Chapter 10
Astrid
Tuesday evening. I was at the kitchen table with the contractor's punch list in front of me and a glass of wine I'd barely touched. The inspector cleared the space on Monday morning. I should have been celebrating. I wasn't. I was reading the same line on the punch list for the third time.
Replace flooring transition strip, exam room two to corridor.
The thermal was the problem.
I washed it on Sunday with the rest of his things and folded the stack on my dresser.
I told myself I'd walk them back across the street on Tuesday.
It was Tuesday. The stack was on my dresser.
The thermal was on my body because the house was cold when I came out of the shower an hour ago, and the thermal was right there at the top of the pile.
I'd reached for it without thinking. I'd stood in front of my closet in it and known I was lying to myself.
I read the punch list line again.
My hand was on my own knee. The same spot, the same pressure I'd carried home from the drive on Saturday.
He put his hand on my thigh on Route 23, and neither of us said a word about it.
I wanted him to do it again. I wanted more than a hand on my thigh.
I knew exactly what shape this was taking, and I did not stop.
Moose was at my feet. The kettle had given up on itself. I got up to turn it off and caught my reflection in the dark window above the sink. Hair in a knot. A man's thermal pulled down past my thumbs.
I turned the burner off and went back to the table. I read the punch list line a fourth time and didn't get any further into it than I had the first three.
The knock came at the front door.
I knew his knock by now. Two even raps a beat apart, a knock with manners and muscle memory built into it. This knock was three short. Wrong rhythm. I was halfway across the kitchen before I knew why I'd gone tight in the shoulders.
I looked through the peephole.
He was in full uniform. Heavy coat unbuttoned at the throat. Blond hair pushed back off his forehead. The porch light caught the cut at his temple a beat before I saw the rest of him.
He was holding something inside his jacket against his chest with his forearm. Something that was moving.
I had the door open before my hand registered turning the deadbolt.
"Kitchen."
He came in. He didn't say anything. I knew the look on his face—I'd worn it the first six months I had a license. Someone who'd done the right thing and would now very much like somebody else to take the wheel.
I went down the hall ahead of him. Moose got out of the way without being asked.
"Set him on the table."
"He's gonna bolt."
"He's not going to bolt. Set him down. Stay between him and the door."
He set the bundle down on my kitchen table, slowly, both hands cupping the bottom like he was setting down something he didn't want to wake.
The jacket fell open at the top, and the cat came up out of it like a snake—small, brown and gray, ribs you could count, one eye crusted half-shut, the other eye yellow and very awake.
He hissed. He spat. He went flat against my placemat and tried to make himself smaller than he was.
About seven pounds of cat trying to be three.
"Hey, sir," I said, low. "Hey. We're okay."
I had a crate in the hall closet I'd packed for Moose for the move and never unpacked. I went and got it, set it on the floor next to the radiator, lined the bottom with the dish towel off the oven handle, and threw a second towel half over the top so the inside went dark.
"Easton. Get behind him. Don't move fast. Just be a wall."
He moved. He didn't ask why. He stood square between the cat and the back door, arms loose at his sides, six-three of firefighter being exactly what I'd asked him to be.
I came at the cat low and slow with the towel from the back of a kitchen chair. I let him see me. I let him see the towel. I let him decide I was a thing he couldn't get past, and when his weight shifted, I had him.
He hissed into the towel. I held him close to my chest, the muscle memory of a thousand frightened cats from school taking over. I crossed the kitchen with him bundled, lowered him into the crate, and let him go.
He went straight to the back corner.
I latched the door.
I stayed crouched in front of the crate for a beat with my hand flat on the towel over the top. He had stopped hissing. He was breathing too fast and too shallow, the way a small animal breathes when it has been running on fear for longer than its body can keep up with.
"You're alright, sir. You sit there. I'll see you in a minute."
I stood up.
Easton was at the counter, watching me with the same face he'd worn watching Sof Cabrera lift Penny's lip in an exam room three weeks ago.
I looked at him properly for the first time since I'd opened the door.
He was bleeding from the cut on his temple.
A long scratch down the side of his neck had gone into the collar of his T-shirt.
The backs of both his hands were open in places I didn't want to count yet.
There was blood on his cuff and on the front of his jacket.
