Page 9 of Spellbound By the Firefighter

Past the shelves, up at the front of the shop, the black square has gone gray along its bottom edge. Thin, grudging, but there. Morning, coming up over Prospect. The night had a bottom to it after all, and we’ve hit it.

Something in me turns cold before my head has caught up to why. My fingers stop moving on his arm. I take a breath, and it snags on the way in.

“Hey.” His voice is wrecked from the smoke and the hour. His hand comes up into my hair. “Where’d you go?”

I don’t answer, because the true answer isn’t anywhere good.

When I was seven, my father was there when I fell asleep and gone by the time I woke, his side of everything cleared out in the night. No note. No warning. I went to bed with a father and got up in a house that didn’t have one anymore. Nobody had thought to tell me it was coming.

That’s the whole cruelty of it. The people you love don’t warn you before they turn into people who are gone.

So I found a fear I could hold in two hands and shut when I was done. A fear with a cover on it. And I decided that was enough.

It was enough for years. Until hours ago, when I let a man carry me into the dark of my own shop and lift the cover off.

Now the light’s coming, and every part of me has braced for the empty space he’d leave behind.

I sit up. His hand slides off my back, and I feel the loss of its weight. I hate that I feel it.

“You should go,” I say. “Before it’s full light. The crew’s going to wonder where you are.”

Behind me, he props up on an elbow. I keep my eyes on the gray window. I can’t do this looking at him.

“That’s not what you want.”

“It’s Halloween.” It takes everything I have to keep my voice level. “One night. That’s what these are. You had a hard season on that mountain, I had a slow shift, and it was good.” I make myself gesture at the cushions, the wreck of us, without turning. “It doesn’t have to be a whole thing. No hard feelings. You don’t owe me a morning.”

The word’s out before I can catch it. Morning. I hear it drop into the quiet and lie there.

“There it is.” He says it so gently it’s worse than if he’d raised his voice. “You already left. You went the second the light showed up.”

I get to my feet. I find the gown pooled where he pulled it off me and step into it, drawing it up my body and working my arms back into the sleeves. I pull the hidden zip up my side with hands that won’t hold still, sealing the whole severe black shut around me again. I drag the high collar back up to my throat, smooth it flat, run my thumb down that row of jet buttons that don’t open anything—checking a seam that was never going to come undone.

I’m putting the armor back on, one motion at a time.

“This is what I do,” I tell him, and it’s the nearest to honest I’ve managed all night. “I close the book before it can end on me. It’s the only way I’ve ever survived a last page.”

He sits up. He doesn’t reach for his clothes. He’s been watching me, unbothered by the wall going up, brick by brick, in front of him. That steadiness is harder to stand than anger would have been.

“So you throw me out at dawn,” he says, “so nothing can throw you out first.”

My hand stops at my throat.

“I know that move. I invented it.” His voice stays low and even. “Four years, I’ve run at a burning mountain so I’d never have to sit in a quiet kitchen and wait to learn if the good thing stays. You do it with a book. I do it with a fire. Same coward, two different doors.”

“Don’t.” My eyes have started to sting. I won’t let them do more than that. “The door’s by the register. You know where it is.”

For a second, I think he’ll argue. He doesn’t. He stands, steps into his pants, unhurried, and something in me caves at the sight of him getting dressed to leave—the exact outcome I asked for.

I almost turn around. I almost cross that floor and take it all back. The pull is so strong that my feet shift toward him before I lock them down.

I choose the armor. I always choose the armor.

I get to the front of the shop ahead of him, set my hand on the door, and pull it open. The cold morning air pushes in through the gap. Out on Prospect, the gray’s gone real, the hay bales taking their shapes back, the dead string lights waiting to come down. I hold the door open with my whole body shaking inside a mourning gown, ending it on my terms before it can end on his. Doing the one thing that has always kept me in one piece.

He crosses the shop. He stops in the open doorway, right where he stood eight hours ago, unsure whether a warm shop would want him in it. He isn’t unsure now. He looks down at my knuckles gone white on the door, my collar fastened to my chin, all of me sealed shut and trembling, but he doesn’t step through.

“Look at me, Audriana,” he says.