Page 19 of Light My Fire

“Long,” she says, and that's all I get, and she crosses the floor toward me slow, taking inventory as she comes, the empty walls, the low pale furniture nobody ever sits on, the bare countertops. I see my apartment through her eyes for the first time, a model unit, a place staged to prove a fictional woman lives well, and I have one beat of pure exposure, worse than standing in front of Voss, because Voss only looked at my face.

I slide the second glass across the island. It's my good scotch, two fingers, one cube already surrendering, and she stops the glass with two fingers of her own and looks at it, then at me.

“It's eight in the morning.”

“You've been up since two. By your body's math it's evening.” I lift mine. “And you smelled like this glass the first time I met you.”

That gets the crooked smile, the real one, tired at its edges, and she drinks, and over the rim of the glass her eyes go past me to the window and stay there.

The city is laid out forty floors down in its gray November morning, the harbor flat as poured metal, and off to the northeast, over Camden, a last thin column of smoke leans out of the grid and smears into the low cloud. It's her fire, and it's mine; ours is a word I have no right to and use anyway, privately, the same as I'm using this whole morning. She walks past me to the glass with her drink and looks down at it, the smudge over Camden, and I look at her back, the set of her shoulders under the jacket, and the silence runs long and neither of us spends a word on it, because the last thing she said to me on that street was an accusation and the next thing she did was come here, and both of us are carrying both halves.

“You can see everything from up here,” she says finally.

“That's what it's for.”

She turns from the window and goes exploring, and I let her. I told her to bring her suspicion, and she brought it, and there's a terrible luxury in watching it work. She moves through my living room with her glass like an inspector after a small disaster, reads the spines of the six books I allow myself, lifts the lid of a ceramic box that holds nothing. Her boots are quiet on my floors, she walks quiet for a big-shouldered woman, they teach them that or the buildings do.

And everywhere she's been, the smoke goes with her. It threads through my filtered sterile air, room by room, woodsmoke in a space that has never once smelled of anything, and I stand at my island breathing it in and understand that it'll outlast her visit, that I'll find it in the curtains tonight, on the sofa nobody sits on, and that I've spent eleven years keeping fire out of exactly one building in this city and just poured it a scotch.

She finds the hallway. I hear her stop at the door that doesn't match the others, the one with the keyed deadbolt I had installed by a locksmith I paid in cash, and I stand at my island with my drink and my heart performing its new disorder and listen to her try the handle, once, openly, no stealth in it at all.

“Locked,” she calls.

“Yes.”

She comes back down the hallway and stands at the end of the island, and her eyes have the stairwell in them now, the place she goes when she's deciding whether to commit, and the morning light off the harbor makes the soot-scrubbed skin of her face look new.

“You going to tell me what's in it?”

“No.”

Behind that deadbolt my gray men sleep on their corkboard, and two document boxes hold eleven years of receipts, and a shoebox holds my sister, and a firefighter is standing in my hallway six feet from all of it with scotch in her hand. I built this apartment so that sentence could never exist. She drinks, unhurried, and watches me over the glass while I don't explain myself.

“Didn't think so.” She sets her glass down on the stone. “I want to be the kind of person who leaves over that door.”

I don't answer that. She doesn't need me to.

“I'm not leaving.”

“I know that too,” I say, and my voice comes out lower than I planned, with a fault line through it I hear and can't seal, and we look at each other across four feet of quartz, a firefighter and the question she walked in carrying, and somewhere outside a gull goes by below us. Below us—this is a building where birds happen underneath you. What's humming between her body and mine has been humming since a warehouse, and I'm done pretending I run it.

I don't remember deciding to move. That's new, and it should terrify me, and there's no time, because I've left my glass on the island and come around it, and her hands have already left the counter, and I take two fistfuls of canvas jacket and walk her backward into the counter's edge and kiss her.

This kiss is nothing like the rain. The rain kiss was theft, fast, both of us grabbing before it got taken away. This one I do slow, because we have a door locked behind her and nowhere to be, and slow turns out to be the more dangerous speed. I kiss her until her mouth softens and opens, until the scotch on her tongue and the scotch on mine are one drink, until I feel the counter take her weight, and she makes a low sound and her hands come up under my sweater at the waist and grip, both of them, hard, pulling me in by the bare skin, and the calluses on her palms drag against my sides and my whole spine lights up like a strip of phosphorus.

“The jacket,” I say against her mouth, and it comes out an order, and her arms drop and let me strip it off her. The shirt under it goes the same direction, and the sports bra after it. I get my hands on her then—the shoulders I've been watching since the curb, the forearms with their occupational ink—and she's pulling my sweater over my head and the static crackles in it and we're both laughing at the static, breathless and stupid, and then the laughing stops because her hands close over my breasts and my head goes back and the sound I make is one I've never let this apartment hear.

I knock the glasses getting up onto her. One of them goes off the edge and dies on my floor in a spray of scotch and crystal, and neither of us so much as flinches. She just hoists me with her hands under my thighs like I weigh what a hose weighs, and sets me on her lap as she leans back against the counter, and I settle over one hard thigh with my knees bracketing her and my skirt shoved up out of the way, and oh, I lose the rest of the sentence, because the seam of her trousers and the iron muscle under it press up exactly where I need them. My hips move before I've agreed to anything, a slow drag down the length of her thigh, and the friction hits where I'm slick and swollen already, where I've been swollen since a brick wall three days ago, and I hear myself moan into her neck, unguarded, fully spent of strategy.

“There you are,” Dani says, quiet, wondering, her hands sliding up my back, and the wonder in it is going to kill me, because nobody gets to wonder at me, I don't allow it, and I grind down on her thigh again and allow it.

We kiss through it, long and deep and wet while I ride her thigh in slow rolls, her hands moving over me, my shoulder blades, my waist, the snap of my bra coming undone under fingers that don't fumble, and the kissing goes on until kissing stops being enough, until I'm trembling, me, my whole disciplined body shaking over hers, and I've wanted her for three days against my own direct orders and I'm through negotiating with myself.

I take a fistful of her wet hair and pull her head back, and her breath leaves her in a rush, and her pupils blow wide, and I put my mouth against her ear.

“Fuck me,” I say, and my voice cracks on it, beg and command in the same two words, and I don't know which one she hears and I don't care. “Your hands. Now. I want your hands.”

Her hand is between my thighs before the sentence ends, under the skirt, silk dragged aside, and the first touch of her fingers through how wet I am pulls a sound out of me that I'd be ashamed of if shame still had a vote. Then two of those thick capable fingers push into me, slow, all the slowness I taught her with the kiss given back to me as cruelty, and my body takes her in and clenches like it's been waiting years, because it has.