Honeyfires

Prologue

She wiped the starlight from my eyes.

How we'd gone from strangers to this, tangled in the evening light, fingers linked, each other's names on our lips, I didn't know.

I only knew how her fingertips felt on my cheeks, only knew that the hollowness in my eyes had filled with the weight of her and her cinnamon words.

Her bare body pressed against mine, spent, satisfied, solid beneath me.

I was always half-prepared to lose her.

Half-prepared for the emptiness to return, to the lonely nights beneath the Arizonan sky, cold desert air outside my window, somehow still tasting of dust and sun and wildflowers.

Of lying awake, staring up at the popcorn ceiling with eyes that had seen far too much, enduring a lifetime of heavy, torrential rains of nothingness.

So much nothing it soaked through my clothes, so much nothing I oozed of it, so much nothing it consumed me.

Then along came Vera. Her smile powered something in me, like a million tiny, scattered lightbulbs all over my skin, so bright they should've burned, but they didn't. Nothing about her hurt.

I remember the day we met.