Chapter Twenty-Eight Jase
Brielle is still asleep when I wake up.
The room is grey with early morning, that hour before the city has fully committed to being awake, and the streetlight through the curtain has faded from orange to pale white. She is on her side, facing away from me, breathing slowly and evenly.
I lie there for a moment and look at the ceiling.
Then I ease out of the bed carefully, throw on my clothes without making noise, and slip out into the hallway, pulling the door closed behind me with both hands on the frame so the latch doesn’t click.
Evan is in the kitchen.
He's at the counter with a mug, still in last night's clothes, and he looks up when I appear in the doorway.
“Morning,” I greet. “Did you sleep here?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “I crashed on the couch. Didn't feel like going home. Coffee's fresh,” he raises his cup at me.
“Thanks,” I say, and pour myself a cup and lean against the counter beside him, and for a minute neither of us says anything.
The apartment is quiet. Max’s door is closed, which means he either left early for the station or he’s still in there.
Evan turns his mug in his hands.
“So,” he says.
“So,” I say.
We stand there for another moment.
“You were with her.”
“Yes,” I say.
He nods, looking at his coffee.
“I told her,” I say.
He looks up.
“That I’m falling for her,” I say. “Last night. I told her.”
He pauses. “How’d that go?”
“She said okay,” I say.
“Okay,” he repeats.
“The good kind,” I say.
He nods again and looks back at his coffee, and I watch the slight tightening that appears around his jaw.
“Evan,” I say.
“I’m fine,” he says.
“No, you’re not.”
He’s quiet for long enough that I think he’s going to let it go, and then he says, “I spent a long time wanting to be someone’s first choice. You know that.”
“I know that,” I say.
“And this is—” He stops. Starts again. “This is not that. What’s happening here? It’s not any one of us being her first choice. It’s something else.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“I’m trying to figure out if I’m okay with that,” he says. “I think I am. I’m pretty sure I am. But I want to be honest about the fact that I’m working on it rather than just telling you I’m fine.”
I look at him.
This is the thing about Evan that most people don’t get to see.
The ease he carries is real; it’s not a performance, but underneath it, there’s a man who thinks about things and feels them more deeply than he lets on, and the fact that he’s saying this to me rather than shrugging it off is not a small thing.
“Here’s what I know,” I say. “She’s not choosing between us. She’s not going to wake up one morning and hand out rankings. That’s not what this is.”
“I know,” he says. “She makes me want to be my actual self,” he says, “Not the version I put out there. The real one.” He pauses. “That doesn’t happen a lot.”
“No,” I say. “It doesn’t.”
“So whatever this is,” he says, “I’m in it. Whatever shape it takes.”
“Good,” I say.
We finish our coffee.
The front door opens at half past six, and Max comes in, which means he went to the station, found it too quiet, and came back, which is a very Max thing to do. He looks at both of us in the kitchen with yesterday’s clothes on, and his expression does one of its small, controlled shifts.
“Don’t say anything,” I tell him.
“I wasn’t going to,” he says, and goes to pour himself coffee.
Then Max’s radio goes off.
The building is a twenty-story residential tower on the edge of the Navy Yard, and by the time we get there, the second and third floors are fully involved, and smoke is pushing hard out of the upper windows.
Three engines are already on scene. I hop out of the rig and assess fast, the way I always do, splitting my attention between what’s in front of me and what’s coming through the radio. There are people on the ground, some walking, some not, and that’s where I need to be.
“Thibodeau, set up triage at the northeast corner,” the incident commander calls over the radio. “We’ve got confirmed residents unaccounted for on the twentieth floor.”
I’m already moving toward the people on the ground, kit in hand.
The first person I reach is an older man sitting on the curb with his hands on his knees, coughing hard.
I crouch in front of him and get the oxygen mask on and check his eyes and ask him questions in a low, steady voice while he coughs himself back to breathing.
His name is Gerald, he tells me, between gulps of oxygen, and he lives on the fourth floor and got out through the stairwell, but his neighbor, Mrs. Okafor, who’s on the twentieth, doesn’t move fast, and she has her grandchildren this week.
“How many grandchildren?” I ask.
He holds up three fingers.
I relay it to the radio.
Evan’s voice comes back immediately. “I’m going up.”
I work the triage line for forty minutes.
A woman with a gash on her forearm from a window she broke to get out. Two men who inhaled too much smoke need monitoring. A teenage girl who twisted her ankle on the stairs and is more furious about it than frightened, which is a good sign, and a couple of others.
I work, and I radio, and somewhere above me Evan is on a harness going up the outside of a twenty-story.
Then I hear it.
A mechanical shriek cuts through the noise of the scene and makes several people on the ground look up at once.
I follow suit.
The harness line is moving incorrectly. It’s faster and more chaotic, swinging wide, and I can see Evan on it, one hand gripping the line and one hand out for balance.
“Evan!” someone shouts over the radio. I think it might be me.
The line drops another three feet and catches, and Evan swings hard into the side of the building, and I hear the impact from the ground, and something cold goes through my chest that has nothing to do with the November air.
Suddenly, Max is on the ladder truck. I don’t know how he got up the aerial so fast, but he is there, extended out over the side of the building—about the sixteenth floor, leaning out from the platform with one arm locked around the railing and the other reaching.
The harness line drops again, and Evan falls. Max catches him but it’s not the way it happens in films. Max grabs the harness with both hands, and the force of it nearly takes him off the platform.
There is a moment, one terrible frozen moment, where both of them are hanging at an angle that should not be survivable, and then Max gets his feet back on the platform and hauls.
Evan gets a hand on the railing, and they both hold.
I’ve held my breath for too long.
Then Evan’s voice comes through the radio.
“I’m good,” he says. “I’m good.”
I realize I’m holding my radio so hard my knuckles have gone white.
I let out the breath I’ve been holding since I heard the equipment malfunction, and look up at the two of them on the aerial platform. Max’s hand is still on Evan’s harness, and neither of them is moving yet.
But I suddenly understand in the way you understand things that happen in your body before they happen in your head, that I would have burned the whole city down if either of them had fallen.
Both of them.
All three of them.
That’s what this is.
That’s what we are.
I pick up my kit and go back to work.