And Then I Got Distracted
Chapter Nine
The restaurant was everything the reviews had promised. Low lighting, candles on every table, the kind of place where the menu had no prices and the waitstaff moved like they'd been choreographed by Gordon Ramsay.
Vera had made the reservation three weeks in advance. I'd ironed a shirt.
Let that sink in. I, Perpetua Alves, who miraculously owned one iron and used it approximately never, had stood in my kitchen at six-fifteen in the morning running it over a dark gray button-down with the kind of focus I normally reserved for rope inspections.
My nicest slacks. The black leather boots Vera had once described, unprompted and with genuine conviction, as making me look like a disgustingly hot biker chick.
I would be thinking about that for the rest of my natural life.
She was worth every second of the ironing.
She sat across from me in a vintage A-line cocktail dress the color of a winter sky. Her golden hair fell in soft barrel curls that caught the candlelight like she'd arranged it that way on purpose. I'd never seen anything so beautiful in my life.
I had eaten relatively none of my food.
"—and I'm thinking we do it in two age brackets," she was saying, hands moving expressively, eyes lit up the way they got when she was in the middle of an idea she loved.
"Six to nine, and ten to twelve. Different books, different discussion formats.
The older ones can do a proper book club structure, but the younger one—"
I was staring at her mouth.
"Petra."
"The younger ones," I said immediately.
She tilted her head. "You weren't listening."
"I was listening. You said two age brackets."
"And then?"
"And then I got distracted."
"By what?"
"You."
She blinked. The color rose in her cheeks in that particular way it did, starting at the throat and moving upward, and she looked down at her plate with a smile she was clearly trying to contain and failing at completely. "You can't just say things like that."
"Why not?"
"Because we're in a restaurant and I have nowhere to put it."
"Put what?"
She looked up at me with those blue eyes darkened several shades. "The way you look at me sometimes."
I opened my mouth.
My phone buzzed.
I ignored it. She was biting her lower lip, and the candlelight was doing something criminal to her collarbones, and I was not—
It buzzed again.
"You should check that," she said softly.
"It can wait."
Third buzz. Fourth and fifth in quick succession.
I turned it over. Rodriguez.
Lightning strike near Salvador Ridge. All hands.
"Fuck," I said, which was not the word I'd been planning to say a minute ago.
"Go." She was already signaling for the waiter with one hand and squeezing mine with the other. "I'll handle the bill."
"Vera, I'm so sorry—"
"Petra." She looked at me across the candles, steady and certain and so heartbreakingly beautiful I wanted to say something entirely dangerous and scary to her right then, over the untouched second course. "I know what I signed up for. Go save them."
I stood. Hesitated. Almost said it.
"There will be other dinners," she said. "Go. Text me when you can. And—" Her voice caught almost imperceptibly. "Be safe. Please be safe."
I leaned down and kissed her, tasting wine on her lips, knowing she was tasting apology on mine.
Then I ran for the station.
The fire wasn't catastrophically bad. But it was bad enough.
The lightning had sparked in the scrubland near Salvador Ridge, wind pushing it toward a cluster of homes on the outskirts. We'd gotten everyone out—that was the only thing that mattered—but we lost two structures before we got a line around it.
I watched one of them burn. A small ranch house with a white wraparound porch, the kind that had probably held rocking chairs and endless Sunday mornings and a family's entire ordinary life.
The owners stood on the road, the woman sobbing into her husband's chest, as the roof collapsed inward.
Everything they owned. All those photographs that couldn't be replaced.
We worked through most of the night. By the time Rodriguez called it contained, it was nearing three in the morning, and I was covered in soot and ash and that enormous exhaustion that came from hours of cutting line in the dark.
I pulled my phone out as we loaded equipment back onto the engines. Three texts from Vera.
Stay safe, baby love.
I know you can't respond. Just wanted you to know I'm thinking about you.
Let me know when you're coming home?
I sent back the water droplet emoji, which was our signal for contained, danger mostly past, and then a heart.
On my way home now.
Her response came immediately.
I'll be waiting.
I expected her apartment to be dark. Expected to let myself in quietly, shower until the water ran clear, and collapse next to her sleeping form without waking her.
The lights were on.
I climbed the stairs slowly, my body acknowledging its complaints one joint at a time. When I opened the door, the smell hit me first. Something warm and savory, completely at odds with the smoke still clinging to my jacket.
