It’s Extremely Romantic, and I Won’t Hear Otherwise
It's Extremely Romantic, and I Won't Hear Otherwise
Chapter Eight
I woke in Vera's comfortable bed with the sunset-pink sheets to the sound of the shower running and lay still for a moment, processing.
Sunlight filtered through the butter-yellow curtains, the smell of coffee already made, the distant off-key humming of someone who had no idea how loud she was in the morning and genuinely could not have cared less.
I pulled on my boxer briefs and went to start the coffee, then discovered she'd already started it. My mug, two sugars already laid out on the counter. Hers with a splash of cream and one sugar waiting.
I filled the mugs and leaned against the counter and listened to her hum and thought: That's my girlfriend in there, singing like a scratched-up record dipped in honey.
That's my girlfriend, who last night had pressed her wrists into the headboard and kept them there for a full ten minutes on nothing but her own will, because I'd asked her to, and had looked at me after like I'd wrangled and lassoed her the moon.
That was a woman worth waking up early for.
The bathroom door opened, releasing a cloud of vanilla-scented steam and the rest of the song, which turned out to be a very committed rendition of a Billie Holiday number that was almost certainly not bathroom-acoustics appropriate.
Vera emerged in a towel, her hair dripping, skin flushed pink.
She was still humming. She was always still humming.
"Oh, you made—" She clocked the mugs on the counter, coffee recently poured and steaming. "You're perfect."
"I know when you need your coffee. It's basic retention."
"It's not basic." She crossed the room and kissed me, soft and minty. "It's extremely romantic, and I won't hear otherwise." She took her mug, wrapped both hands around it, and gave me the look. The one that made my pulse kick up like an engine turning over. "What are you thinking about?"
"Nothing."
"You're doing the face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have several. This one means you're thinking something you've decided not to say." She took a sip, watching me over the rim. "What is it?"
I looked at her, at the towel, wet hair, fogged-up cat-eye glasses she'd somehow already put on.
She was making a face herself, that dreamy expression she got on the first sip of good coffee, the same expression she made in entirely different contexts, which she was completely aware of and deployed without conscience.
"I have to bring lunch to the station today," I said instead. "Equipment check before fire season. My turn to buy."
Vera straightened immediately. "Can I come?"
"To the fire station?"
"I could bring the lunch. I make good sandwiches. Well, I assemble good sandwiches since the deli does the actual work, but I have excellent curatorial instincts." The slightest uncertainty crossed her face. "Unless that's—I mean, if work is work, I understand."
I set my mug down and pulled her in by the waist. She came willingly, mug still in hand, tucking herself against me with the ease of someone who'd decided this was her spot and wasn't accepting counterarguments.
"I'd love for you to come."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." I kissed her hair. "Fair warning. They're going to interrogate you."
She pulled back to look at me. "I handle difficult patrons for a living.
I once talked a man through a three-hour dispute about whether Moby Dick counted as a novel or an extended metaphor while he was hoarding overdue library books he refused to return.
" She patted my chest. "I can handle a few firefighters. "
"That is not the same thing."
"It's the same energy." Another pat, more decisive. "I'll be fine."
I looked at her, my girlfriend, in a towel, in the kitchen, radiating the calm confidence of someone who had never met a room she couldn't win.
She was absolutely going to be fine. The crew was the one that needed warning.
Station 19 sat on the edge of town where the last of the residential streets gave way to open scrubland, a low concrete building with a wide apparatus bay, a crew quarters wing, a training yard around the back, and the helipad out to the side, set apart from everything else the way a flight deck was always in its own domain.
The Bell 212 sat on the pad in the afternoon sun.
Seventy-some feet of rotor diameter, twin turboshaft engines, red-and-white paint that Station 19 kept clean enough to reflect the sky.
She wasn't flashy. She was a workhorse. Forty-plus years of airframe design that had survived Vietnam, oil platforms, and several decades of being dropped into the worst terrain in the American West. She looked exactly like what she was: reliable past the point of argument.
Vera got out of her Beetle in a yellow sundress with tiny white daisies, carrying a large paper bag from the deli, and stopped walking the moment she saw the helicopter.
"That's the helicopter," she said.
"That's the helicopter."
"It's bigger than I pictured."
"Most things here are."
