Nowhere Else Important to Be
Chapter Four
I arrived home late, the moon a thin sliver of itself. My motorcycle helmet hung from one hand as I fumbled in the dark, the key meeting the lock at roughly forty percent accuracy, which was a personal low.
The night smelled of smoke and the whiskey I'd spent the last few hours drinking at a dive bar with half the crew.
It was the kind of drinking that was really just a prolonged way of not being alone with your own head.
We'd played pool and talked loudly about things that had nothing to do with the fire, which was the only kind of decompression I'd ever really learned.
I wasn't drunk. I was also not entirely sober, which I acknowledged privately and tried to immediately forget.
My keys hit the concrete.
"Damn it." A little too loud for this hour. I braced one hand against the door and waited for the hallway to agree on a single orientation.
"Need some help down there?"
I looked up.
Vera was standing in her doorway in Powerpuff Girls pajama shorts, a thin tank top, and a different pair of cat-eye glasses than she usually wore.
Violet frames, slightly askew, coupled with the air of someone who'd been asleep and had not checked a mirror before stepping out.
Her hair was up in a loose, messy knot. Her expression was somewhere between amused and assessing, with a small undercurrent of something mysterious beneath it.
The door was ajar behind her, warm yellow light spilling out into the hallway around her.
She looked so beautiful it was almost painful.
I briefly forgot that I was a grown adult with combat experience, a decade of crisis training, and a helitack forewoman certification.
"Nice glasses," I managed.
"Nice landing." She nodded at my keys on the floor.
"That was intentional. I was checking the structural integrity of the concrete."
"And?"
"Solid. Very solid. You can sleep soundly."
"I was sleeping soundly," she said, "until someone started rattling their keys like a raccoon in a wind chime.
" She padded over in bare feet, bent down in front of me to pick up my keys without being asked, and I had to look away because the shape of her in the dim moonlit hallway was almost too much to bear.
"You have a lot of keys for someone who couldn't find the right one. "
I swallowed thickly. "They're all important."
"What's this one?"
"Station locker."
"This one?"
"My Harley."
She held up a small, battered key with a piece of red electrical tape wrapped around the bow. "This one?"
I looked at it. Thought about it genuinely. "I… I don't actually know anymore."
She looked up at me. Her expression hadn't moved much, but her eyes were doing a lot. It was that quiet inventory she took of everything, organizing the details I hadn't said alongside the ones I had, like she was shelving a book she intended to read very carefully.
"How was the fire? I saw the smoke from the library. We could smell it before lunch."
"Contained." I said it the way I always said it. Flat, factual, a word that was designed to be the end of the subject.
She handed me my keys. "You're shaking."
"Adrenaline."
"Mm." She stepped slightly closer, tilting her head back to look at me properly. "How much did you drink?"
Not an accusation. Just a question, asked the way she asked everything, like the answer was something she intended to stay for regardless of what it turned out to be. I realized I liked that quality about her. A lot.
"Enough to take the edge off. Not enough to make bad decisions." A pause settled between us for a singular moment. "Debatable on the keys."
She was quiet, then, "Come inside. You look like you could use a cup of tea."
"I'm fine."
She gave me the look. I recognized it as the librarian look, the one that had probably silenced entire rooms of restless middle-schoolers and at least one man researching whether his neighbor was legally a ghost. The look that said: I have already assessed this situation, and my assessment is final.
"I'm fine," I said again, following her into my apartment.
She moved through my kitchen like she'd been doing it for years, turning the lights on, putting the kettle on, rummaging mugs out of the right cabinet without a single hesitation. I sat at the table and watched her hands and tried to breathe at a normal depth.
"You don't have to do this," I said.
"I know."
"I've had bad fires before. I come home, I sleep it off, I'm fine in the morning."
"Okay."
"I'm serious. This isn't—I don't need—"
"Petra." She set a mug in front of me. Black tea, two sugars.
Exactly how I took my coffee, which she had apparently documented from Rosie's like it was reference material.
"I'm not doing this because I think you need saving.
I'm doing it because I have a heart and nowhere else important to be.
" She sat across from me. "Drink your tea. "
I wrapped my hands around the mug to hide the tremor, which was a completely transparent strategy because she had already seen it and elected not to say anything, which was somehow worse and better simultaneously.
"You remembered," I said. "Two sugars."
"You were very emphatic about it at Rosie's. I logged it."
"You log things."
"I'm a librarian." She propped her chin in one hand. "Everything gets cataloged. You're in the system now." A beat passed. "On a scale of normal post-shift to actually terrible, where are we tonight?"
I looked at her across the table. The violet glasses. The messy knot. The unhurried patience on a face I couldn't have looked away from if I'd tried.
"Seven," I said honestly. "Maybe a six and a half."
She nodded. No sharp intake of breath. No oh my god. Just: noted. "Tell me what happened. Only if you want to."
I turned the mug in my hands. "Wind shifted on us. We were cutting line in the canyon and the fire turned. Started moving up the wall faster than the briefing had it. Our safety zone got very small, very fast." I paused. "I pulled the crew out."
She was quiet, listening.