Vera appeared in the kitchen doorway in one of my old station t-shirts and tiny sleep shorts, her hair in a messy bun, her glasses on, holding a dish towel. She'd set up food on the counter. Soup, fresh bread, and hot chocolate.
"Hey," she said softly.
"You didn't have to—"
"I know."
She crossed the room, and I tried to step back, acutely aware of what I smelled like. She wrapped her arms around me anyway, pressing her face into my filthy jacket without hesitation, like she'd assessed the situation and made her decision, and the decision was—irrelevant.
"I wanted to," she said against my chest.
I cracked open. Just slightly. Just enough.
It was how the dark used to get in, but with her holding me, her golden hair and golden soul, I felt… illuminated.
"Vera, I'm disgusting," I tried saying.
"You're home." Her arms tightened. "I just need one minute with my favorite girl. Okay?"
Favorite girl.
I stopped arguing and wrapped my arms around her. Let the tension drain out through my shoulders. Let myself be held by someone who didn't care that I smelled like smoke and ash and a family's lost Sunday mornings.
"We lost two structures," I heard myself say. "One of them was a house. Everyone got out. The family, the dog, everything breathing. But the house—" I stopped.
She pulled back to look at me. "Everyone got out?"
"Yeah."
"Then you did your job." Her hands came up to cup my face, thumbs moving over my cheekbones the way she always did, a gesture I had not yet found an adequate response to except to stand very still and feel it. "You saved lives. That's what matters."
"I know," I said.
"Do you?"
"I'm getting there."
She studied my face for a moment, apparently satisfied with my progress. "Go shower. I'll warm up the soup."
Twenty minutes later, I emerged clean, damp-haired, in fresh clothes that smelled like laundry detergent. She'd set the table. She'd lit one candle, the small cedar one from her windowsill, and put it between our bowls like a continuation of the dinner we hadn't gotten to finish.
I sat down across from her and didn't say anything for a moment.
"What?" she asked.
"You lit a candle."
"We didn't get to finish our dinner." She shrugged one shoulder, very casual, very Vera. "Seemed like the thing to do."
I love you, I thought, right there over the soup. I love you and I've been trying to say it, and I don't know why I keep failing to.
"Thank you," I said. "For waiting up. For this."
She reached across the table and linked her fingers with mine. "I'll always wait up for you."
We developed a system after that.
Fire emoji when dispatch called. She'd respond with be safe, never when will you be back, because she understood I couldn't promise that. Fires didn't run on schedules, and I couldn't give her timelines I didn't have.
Water droplet when it was contained. Danger mostly past, still work to do, but the worst of it over.
Heart when I was heading home.
She always responded within seconds.
I'll put coffee on. Making your favorite. Can't wait to see you.
It was an extremely simple system. It was also, I was aware, one of the most intimate things anyone had ever done for me.
A few weeks into the routine, I was repacking my gear bag at the station when something fluttered out of the inside pocket.
A small square of pink, folded once. Vera's handwriting.
She must have tucked it in on some morning when I'd been half-awake and not paying attention, which was most mornings, because she had a way of moving through my apartment that made paying attention difficult.
Be safe. I lo — I'll see you soon.
I stared at those two crossed-out letters.
I lo.
My pulse kicked up hard in my throat. She'd almost written it. Started it, gotten two letters in, crossed them out, written something safer instead, and then tucked it into my gear bag where I'd find it on a day when she wasn't there to see my face.
The words had been sitting in my own chest for weeks, pressing against my ribs like smoke pressure, threatening to escape every time she looked at me or laughed at something I said or reached for my hand without thinking about it.
"You good, Alves?" Stevens appeared from the rope cache, reading my expression with the alarming perceptiveness he occasionally displayed between bouts of stepping on his own hose lines.
"Yeah." I folded the note carefully and tucked it into my wallet, right behind my ID. "I'm good."
He looked at me for a moment. "You've got a face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have the face you make when you're thinking about Vera."
"I have one face. It's my face. It does what it wants."
"It's doing the Vera thing right now, specifically."
"Stevens."
"I'm just observing."
"Go observe somewhere else."
He went. But he was smiling, and I didn't have it in me to find that annoying.
Did I really have a Vera face?