9. Chapter 9
Chase gets the rest of the shift off the line while his knee heals.
It is the longest shift of my life. He is around the station on light duty, riding a desk, doing the inventory he hates, and I keep catching him favoring the leg, keep wanting to do for him what he would do for me, and not being able to, because there are always eyes.
We have not talked. Not really. Not since the warehouse.
Since I knelt on the pavement and shared my air with him and understood, all the way down, that I was done hiding.
I have been carrying that around for three days like a live coal, waiting for a chance to put it in his hands, and the chance keeps not coming.
It comes on the following night.
The station finally goes quiet around midnight.
The crew is asleep, the captain gone home, and I find Chase in the back of the engine bay, where the light is low and the big doors are shut against the dark and it is just the rig and the smell of diesel and the two of us.
He is wiping down a tool he has already cleaned twice.
I know that move. It is the move of a man keeping his hands busy so he does not have to think.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey." He does not look up.
I lean against the rig next to him. Close. Closer than the eighteen inches. He does not move away, which is something.
"We should talk," I say. "About the warehouse. About… us."
His jaw tightens. The rag keeps moving. "Healy…"
"Don't." I am surprised how steady my voice is. "Don't Healy me. Not back here. There's nobody to hear it."
He stops wiping. Sets the tool down. But he does not look at me, and the silence stretches, and I realize that if I wait for him to start this, we will both be old men.
Chase does not do soft words. He has told me that a hundred ways.
So it has to be me. It is always going to have to be me, and I am okay with that, I am the one with all the words, that is the whole point of us.
So I just say it.
"I'm not ashamed," I tell him. "I need you to hear that part first, before anything else. I have spent all day trying to figure out what I feel, and you know what I came up with? Not one ounce of shame. Not about you. Not about me. Not about any of it."
He goes very still.
"I spent my whole life thinking I was straight," I go on, and my voice is shaking now, not from fear, from how much I mean it.
"And maybe I was wrong about the label or maybe the label just never had you in it.
I don't know. I don't care. I'm not standing here hating myself, Chase.
I'm not confused about whether I want this.
I am twenty-one years old and I have never been more sure of anything than I am about wanting you. That's not the part I'm scared of."
He finally looks at me then. And his face is doing something I have never seen it do. Cracked open. Raw. Like the words are landing somewhere deep, and he has no defense against them.
"Then what?" he says. Rough. Barely there.
"The job. The gossip. The captain. All of it." I let out a breath. "And… okay. The real one. The one that keeps me up. I'm scared that this is bigger for me than it is for you."
There it is. Out in the open, in the low light, between us.
"I'm scared," I say, and now my voice does break, just a little, "that I'm standing here with my whole chest cracked open and you're going to give me that flat voice and tell me to get some sleep.
Because I can take the job being hard. I can take hiding, if I have to.
What I can't take is not knowing if this is real for you the way it's real for me.
I held your life in my hands last night.
I gave you my air. And I would do it again without thinking, and I need to know…
" I stop. Swallow. "I need to know if you'd do the same for me.
Not the firefighter thing. You'd do that for anyone.
I mean… me. Us. Is it real, Chase? Just tell me it's real. "
The silence after that is the loudest thing I have ever heard.
He looks at me. And everything is in his face - I can see it, the want, the fear, something that looks so much like love it makes my throat close - everything is right there, and all he has to do is say one word.
Yes. Real. Anything. Three letters. He is a man who ran into a collapsing building for a stranger.
He has more courage than anyone I have ever met.
And I watch him stand at the edge of one word and not be able to make himself jump.
His mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
The seconds stretch. I can hear the rig ticking as it cools. I can hear my own heart. I gave him everything I had, laid it all on the concrete floor of the engine bay, and he is just standing there, jaw working, eyes wrecked, saying nothing.
And nothing, it turns out, is its own answer. Or it feels like one. It feels like the floor giving out, the same as the morning after, except worse, because this time I did not leave any of myself in reserve. This time I went all in.
"Okay," I finally say. Quiet. "Okay."
"Jason…." My name. Finally, my name. But strangled, as if it costs him everything just to get it out, and then nothing after it. No second word. No real one.
"It's okay," I lie. "You don't have to… it's fine. Forget I…"
"I'm not good at this," he says. Hoarse. Desperate. "The talking. The… I never have been. You know that. I don't… I can't just…"
"I know." And I do know. That is the worst part. I know exactly who he is, and I love him anyway, and I am still standing here feeling like I have been hollowed out with a Halligan. "It's okay, Chase. Really. I shouldn't have… it's late. We should sleep."
I push off the rig. My legs feel strange under me. I make myself smile, the old reflex, the sunshine going up like a shield, except it does not reach anywhere near my eyes and we both know it.
He does not stop me. That is the thing I will replay later, lying in my bunk.
He had every chance. I walked slow. I gave him the whole length of the engine bay.
And he stood there by the rig with his jaw clenched and his hands in fists at his sides, and he let me go, watching me the way you watch a fire you cannot reach. He did not say the word.
I get almost to the door before he speaks.
"It's real."
So quiet I almost miss it. So quiet I am not sure, for one second, that I did not imagine it, conjure it out of how badly I wanted it.
I turn around.
But he is not looking at me anymore. He has picked the tool back up. He is wiping it down again, head bent, shoulders rigid, like the two words cost him so much he has to hide from what comes next. Like he threw them out into the dark and could not bear to watch them land.
And I do not know what to do with that. Two words, given to the floor instead of to me, by a man who could not look me in the eye while he said them.
Is that enough? Is that everything he has?
Is that real being handed to me sideways because it is the only way he knows how, or is it a scrap he tossed me to make me stop hurting?
I do not know. That is the ache of it. I stand there in the doorway of the engine bay, and I genuinely do not know. I am too raw and too tired to push for more tonight, because I already gave everything and got back two words aimed at a wrench.
"Goodnight, Chase," I say.
He does not answer. The rag keeps moving.
I go to bed and I do not sleep. I lie there in the dark and I turn it over and over - it's real, it's real, it's real - trying to decide if it is the beginning of something or the kindest possible ending.
I am not ashamed. I meant that. Of everything I said tonight, that is the part I am most sure of.
There is no shame anywhere in me about loving him.
There is just this terrible not-knowing, and a grumpy, broken, brave man across the station who can run into fire without blinking but cannot, apparently, look me in the eye and tell me I matter.
I close my eyes. I do not cry. I just lie there and hold those two whispered words against my chest like the last warm thing in a cold building, and I wait for morning. I have no idea what it is going to bring.