"Stevens took some superheated air during the pull-back. He's okay. But it was—" I stopped. "It got close."
"Close to Stevens, or close to you?"
I was silent for a moment.
"Both," I said.
She didn't react with alarm. Didn't tip into the civilian pattern of horror-to-reassurance that forced me into managing their response instead of my own. She just looked at me steadily, without flinching. Like whatever I said next was something she had the capacity to hold.
"I'm still here," I said. Half fact. Half something I needed to say out loud.
"You are," she agreed. "I noticed."
I took a sip of tea. The shaking was lessening, the adrenaline metabolizing on its normal schedule, my body finally downshifting.
It always happened this way. Tonight it felt faster than usual, and I suspected that had something to do with the unique tenderness and attention of the person sitting across from me.
"I drink sometimes," I said. "After bad ones. You should know that."
"I know now," she said simply.
"It's not—" I stopped. Tried again. "It's less than it used to be. I'm working on it. But I'm not going to pretend it's not a thing."
"Thank you for telling me."
I stared at her. "You're very strange, you know that?"
"I've been told." She tilted her head. "How so, to you specifically?"
"Normal people would've said it's fine or something."
"Would that have helped?"
I thought about it. "No."
"Then why would I say it?"
I had no answer for that. I finished half my tea in silence, and she let me, which was also the right thing, and I was starting to suspect she had an uncanny ability to know what the right thing was before she did it.
"Can I ask you something?" I said.
"Always."
"Why are you actually awake right now?" I looked at her.
The glasses, slightly askew. The pajama shorts, which had the Powerpuff Girls on them and were objectively not loungewear designed for midnight social calls.
"You're in Powerpuff Girls pajamas at midnight.
That implies a person who goes to sleep at a reasonable hour. "
She was quiet for a moment.
"I heard your motorcycle engine," she said.
"I kind of expected you home from the station much earlier, but I also saw the smoke so I don't know why I even thought that.
Of course you were off fighting that fire.
I was thinking all day—" She stopped. Started again.
"I was thinking about the helicopter. About the door being open.
About the canyon and the fire and all the dangers you had to face. "
I looked at her.
"So you waited up."
"I happened to still be awake."
"In pajamas. By your front door."
"I may have relocated to my couch. With my eyes closed."
"Vera."
"Mm?"
"That's very—" I searched for a word that wasn't the accurate one, the terrifying one, the one that named what was happening here. "—neighborly of you."
The corner of her mouth curved up. "I'm an excellent neighbor."
"Ten out of ten. Would recommend." I turned the mug in my hands.
"Thank you," I said. "For the tea. For the two sugars.
For—" I gestured vaguely at the kitchen, at her, at the whole impossible, improbable situation of her sitting across from me at midnight in glasses she hadn't checked before putting on. "This."
She stood to gather the mug, and I stood too, old habit, and we ended up closer than the kitchen layout required in the way that seemed to keep happening around her, like some law of physics I hadn't been briefed on.
She looked up at me. A few loose pieces of hair at her temples. The violet glasses, still slightly crooked. She smelled like sleep and something sweet beneath it, something that made me think of warm rooms and old pages and the safety of somewhere nothing dangerous could ever reach you.
"You should sleep," she said softly.
"I know."
"Are you going to?"
"Probably not immediately."
She considered this, then she reached up, very carefully, and straightened her violet glasses. Deliberated something, then reached up again and pushed a lock of hair off my forehead instead, her fingers cool and brief against my skin.
"When you can't sleep after a bad one," she said, "what do you usually do?"
"Sit with it," I said. "Wait it out."
"That sounds lonely."
"It is," I said. Which surprised me, because I'd never said that out loud before. Not to anyone.
Her hand dropped. She didn't step back. I leaned down slightly, not entirely sure what I was doing or where I thought I was going with it, and she placed one hand flat on my chest, steadying me with a gentleness that felt like something more than a gesture.
"Ask me tomorrow," she said quietly.
"Ask you what?"
"Whether you can kiss me." The tiniest pause. The smallest possible smile at the corner of her mouth. "When you're not running on whiskey and adrenaline. I want you to remember it."
I could not breathe. I was not going to survive this woman.
She was going to be the thing that finished me, and it was going to be the most ridiculous footnote in the history of the San Jacinto Fire Department—helitack forewoman, survived two combat tours, hundreds of rappels into active wildfires, finally done in by a librarian in Powerpuff Girls pajamas.
"I'll remember it anyway," I said, stepping back. "I remember everything about you."
"Then it'll keep." She moved toward the door. Paused in it. "Go to bed, Petra."
"Vera."
She looked back.
"Next time you hear me losing a battle with my keys—"
"Yes?"
"Don't wait so long."
She looked at me for a moment. The smile that crossed her face was slow and warm and knowing, the kind that arrived like the nighttime darkened into midnight blue in the desert. Quiet, and somehow bigger than you expected.
"Only if you promise to keep being worth waiting up for."
The door clicked shut behind her.
I stood in my kitchen in the dark, the tremor finally gone from my fingers, the adrenaline fully metabolized, my body having remembered at some point in the last hour that it was safe.
I looked down at my hands.
Steady.