Chapter Fifteen Brielle
A few days ago, I didn’t know what an incident report form looked like.
I know all of this because I have spent the last several days learning it, cross-referencing paper files against digital ones, rebuilding an organizational system from the ground up, and discovering in the process that I find this kind of work genuinely satisfying in a way that I couldn’t have predicted and cannot entirely explain.
My mother would be appalled.
My phone buzzes on the corner of the desk.
I don't look at it. It buzzes again, twice in quick succession, and I turn it face down without checking the screen because I already know what's there.
The notifications have been stacking up for days, my mother's name appearing and disappearing like a tide I keep choosing not to swim in.
Whatever she has to say can wait. It has been waiting for eleven days already and the world has not ended.
I think about this sometimes, in the quiet of the admin office, with the afternoon light coming through the small window and the sounds of the station going about its business around me.
Eleanora Hayes, who has attended galas in four countries and sat on the boards of organizations with names so long they require an acronym, would look at her only daughter cross-legged on the floor of a Brooklyn fire station reorganizing a filing cabinet and feel something so far beyond horror that the English language probably doesn’t have a precise word for it.
I find this thought deeply satisfying every single time.
Today, the station is quieter than usual. Max and Evan rolled out on a call an hour ago, something two blocks east that came through on the radio while I was in the middle of the supply order spreadsheet I’ve been building.
Weston is in his office. Rory is somewhere in the bay.
Jase left for a Costco run forty minutes ago and texted me a photo of a cart already overflowing with paper towels with the caption “this is your fault, you put it on the list,” which made me laugh out loud alone in an office, which is something that would also have appalled my mother.
I am, I realize, smiling to myself.
I’ve been doing that a lot lately.
I reach for the bottom drawer of the left filing cabinet, the one that sticks and requires an angle of persuasion to open properly, and lean down to work it free. It gives on the third try, which I count as a personal victory.
I crouch lower to see what's inside. There's a takeout menu at the front of the drawer, grease-stained and dog-eared, from some pizza place two blocks over. I set it aside and think about last night's dinner instead, which was considerably better.
Evan made pasta. Max said almost nothing for long stretches and then said exactly the right thing when he did. The four of us were in the living room afterward, some game on the television that none of us were really watching.
It occurs to me that I have spent more evenings in genuine human company in the past week than I did in the entire last year of my engagement.
I pull a folder from the bottom drawer, sit back on my heels, and try to remember the last dinner I had with Richard that felt like that. Like people who actually wanted to be in the same room.
I can’t.
I open the folder and look at what’s inside without seeing it, because my brain is visiting last night’s dream with the thoroughness it deserves.
It started the way it always starts now.
The house that doesn’t exist. The warm floors. The kind of light that only happens in dreams, golden and slightly too perfect, the way real light never quite manages to be.
Except last night it was different. Last night there was a kitchen, and a table, and the four of us, the way we actually are, not some dreamed approximation but the real versions.
And then one by one, the ordinary things fell away, and what was left was something else entirely.
Last night started with Jase’s hand at the back of my neck, fingers sliding into my hair, his mouth finding the soft place below my ear, and I turned into it without hesitation because in the dream.
Max was behind me, his hands at my waist and then his mouth at my ear, saying something I couldn’t make out, but I felt the full length of my spine.
I reached back for him and he was there, and then Evan was crossing the room toward me with his jacket still on and that look on his face, the one I’ve been cataloguing for days now, the one that means he has made a decision and is done pretending otherwise, and his hands found my face and I looked up at him and he—
I stand up abruptly and put the folder on the desk.
Right.
I’ve been having variations of this dream since the night before my wedding, when an anonymous fireman knocked on a door that didn’t exist, and I woke up alone in Richard’s bed with my heart going and the awareness that I was about to make a very serious mistake.
That dream had no faces. The man at the door was a symbol, a feeling, the shape of something I wanted and didn’t have a name for yet.
Now I have three names.
Now I have three faces, and three voices, and three specific and entirely distinct ways of being in a room that I have spent time learning the way you learn a language when you’re fully immersed in it, without meaning to, until suddenly you understand everything being said.
Fate, I think, has a genuinely absurd sense of humor.
I also think that I have no regrets whatsoever, which is something I couldn’t have said about my life seven days ago, and which I am still getting used to the feeling of.
I go back to the filing cabinet.
The supply order spreadsheet needs finishing before Jase gets back, because he texted fifteen minutes ago to say he was on his way and that the cart had somehow gotten worse, accompanied by a second photo that confirmed this.
I’ve been managing the station’s supply expenses for four days now, which still strikes me as slightly improbable given that a week ago I had never balanced anything more complex than a personal credit card statement, but which has turned out to be well within my capabilities once I had a system to work within.
It turns out I like systems.
It turns out I like a lot of things I didn’t know I liked, now that I’m allowed to find out.
I'm humming something under my breath, I notice.