None of it was bleeding I needed to call anybody about.
All of it was bleeding I was going to clean up myself.
"Counter."
"Lean back."
"Astrid, I can do it."
"Counter, Easton. Sit."
He sat. Even bleeding from eight places, he sat the moment I told him to—and we both clocked it.
I went to the bathroom and got my kit. Iodine. Gauze. Saline. Hibiclens. The fine-tipped tweezers I'd had since school. I set it on the counter beside his hip.
He'd unbuttoned the rest of the jacket and dropped it on the floor next to my dishwasher. He was in a navy T-shirt with the Hartsdale Fire crest at the chest, his uniform pants, and his boots.
"Lean back. I need to see the temple."
He leaned.
I stepped between his knees because that was where the overhead light was best, and I started on the cut at his temple. Saline first. He didn't flinch. The cut was clean and shallower than it looked.
"Tell me how this happened."
"Cat call. Engine compartment of an abandoned Buick out past the river. Halsey said leave it. I said no."
"And?"
"He went up under the heat shield. I got him out. I didn't have gloves."
"You didn't have gloves." I kept my voice flat—a vet voice, not a girlfriend voice. It was the only voice I trusted right now.
"They were in the rig. He was in the engine compartment. I made a choice."
"Mhm." I unscrewed the iodine without looking up.
I cleaned the temple. Patted it dry. Left it open because the bleeding had stopped. The next one was the long scratch down the side of his neck.
I tipped his chin to the right with two fingers under his jaw. His skin was warm under my fingertips. The pulse under my thumb was steady and fast—faster than I'd have expected for a man who'd sat in a fire truck for ten hours.
"This one's deep."
"Okay."
"Going to sting."
"I know."
I cleaned it. He breathed in through his teeth once at the top of it. The pulse under my thumb jumped, then steadied again.
"You'll live."
"Yeah."
The cat was sleeping in the crate now. Moose was on his rug. Moose had taken one look at the cat in the crate, one look at Easton on the counter, and decided he was not getting involved.
I moved to the hands.
The right hand was worse than the left. Three long scratches across the back, one short, deep one across the knuckle of his middle finger.
I set his hand on my hip, palm down on the bone through the thermal, because that was where I could see the wound, keep his hand still, and have my own two hands free.
He let me. The back of his hand against my hip felt heavier than a hand on a hip had any right to feel.
I cleaned. He watched.
I worked methodically. Talking low. This one's fine. This one's nothing. This one I'm going to have to push some saline through. Hold still. He held still. I'd cleaned a hundred dogs and a few people and never once been aware of the temperature of a hand on the bone of my hip while I did it.
I switched to the left.
I was very aware of his knees on either side of my hips. I was very aware that I was wearing his thermal under my sweater and hadn't told him. I was very aware that he was working very hard not to look down at my hands and was looking at my face instead.
The last scratch was at his hairline. Above the cut at his temple. A short scrape that had bled into his eyebrow and dried there.
I had to come up with the angle for it.
His face was closer than I'd accounted for.
Close enough to see the gold flecks in the blue of his eyes I hadn't known about.
Close enough to feel his breath against the inside of my wrist. Close enough that the kitchen narrowed to the inch of air between us and the soft tick of the radiator going on somewhere behind me, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd breathed at a normal speed.
He was looking at me the way he'd looked at me on the bank of the lake Saturday morning. Like he was giving me the wheel.
I'd never been looked at like this. Brett decided things and informed me of his decisions afterward. Easton was sitting on my kitchen counter, bleeding from a cat, holding still under my hands, and letting me choose.
The gauze paused at his temple.
I could close the inch. I could not close the inch. He was going to let me do whichever one I did.
The herb jar hit the kitchen tile.
It didn't break. It rolled. Moose stood at the windowsill with the deeply offended innocence of a dog who'd just saved his owner from herself and was prepared to be thanked at any moment.
We both jumped.
I stepped back, cleared my throat, and pretended my hands hadn't just been on his face. He cleared his throat and pretended he hadn't just been letting me decide whether to kiss him.
I picked the herb jar up off the floor and set it back on the windowsill. I came back to the counter. I finished the hairline scrape in eight seconds.
"You're done."
"Thanks, Astrid."