The first properly cold night of the year always found him on his knees at the hearth, swearing quietly at the damper the way he'd sworn at it for twenty-two years, as though this might finally be the year it opened on the first try.
"You're doing it wrong," she said from the doorway, arms crossed against the chill, watching him coax a match into wood he swore was seasoned and she knew for a fact wasn't.
"I have never once done this wrong," he said, which was what he said every year, striking a second match off the hearthstone with the particular stubbornness of a man defending twenty-two Novembers of the exact same failure.
"The wood's green. It's always green. You buy it the same week from the same man who tells you it's seasoned." She came in anyway, the cold still on her, and folded herself onto the rug a few feet behind him, close enough to catch the first real heat when it came.
He got smoke before flame, the sweet damp smell of it filling the room the way it always did, and swore at the wood, and she laughed low behind him — not unkindly, the laugh of someone who'd heard this exact swearing every year since a different apartment, a smaller hearth.
"Come hold this," he said, meaning the bellows, meaning nothing, meaning come closer, and she did, settling in against his back with her knees along the outside of his, her chin finding the place on his shoulder it had been finding for over two decades.
"You always say that," she said, "like you need the help," and put her hand flat over his on the bellows anyway, and stopped arguing about the wood, and he stopped defending it, and for a while neither of them said anything about the fire at all.
It caught while they weren't watching it — really caught, the small orange give-in that meant the room would be warm within the hour — and neither of them moved to see it happen. The couch sat behind them, blanket folded and waiting, entirely forgotten, while the two of them stayed low on the rug in the growing light, her hand still over his, his mouth finding the curve of her neck the fire hadn't reached yet.