8. Beck
EIGHT
BECK
I ran.
Not metaphorically. I actually ran. Five AM, before the sun was up, hitting the trail that wound behind the station and up into the foothills.
The air was raw, October having given way to early November with a sharpness that bit at exposed skin.
My lungs burned. My legs burned. Good. I wanted everything to burn except the thing that was actually burning, which was the memory of Lila's mouth under mine and the way she'd said my name like it was the only word she knew.
The trail was steep, a series of switchbacks carved into the hillside by boots and weather, roots breaking through the packed earth like the mountain was trying to slow me down.
I ran harder. Pushed through the burn in my calves, the rawness in my throat.
Physical pain was honest. Physical pain said, here is the damage, here is the cause, here is the boundary.
Emotional pain was a liar. It hid and shifted and disguised itself as anger or stoicism or the careful arrangement of hose couplings at three in the morning.
I'd kissed her and then walked away. Left her standing in her apartment with swollen lips and confusion on her face, because that was what I did. I destroyed good things by being too afraid to hold them.
Three miles up the trail, I stopped at a rock outcropping that overlooked the town.
Ember Falls was still mostly dark, a few lights scattered through the valley like fallen stars.
The station was visible. The bay lights were on, which meant Cole was already doing morning checks.
The mountains rose around everything, patient and indifferent.
I braced my hands on my knees and breathed. Tried to organize the chaos in my head into something manageable. Failed.
Here was what I knew. I wanted Lila Webber.
Not in the abstract, not as a general appreciation of an attractive colleague.
I wanted her specifically, granularly, in a way that had settled into my bones over the past seven weeks like smoke into fabric.
I wanted her laugh that came from somewhere deeper than performance.
I wanted her competence on calls, the way she became a different version of herself, sharper, cleaner, more focused.
I wanted the freckle beneath her ear and the way she hummed songs I couldn't identify and the stubborn set of her jaw when she argued with me about protocols she was right about.
Here was what I also knew. The last person I let myself care about in this job died thirty feet from me.
The floor opened and swallowed him and I heard it happen and I couldn't stop it.
I carried that sound in my body, not in my memory, in my actual physical body, in the way my hands tightened when I heard structural creaking, in the way my chest locked up when visibility dropped to zero.
If I let Lila in, all the way in, not just the door-holding and the coffee but the real thing, the laying-yourself-open thing, and something happened to her on a call, I wouldn't survive it. That wasn't hyperbole. That was a clinical assessment of my own structural integrity.
So I ran. And I went back to the station. And I pulled the wall up so high and so fast that I could practically hear the bricks slamming into place.
I avoided her. Not in the obvious way. I still rode the medic unit with her, still ran calls, still did the job.
But the coffee on the bumper stopped. The saved seat at breakfast disappeared.
I spoke to her in the clipped, professional tone I'd used in her first week, and I watched the realization move across her face like a weather front.
She didn't beg. She didn't confront me. She didn't cry or slam doors or demand an explanation.
She just adjusted. Recalibrated. Got her own coffee. Sat wherever there was an open seat. Matched my professional tone with her own and didn't miss a beat.
And that was worse. That was infinitely, catastrophically worse than if she'd fallen apart, because it meant she'd done this before, been pulled close and then pushed away, and she had practice at absorbing the impact. She was so good at it that nobody else would have noticed.
I noticed.
Three days into my retreat, Cole cornered me in the equipment room.
He didn't start gently. Cole never did. Beneath the cooking and the dad jokes and the easy warmth, there was a directness that could cut glass.
"What happened?"
I was inventorying hose couplings. I didn't look up. "Nothing."
"Something happened between you and Lila. Don't insult me by denying it."
"It's personal."
"It's affecting the station. You've gone back to acting like she's invisible, and she's acting like that's fine, and the rest of us are pretending we don't see it, and it's exhausting." He leaned against the shelf. "What did you do?"
The question landed. What did you do, not what happened.
Because Cole knew me. Cole had watched me build walls around myself for two years and had said nothing because he understood grief, because he had his own.
A marriage that ended, a custody arrangement that meant he only had Lily half the time, a loneliness he carried with the same grim efficiency I carried mine.
"I kissed her," I said.
Cole's eyebrows didn't move. A feat of self-control. "And?"
"And then I left."
"Left as in went home?"
"Left as in said 'I can't do this' and walked out of her apartment."
Cole exhaled slowly through his nose. The sound of a man counting to ten. "Beck."
"I know."
"Do you? Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you found someone who actually got through, which, by the way, is a miracle of human engineering given how hard you've worked to be unreachable, and then you punished her for it."
"I'm not punishing her."