I don't know when I started doing that. Some song that's been in my head since yesterday, something Jase was playing in the kitchen while he made coffee, and I'm halfway through what I think might be the chorus when my left calf seizes up without warning.
“Ow,” I say, out loud, to nobody.
I grab the edge of the desk and try to straighten my leg and it doesn't help, the muscle locked tight and furious, and I'm still on the floor pressing my palm uselessly against it when footsteps appear in the hallway and then Jase fills the doorway.
He looks at me on the floor with my face doing whatever my face is doing right now and says, “What happened?”
“Cramp,” I say through my teeth. “Calf. It's fine.”
“It doesn't look fine,” he says, and he's already crossing the room, dropping to one knee in front of me, and he's in a t-shirt with his sleeves pushed up and I am very aware of this in the specific way I've been very aware of Jase Thibodeau for the past two weeks, which is constantly and inconveniently.
“Let me,” he says.
“You don't have to—”
“Brielle.” He says my name the way he says it when he's not asking, and I stop arguing.
His hand wraps around my calf and I feel every individual finger.
He's warm, warmer than I expected, and his grip is firm in a way that should be uncomfortable and isn't. He finds the seized muscle with his thumb and presses in slowly, watching my face while he does it, and I make a sound that I immediately wish I hadn't.
“I know,” he says. “Stay with it.”
“Easy for you to say,” I manage.
“Breathe out,” he says.
I breathe out.
His thumb moves in a slow circle and I feel the muscle begin to ease, and I'm trying very hard to focus on that and not on the fact that he is extremely close and extremely large and looking at me with those dark eyes that are doing the two-things-at-once thing they always do.
I look at his forearm instead, the muscle shifting under his skin as his hand works, and that is also not helpful.
“How long have you been sitting on the floor?” he says.
“A while,” I say.
“Brielle.”
“A few hours maybe.”
He makes a sound that is not quite a sigh and not quite a laugh. “Your feet are still recovering,” he says. “You can't sit on hard floors for hours and expect your legs to cooperate.”
“I was filing,” I say, as if this is a reasonable defense.
“You were filing,” he repeats, in the tone of a man who finds this both exasperating and entirely unsurprising.
The cramp is loosening now, the muscle giving up its argument under the steady pressure of his hands, and I should be focusing on that.
I am focusing on that. I am also focusing on the way his thumb traces a slow arc below my knee and the way the afternoon light is coming through the window at an angle that does something unfair to the line of his jaw and the way he's still watching my face like he's checking in, making sure I'm okay, which is such a Jase thing to do that it makes something in my chest go soft.
Then his hand moves.
Not dramatically. Just slightly, his palm sliding a fraction higher up my calf, warm and unhurried, and his thumb traces a small slow circle against the back of my knee.
I stop breathing.
I don't mean to. It just happens, the breath catching somewhere in my throat, and I look down at his hand and then up at his face and he's already looking at me.
Not with surprise. Not with the easy charm he uses when he wants to deflect something.
Just looking at me, steady and quiet, and I think is he going to and then I think I want him to and then immediately after that I think why do I want him to so badly when it's been approximately four minutes since I was on the floor swearing at a muscle cramp.
His hand stills.
We are both completely motionless for a moment, his hand warm against the back of my knee, my heart doing something loud and inconvenient in my chest, the admin office very quiet around us and the afternoon light very warm and the distance between us very small.
I don't pull away.
I don't move at all.
He looks at me for one more second, something working behind his eyes that I can't read, and then he pulls his hand back and stands up, and the moment closes like a door that neither of us shut, it swung that way on its own.
I look at the filing cabinet.
He clears his throat lightly. “Better?” he says.
“Better,” I say, to the filing cabinet.
He holds out his hand to help me up and I take it and he pulls me to my feet and we end up closer than we planned, my free hand landing on his chest to steady myself, and neither of us moves.
I can feel his heartbeat under my palm and it is not as steady as he looks, which is information I file away with everything else I've been collecting about him without meaning to.
“The receipts,” I say, because I need to say something that is not what I'm actually thinking.
“Right,” he says. “The receipts.”
He holds them out and I take them. Our fingers overlap around the paper and neither of us hurries past it. He looks down at the spreadsheet.
“This is genuinely impressive,” he says. “Weston is going to lose his mind.”
“Good way or bad way?”
“With Weston those are sometimes the same thing,” he says, and heads back toward the door.
I turn back to the filing cabinet and I am very deliberately not thinking about his hand at the back of my knee or his heartbeat under my palm or the second where everything went still and neither of us looked away.
I am doing a reasonable job of this until he pauses in the doorway.
“Brielle.”
I look over my shoulder.
“Whatever you were humming,” he says. “Don't stop.”
Then he's gone, back down the hall, and I stand there for a moment with a filing folder in my hand and the afternoon light on the floor and the warmth of someone who has been seen, properly seen, without having to perform a single thing.
I start humming again without meaning to.
I don't stop.