5. Chapter 5
Iwake up to gray light and the smell of coffee and the immediate, full-body certainty that last night actually happened.
For one second, lying in my bunk with the bruise pulling tight across my shoulder, back and hip, I let myself feel good about it.
I replay the whole thing. His hands. His mouth.
The way he held on after, like he was not ready to let go.
The way he said my name, low and rough, the first time he ever used it.
Then I roll over and see his bunk is already empty, stripped, squared away like nobody slept in it at all, and the good feeling curdles.
The rest of the shift are already up. I can hear them in the bay, boots and voices, the ordinary morning noise of a station waking up.
I drag myself upright, pull on a clean shirt over the bruise, and tell myself it is fine.
It is going to be fine. We are two adults.
We had a moment. A big moment. We will talk about it, figure it out, and it will be fine.
I walk into the kitchen rehearsing what I will say.
Chase is at the counter with his back to me, filling his mug. Broad shoulders, that familiar stillness. My whole chest does something stupid just looking at him.
"Morning," I say.
"Healy." He does not turn around. "Coffee's fresh. We're checking the rig at oh-eight-hundred, so eat fast."
Healy.
Not Jason. Healy. Back to the last name, back to the clipped orders, back to the gruff training officer who found my whole existence personally offensive a week ago.
"Right," I say. "Yeah. Cool. Rig at eight."
He takes his coffee and walks out without looking at me once.
I stand there in the empty kitchen feeling like the floor gave out under me all over again, except this time nobody is grabbing the back of my coat.
Here is the thing about me. When something hurts, I get louder. I always have. Some people go quiet and some people go small, and I go bright, blindingly bright, like if I just generate enough sunshine nobody will notice the thing underneath. So that is exactly what I do.
I follow him out to the bay and I am cheerful.
God, am I cheerful. I crack jokes at Martin, the clipboard guy, who grunts.
I whistle while I check the compartments.
I tell a long pointless story about my academy instructor that nobody asked for.
I am a one-man morning show, and the whole time my eyes keep cutting to Chase, waiting for him to look at me, to give me anything, a flicker, a crack, the cousin of a smile.
Nothing.
He runs the rig check as if I am any rookie.
He corrects my grip on the hydraulic tool without his hand lingering on mine.
When I hand him the wrong fitting, he just says "other one" in a flat voice and takes it from me without our fingers touching, like he is being careful now, careful in the exact opposite direction from last night.
It should not hurt this much. I keep telling myself that. We barely know each other. It was one moment, fueled by adrenaline, a near-death experience, and an empty station. People do crazy things when they almost die. That is probably all it was for him. A pressure valve. A thing that happened.
But he said my name.
I cannot stop snagging on that. You do not say someone's name like that, low, wrecked and like it costs you something, if it is just a pressure valve. Do you?
Maybe you do. What do I know? I am the guy who spent a week telling himself a buzz was nothing.
We break for breakfast and I am midway through aggressively buttering toast for everybody, performing helpfulness, when I catch Chase actually looking at me.
Across the kitchen. Just for a second, the same way he looked in the drill yard, the same unreadable weight in it.
My heart lurches up like an idiot dog hearing the door.
Then Martin, the clipboard guy says something and Chase's face shuts like a slammed locker, and he looks away, and I am left holding a knife and a piece of toast and the stupid wreckage of my own hope.
Fine. Okay. Fine.
I carry the toast around. I refill coffee. I am sunshine, I am sunshine, I am a probie who is great to have around and absolutely not falling apart inside over his training officer.
The morning grinds on. Chase keeps me busy, keeps me at arm's length, keeps the whole thing locked behind that flat professional voice.
And somewhere in the middle of it, the brightness starts to cost me.
My jaw aches from smiling. My jokes get a half-beat slower.
I catch Martin giving me a look, not unkind, like he can tell the show is running on fumes.
"You good, new guy?" he asks.
"Never better," I say, too fast, too loud.
Later, I duck back into the bunk room to grab a fresh undershirt, mostly because I need thirty seconds where nobody can see my face. The room is dim and quiet, the bunks half-stripped, that smell of bleach and sleep.
I am not alone for long.
The door opens and shuts and it is Chase, of course it is Chase, filling the doorway, and for one second the flat mask is gone and something raw shows through underneath.
He looks at me across the narrow room, and there is so much in his face all of a sudden - want, fear, apology, I cannot sort it - and he takes one step toward me.
My whole body leans in before I decide to.
"Chase…" I start.
And that is when the tones drop.
Not a fire. A medical assist, the calm dispatch voice rattling off an address, but it does not matter what it is.
The spell shatters. Chase's face slams shut again, the mask back up so fast it is like it never slipped, and he steps back, and the eighteen inches of air between us turns back into a canyon.
"That's us," he says. Flat. "Move."
We move.
The whole call I am useless in my own head, going through the motions, my hands doing the job while the rest of me is stuck in that bunk room watching the door close on his face.
Because that is the part that guts me. He stepped toward me.
He almost said something. And then the world reminded both of us, in about half a second, exactly how little privacy we have, exactly how fast we can be ripped apart by a sound, exactly how this whole thing could blow up if it ever got the chance.
Maybe that is why he is doing this. The thought arrives small and cold. Maybe the walls are not because he regrets it. Maybe they are because he is scared, the way the captain warned, the way the house talks. Maybe.
Or maybe I am just doing the thing I always do, spinning gold out of nothing, building a whole story so I do not have to sit with the simpler one. The simpler one being: it meant something to me and nothing to him.
By the time we get back it is afternoon and I am wrung out, the sunshine all burned off, nothing left underneath but the ache.
Chase disappears into the captain's office for a debrief.
I sit on the rear step of the engine, in the exact spot where he found me nights ago, and I do not even have it in me to find something to clean.
He comes out eventually. Crosses the bay. For a second I think he is going to stop, going to say something, going to give me one real word.
He slows. He looks at me. His mouth opens.
"Get some rest, Healy," he says. "Long night last night."
And then he is gone, into the bunk room, and the door swings shut behind him.
Long night last night.
That is what he is calling it. A long night. Like it was a busy shift. Like it was nothing.
I sit there in the cooling bay with the bruise aching across my back and his coffee-and-smoke smell still somehow in my head, and I feel the hope finally give out for good.
I am not sunshine. Not right now. Right now I am just a twenty-one-year-old kid who crossed a line he cannot uncross for a man who has apparently decided to pretend the line was never there.
I told myself the dangerous part was naming it.
I was wrong. The dangerous part was hoping he would name it back.