"You're not protecting her either. You're protecting yourself. And she's the one paying for it."
The hose coupling I was holding suddenly needed to be inspected with great attention. I turned it over in my hands. Counted the threads. Anything but look at Cole's face and the truth on it.
"Jake died," I said. And my voice came out wrong, too rough, too bare. "He died because I wasn't fast enough. Because the building was compromised and we went in anyway and the floor gave way and I was thirty feet from him and I might as well have been thirty miles."
"I know, Beck."
"If something happens to her, on a call, in a fire, in a car accident on the way to a goddamn grocery store, if I open that door and she's on the other side and then she isn't?—"
"You're not the only person who's ever been afraid of losing someone.
" Cole's voice was quiet now. Steady. "I'm afraid every time Lily gets in a car.
Every time she has a fever. Every time her mother calls and I think, what if.
But I don't stop loving her because I'm afraid.
That would be the worst possible response to the problem. "
"It's different."
"It's exactly the same. You're not protecting her, Beck. You're punishing her for making you feel something."
The words hit like a palm strike to the chest. Not because they were cruel but because they were precise. Because Cole had seen the thing I'd been hiding from myself and said it out loud, and now it was in the room, and I couldn't pretend it wasn't.
"So what do I do?" The question came out before I could catch it. Smaller than I wanted it to sound.
Cole pushed off the shelf. "That's between you and her. But I'd suggest starting with the truth." He paused at the door. "And maybe an apology."
He left me alone with the hose couplings and the silence and the slow, terrible process of recognizing my own cowardice.
The rest of the week was an exercise in endurance. I went through the motions. Worked my shifts. Ran calls. Sat through meals where Lila was across the table, a careful three feet of distance between us, and every one of those feet felt like a mile.
On Friday, we got the call. Multi-vehicle pileup on the switchback section of Highway 9. Three cars, one overturned, the mountain road slick with the first real cold of November. We rolled with everything, engine, medic, both crews.
The scene was chaos. An SUV on its roof, wheels still spinning. A sedan crumpled against the guardrail. A pickup that had slid off the road and down the embankment. People screaming. A child crying. The smell of gasoline and cold asphalt and fear.
Lila moved through it like she'd been born for this.
I watched her, not from a distance, because I was working too, but in the peripheral way you watch something that demands your attention no matter where you direct your eyes.
She triaged three patients in under two minutes, her hands steady, her voice cutting through the noise with surgical clarity.
She intubated a woman in the overturned SUV, a difficult airway, compromised by position and blood, and got it on the first pass while I held C-spine and Cole stabilized the vehicle.
"I need a chest decompression, tension pneumothorax, left side. Beck, hold pressure on the scalp lac. Someone get me a 14-gauge."
She was magnificent. There was no other word.
Not beautiful, though she was, rain-damp and focused and with blood on her gloves.
Magnificent in the way that someone is when they're doing exactly what they were made to do, when every cell in their body is aligned with purpose, competence and courage.
The woman survived. All three patients survived. Lila rode in the ambulance with the most critical, keeping the tube secure over fifteen minutes of mountain roads, calling ahead to Mercy General with the kind of report that made ER teams ready before the rig arrived.
Back at the station, she cleaned up. Filed her report. Sat in the common room with a cup of tea and hands that had the faintest tremor, the only sign that the adrenaline was catching up with her.
I stood in the doorway and looked at her. She looked at me. And in her eyes, I saw something I didn't deserve but recognized. Patience. Not infinite patience. She wasn't a saint. But enough patience for one more chance.
I wasn't going to waste it. I'd wasted enough, weeks, months, two years of refusing to let the light in because I was afraid of what would happen when it went out.
But light didn't work that way. You couldn't hoard it by keeping the curtains closed.
You could only stand in it while it lasted and be grateful for the warmth.
Not tonight. Tonight we were both wrung out, and some conversations needed energy and courage that I didn't have at 01:00 AM after a mass casualty call.
But soon. Before the distance I'd created became permanent.
Before the wall I'd built between us hardened into something neither of us could break.
Cole was right. Jake was gone. Lila was here. And every day I spent pushing her away was a day I chose grief over life.
I was tired of choosing grief.
I looked at Jake's locker one more time.
The empty space where the nameplate should be.
Tomorrow I'd ask Captain Harding for a new label maker.
Not to replace Jake. Nothing replaced Jake, and nothing needed to, because the people we lost didn't live in nameplates.
They lived in the way we carried the work forward, in every call we answered and every person we pulled from the wreckage.
Jake lived in the way I held C-spine and called commands and refused to leave anyone behind.
But the locker needed a name. And the name, I'd decided, was Webber.