder and one arm across me like a strap, and that's how I find out Zara sleeps attached, this woman with her empty walls and her locked door, latched onto me like I'm the last raft off something. I lie there in the harbor light doing the only fantasizing I have wattage left for, which isn't even filthy, her at my kitchen table, learning to like cheap beer, some future morning with nothing wrong in it, and I chase that picture down into the dark, and sleep takes me mid-reach.

I surface twice. The first time the light has gone gold and sideways and she's still against me, asleep, her face emptied of all its chess, younger by ten years, one hand fisted loose in my shirt that I'm not wearing, fisted loose against my sternum. There's a faint crease between her brows even asleep, like whatever runs her never fully clocks out. I look at her for a while from somewhere underneath thinking, and I put my hand over her fist, and her fingers turn and hold on without her waking, and I go back down with that.

The second time it's full dark and the bed is cold on her side.

I lie still, the apartment humming its money hum, and down the hall there's a thin line of light under a door, and I don't have to get up to know which door. There's no sound, just the light, steady, and the clock on the nightstand burning past three in angry red. I think about getting up. I run the whole operation from the bed, walk down the hall, knock, say my name, see what her face does when she opens a locked room at 3 a.m. to the firefighter in her bed, and I'm a person who opens doors for a living, it's the whole job, and I lie there and don't, and I'd like to say it's because I respect her privacy, and it isn't. It's because I'm afraid of which woman would open the door.

Sleep takes me again before the light goes off, and that's the fact I'll be carrying around all day like gravel in my boot.

When I wake for real it's morning, actual morning, and the bedroom smells like coffee, and there's a woman in the kitchen in silk.

I stand in the doorway in yesterday's shirt and watch her before she knows I'm there, or before she shows me she knows. She's at the stove with her hair twisted up and pinned with a pencil, barefoot among the wreckage we never cleaned, the broken glass swept into a neat glittering pile by the baseboard, eggs going in a pan, my boots standing together by the island where somebody set them straight. The whole picture is so good, so exactly the future I fell asleep chasing, that it takes me a second to notice what's wrong with it, and then she reaches across the burner for the salt, her sleeve pulls back, and I notice.

The inside of her left wrist carries two burns. They're new, today-new, raised and angry, a pink blistered stripe maybe two inches long with a smaller spatter mark south of it, the skin around them tight and shiny. I've read burns for twelve years, it's half my trade, first-degree edging second, hours old at the most, the kind you get from a hot pipe or a heat gun or a piece of equipment that bit you in the dark, and not, in my professional experience, from eggs.

“Morning,” she says, without turning around.

“Your wrist.”

She turns then and looks down at it like it belongs to someone on her staff, and there's a half-second, her trademark half-second, the same gap that followed char patterns at the Saltbox, the little beat where the machinery selects, and then she shrugs one silk shoulder.

“Bacon,” she says. “Grease jumped. The pan's enthusiastic and I was careless, and before you ask, yes, it's been run under cold water, and no, you can't dress it.” She gives me a small dry smile. “I burned myself cooking you breakfast, Dani. Let me keep a little dignity.”

It's a good answer. It's warm and self-deprecating and it invites me to laugh and stay out of it, and it's wrong, and my body knows it's wrong before my manners do. There's no bacon. There's eggs and toast and coffee, no bacon anywhere, no bacon smell, and the burn is on the inside of the wrist, the carrying side, the reach-into-a-machine side, not the spatter side, and the blister line is too straight for grease, grease freckles, it doesn't draw. I stand in the doorway of this gorgeous apartment doing the math I do at every fire scene, fuel, pattern, story. The story doesn't fit the pattern, and the light was on under that door at three in the morning.

She watches me do all of it. That's the part I can't explain to anyone who hasn't stood in her weather. She watches me clock the no-bacon and the wrong-side burn and the too-straight line, watches the whole inspection run behind my face, and she doesn't reinforce the lie, doesn't pile on detail like liars do, she just holds my eyes with the spatula in her hand and lets the lie sit on the counter between us like a third place setting, and what's in her face isn't guilt. It reads like regret that arrived on schedule.