She turned to look at me, blue eyes bright in the afternoon rays of light. "How often do you take it out?"
"Depends on the season. Pre-season, twice a week for training. Come June, we could have multiple runs a day." I reached for the bag. "Come on. Meet the crew first."
"In a minute." She hadn't moved. She was looking at the Bell 212 with that librarian look, the one that meant something had her complete attention and was not going to be released until she'd understood it properly. "Does it have a name?"
"The helicopter?"
"People name things. Your motorcycle has the flames, and I've been calling it Cinder in my head for weeks. Does the helicopter have a name?"
"The crew calls her La Jefa."
Vera blinked. "The Boss?"
"Rodriguez named her twenty years ago. Nobody's changed it."
She looked at the helicopter. Then at me. Then back at the helicopter. "I like her already," she said, and let me steer her toward the apparatus bay.
Every head in the bay turned the moment we walked through the door.
I'd warned them in the group chat that morning.
Bringing Vera today. Behave yourselves.
The responses had ranged from enthusiastic (Stevens, three exclamation points and an emoji I didn't recognize) to cryptic (Miller, who had simply replied noted, which from Miller meant he had opinions he was saving for the room) to genuinely threatening (Jackson, who had replied I'm going to tell her everything, and when I'd typed back you absolutely will not, had sent a single thumbs-up that I did not trust at all).
Stevens emerged from somewhere near the engine with the energy of a golden retriever who has heard the word "treat.
" He was twenty-three, broad-grinned, and still operating on the general assumption that the universe was fundamentally going to work out for him.
He stuck his hand out. "Brandon Stevens.
Rookie. Alves makes me do all the worst jobs, but I learn an extraordinary amount from the experience. "
"Vera Montgomery." She shook it. "She mentioned you."
He puffed up like a cartoon rooster. "Good things, I hope?"
"She said you once got tangled in your own hose line twenty feet from a structure fire and tried to blame smoke inhalation."
Stevens deflated. He looked at me. "You told her that?"
"It came up organically."
"How does that come up organically—"
"In the context of discussing the importance of spatial awareness under pressure."
"That's not a context—"
"Spatial awareness, Stevens."
He turned back to Vera with the wounded dignity of someone who had been betrayed but was going to maintain his composure. "For the record, the smoke was genuinely impairing. I've grown a lot since then."
"I'm sure you have," she said, in the tone she probably used on the seven-year-old who checked out volcano books, and Stevens looked so grateful it was almost sad.
Jackson materialized on my other side like he'd been stationed and waiting. He slung an arm around my shoulders. "I'm Jackson. I'm the handsome one."
"You're the one who said you'd tell her everything," I said accusingly.
"I'm the one who keeps morale up." He smiled at Vera, ignoring me. "She keeps us alive. Whole different skill set."
"Every workplace needs both," Vera agreed, very seriously.
Jackson pointed at her. "I like you." He looked at me. "She's great. Ten out of ten." He paused, the expression of a man about to deploy information he'd been holding. "You know she talks about you too, right? She said—"
"Tower duty," I said. "Thirty feet. Go."
"I haven't even said it yet—"
"I know what you're going to say. Go."
He retreated, grinning, which told me whatever he'd been about to say was something I was going to hear about later, in detail, at a time of his choosing.
Vera watched him go and turned to me with the expression of someone who intended to ask Jackson everything at the earliest available opportunity.
"Don't," I said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were planning something."
"I'm always planning something." She patted my arm. "I'll be very discreet."
Miller was at the far end of the table, coffee mug in hand, wearing the expression of a man who'd been watching people for thirty years and had stopped pretending to find it entertaining. He watched Vera with something that wasn't quite suspicion but was adjacent to it.
"Miller," I said. "Play nice."
"I'm always nice," he said. No one confirmed nor denied this.
Vera walked over and set the deli bag on the table in front of him.
"I brought turkey clubs and Italian subs because I didn't know preferences.
Also cookies—chocolate chip and snickerdoodle, both with brown butter, because I believe in giving people options.
" She paused. "I also Googled wildland fire nutrition requirements for high-exertion work, and apparently you burn through carbohydrates at a significant rate, so there are sourdough rolls as well. I may have slightly over-catered."
Miller stared at the bag.