Page 13 of Light My Fire

I delete it. It's too long, too armored, a cross-examination pretending to be a flirtation. I type instead, tell me something. do you always risk yourself for beautiful strangers, or only at the good fires? My thumb hovers, and Petra's voice says be that, and the scotch says other things, warmer, and I press send and set the phone face-down on the marble like that undoes it.

It buzzes before the glass is back at my mouth.

Beautiful strangers, huh. You writing a complaint or a review?

The laugh comes out of me before I've approved it, one rough syllable, alone in my kitchen. I write, a review. five stars. the rescue was prompt and the airway check was extremely thorough.

Three dots appear, then stop, then start again, and I'm watching them like a fire I set, and the reply comes through. Thorough is the minimum standard. You had a lot of smoke exposure for someone with such good timing.

I lean against the counter. She's flirting and investigating in the same sentence, this woman, and she knows I know it. The hum under my sternum is back, the one with no target attached, and I should be afraid of it but I'm not. I type, my timing brought me to your fire scene. I'd call it excellent.

My fire scene, she sends back, fast and possessive. Then, before I can answer, three dots again, and, I'm on shift. If this number turns out to be a wrong number I'll survive. If it's not, I get off at seven.

I look at that message for a long time. There's a door in it, politely propped, no pressure on the hinge, and behind the door is everything Petra warned me about: the photograph, the second viewing, Mercer's quiet favors, the entire architecture of risk I've trained myself never to touch. I'm not what you should want, I think at the screen, at her, across the dark city, in her station with her boots by her bunk. You rescue people. You have no idea what you pulled out of that warehouse.

But I type, it's not a wrong number. goodnight, Dani.

She sends back a single word, goodnight, and then, a second later, like she lost a fight with herself, Zara.

It's my name, nothing else, set down at the end like a hand at the small of a back, and I put the phone on the counter and finish the scotch—it does nothing at all to put the fire out.

I stand at the window a while longer and let myself picture her at the station instead of armoring against it. She's somewhere across that grid of light right now with her boots by her bunk and her hair out of its braid, reading my texts again, or not, lying on top of the blankets like physical people do, one arm behind her head, the tattoos on display for nobody. She said if it's not a wrong number, I get off at seven. She built me an exit and a door in the same sentence and then guarded neither one, and that, more than the mouth, more than the hands, is what I can't stop turning over. She plays fair. I haven't met anyone who plays fair since I started keeping score.

I go to bed. The room is dark, the city's glow makes a gray line under the curtains, and the sheets are cold and then not. I lie there and conduct the argument, discipline on one side and on the other a woman saying look at me with two fingers on my jaw, and the argument lasts as long as it takes me to slide a hand down my own stomach, which is to say it was never an argument at all.

The vibrator lives in the bedside drawer, small and gold and German, because I own nothing that doesn't do its job. I don't reach for it yet. I start slow, fingertips only, tracing where the dress sat against my thighs on that curb. I build her out of inventory, callused hands with one glove off, forearms full of ink that moved when her grip shifted, the braid coming apart at her temple, dirty water dripping off her helmet when she leaned in, her voice gone hoarse saying you're fine when I was the only one of the two of us telling lies that night.

In the dark, behind my eyes, I do what I do, I take control of the scene. I put her in my apartment, post-shift, hair wet from the station shower, and I walk her backward into the wall and hold her there with one hand flat on her chest, and the fantasy purrs along its track, my mouth at her ear, her pulse under my palm. Beg me, I tell her, and oh, she'd hate it and want it; I've seen how she follows orders, badly, beautifully, on her own terms. My fingers find slick skin and the breath goes out of me in a long burn. I'm wet enough that it's embarrassing, two days of this, eleven openings of a contact card, and I circle my clit slow, slower than I want, because rationing is the only dominance I have over my own body tonight and I intend to keep it.

I take myself to the edge that way, two fingers and a fantasy, her shirt in my fist, her mouth an inch from mine and not allowed to close the distance, and right at the lip of it I stop, flatten my palm against myself, and breathe. The ache complains up through my belly like a banked fire looking for air. I do it again, build and stop, build and stop, sweat starting at the backs of my knees, the sheets gone humid, and in the scene, she's stopped fighting the wall and started watching me with those dark steady eyes like she knows exactly what I'm doing to both of us and intends to outlast it. That's the trouble with building a fantasy out of a real woman. She brings her own behavior.

It almost works. The scene runs, her wrists in my one hand, all that authority coming apart against my mouth, and the charge climbs my spine in increments I control, and then the scene slips. It slips because fantasies are honest even when their owners aren't. Suddenly she isn't pinned and begging, she's kneeling, exactly as she knelt, gear-heavy and patient on the wet street, looking up, and she takes my jaw in two fingers, and she says swallow, and the sound I make in my empty bedroom is nothing I'd let anyone living hear.

I reach for the gold.

The first touch of it, low and humming and exact, arches me off the sheets. After the edging my whole body is one raw nerve, and I have to lift the vibrator away twice in the first minute or end it embarrassingly early. I ride the flat of it in slow strokes, not chasing yet, knees falling open, one heel hooked in the sheets. I let myself have the truth in the dark where it can't testify, that what's burning me isn't the fantasy of taking Dani Serrano apart, it's the fact of her hands. She touched me like a person, checked me like I was worth keeping, wrote her number crooked because I was watching, called me by my name like it tasted good. The hum tightens, my thighs tighten, everything pulling low and central and inevitable, and I press the vibrator closer and circle, and my free hand finds my own throat, fingers light where her fingers took my pulse, exactly there, pressing slightly, her count finishing what she started.

“Dani.” I say it out loud, once, a test, and the word detonates the whole careful structure. The climax takes me in a long rolling clench, back bowed, heels dug in, her name breaking into pieces in my mouth, Dani, Da—ni, until I'm wrung flat against the sheets with the gold buzzing forgotten against my thigh and my heart going like a struck match.

I switch it off. The room comes back, the gray line under the curtains, the far hum of the city I'm taking apart one address at a time, and for a minute I just breathe, sweat cooling at my hairline, aftershocks walking through me at long intervals like the last cars of a freight train. My hand is still resting at my own throat. I move it, and then, because nobody is watching and lying to myself has stopped working anyway, I put it back.

Eleven years, I think, staring at the dark ceiling, slick-fingered, loose-limbed, terrified in a way no fire has managed since the first one. Eleven years of clean margins, and I just came with a firefighter's name in my mouth, and not any firefighter, hers, the one with the chief I can't read, the one who counts lies for a living and has already counted two of mine.

I reach over, pick up the phone off the nightstand, and look at the last message one more time before sleep takes me. Goodnight. Zara.

Petra's right about me. The fires they can't prove, she said, but a woman they can photograph, and God help me, I'm starting to want to be seen.

7

DANI

Ichange my shirt three times, which is two more times than I changed it for my last actual date, and end up in the first one anyway, dark green henley, sleeves shoved up, because if she's going to look at me like she looks at me, the tattoos are coming too.

She texted the place at noon, an address and a time and nothing else, and I spent my whole day off orbiting that little gray bubble. I cleaned my apartment for nobody. I went for a run and took the bridge route, the long one, and came back with my lungs burned clean and exactly none of my questions answered, because the questions aren't the kind running fixes. Quinn texted asking if I wanted to catch the game and I typed busy and then stared at the word like it belonged to a different woman, one with a secret, which as of tonight I guess I am.

The Saltbox sits at the dead end of a pier road where the streetlights give up early, a low brick room with rope lights behind the bottles and a jukebox that only seems to know songs about leaving.

Zara's already there.