Page 91 of Honeyfires

"I've never played cornhole before," Vera told Stevens.

Stevens straightened. "I'll teach you. It's simple. The hole is worth three points, the board is worth one. The main thing is your release angle and the arc."

"Like rappelling?" Vera guessed.

Stevens stopped and ran this comparison through his internal calculator with visible concentration. "...Yes. Actually, exactly like rappelling. You want a consistent arc on release, and you read the distance before you commit." He demonstrated, stepping up and throwing with the form of someone who had practiced this considerably more than was strictly necessary. The bag dropped cleanly into the hole. "That's the movement."

Vera studied it. Stepped up. Threw.

The bag went in the hole.

Silence.

"Beginner's luck," Jackson said.

She threw again. Hole again.

"Beginner's luck," Jackson said, with less certainty.

Third throw. Hole.

Stevens turned to me with an expression of pure wonder. "She has the arc."

"She has the arc," I confirmed.

"I went to the hole on my first try," he said, to no one in particular. "It took me three weeks to get consistent."

"She also parallel-parked my truck in a spot I wouldn't have attempted," I said. "She's like this about most things spatial."

"Library science," Vera said, accepting the tournament bracket Stevens had immediately begun updating. "Shelving requires an understanding of three-dimensional space."

Stevens wrote something on the bracket. I was fairly certain he was changing her seed ranking.

Cruz challenged her to a head-to-head round, which she won, and then Davids took over from Cruz, and they played three rounds that drew a loose crowd of seasonals because word had gotten around about the arc. Miller watched from his picnic table without a word, but I saw the pride on his expression each time she scored.

Emerson got her a fresh drink between rounds without being asked and then immediately looked like he wasn't sure why he'd done it.

"Thank you," Vera said, completely naturally, and went back to the game, and Emerson looked at the ground, cheeks blazing. I didn't make fun of him.

The light was turning golden over the scrubland, the way Arizona light did in the late afternoon, when the heat started to consider backing off and the shadows went long and everything turned the color of something old and good and right. It was my favorite time of day in the desert, and it was somehow better with Vera standing in the middle of it, winning a cornhole tournament she'd been recruited into forty minutes ago.

I went inside to grab more drinks from the station cooler, and it was good in there—cool and quiet, the familiar smell of the equipment bay, the comfortable dark after the bright afternoon. I grabbed the bottles, turned back toward the door.

And heard the voices from just around the corner of the patio, low that way two people sounded when they thought they were out of earshot.

Davids and Emerson.

"—I mean, come on. In that dress—"

Emerson laughed. The kind of laugh that knew exactly what it was agreeing to, completely complicit.

"Did you see when she leaned over the cornhole board?" Davids continued. "What I wouldn't—"

I stopped moving.

"—genuinely don't know how Alves concentrates at work knowing that's waiting at home—"

The cold moved through me fast and then burned out, replaced by something that was not quite anger and not quite anything I could name either.