10. Chapter 10
Ido not sleep, and when the gray comes up over the bay windows I am still turning those two words over.
It's real. To a wrench. I have decided, somewhere around four in the morning, that I cannot live on a thing somebody says to a wrench.
I deserve more than that. Even if more than that means the answer is no.
The shift ends at seven. I pack my kit slow, last one in the bunk room, putting off the moment I have to walk past him in the bay and pretend I am fine. I am not fine. I am wrung out and hollow and I have run completely out of sunshine.
When I finally come out, the others are already gone, peeling out of the lot in their trucks. And Chase is standing by my car.
Not his. Mine. Waiting.
He has his bag over one shoulder and his jaw is set and he looks like a man who has not slept either, and for a second I just stop in the middle of the lot, because Chase does not wait by anyone's car. Chase leaves. Chase is always the first one out the door and into his own quiet.
"Hey," I say, carefully.
"Hey." He shifts his weight. The bad knee. "Got a second?"
The early light is flat and gold across the lot, the station gone quiet behind us, the whole noisy world of the firehouse stripped away. Just the two of us and the birds and the diesel smell. I drop my bag.
"Yeah," I say. "I've got a second."
He does not say anything right away. He looks at the ground. He looks at the engine bay. He is a man visibly trying to find a door into something, and I have learned not to fill his silences for him, so for once I do the hardest thing I know how to do.
I shut up. I wait.
"Last night," he finally says. "What I said. To the…" He huffs, disgusted with himself. "I said it to the floor. Like a coward. You opened your whole chest up and I gave you two words and I couldn't even look at you."
"Chase…"
"Let me." It comes out rough, almost pleading, and it stops me cold, because Chase never asks for the floor. "I'm bad at this. You know I'm bad at this. So I gotta just… I gotta get it out before I lose it."
I nod. My heart has climbed all the way up into my throat.
He takes a breath. And then he looks at me - really looks, dead-on, no flat mask, no turning away, those gray eyes holding mine like he is bracing into a hose line.
"It's not a fluke," he says. "That's the first thing.
I need you to know that it was never a fluke.
Not the first night, not the shower, not any of it.
I told myself it was. Adrenaline. The job.
A thing that happened. I'm real good at telling myself things.
" His jaw works. "It was never that. It was you.
From a lot longer back than I'll admit standing in a parking lot. "
I cannot breathe.
"And it's not shame," he goes on, and his voice gets harder here, certain, like this part he is sure of.
"I want you to hear that, because you said it last night and it about took my legs out.
I'm not ashamed of you. I'm not ashamed of me.
I spent thirty-two years calling myself one thing and it turns out I was just a guy who hadn't met you yet.
That doesn't scare me. That's not the part that had me wiping down a tool I already cleaned twice. "
A breath of a laugh gets out of me, wet and surprised. "Yeah. I clocked that."
"Course you did." The corner of his mouth twitches.
"You clock everything. Never shut up and never miss a thing.
" Then the almost-smile is gone and he is serious again, and he steps closer, into the eighteen inches, into less than that.
"What scared me was you. How much. I have never in my life wanted something the way I want you, and wanting like that…
it's a liability. On the job, you don't get attached to the things you can lose, because in this work you lose things.
And I looked at you and I knew, I knew, that if anything ever happened to you, I would not survive it.
And that terrified me more than any fire I've ever walked into.
So I ran. I gave you the flat voice and the last name and I ran, because it was easier than standing still and letting it be true. "
The sun is in his hair. His hands are shaking, just slightly, the same way they shook that first night when he peeled my gear off. I have never loved anyone the way I love him in this exact second.
"And then you gave me your air," he says, quieter now.
"In that warehouse. You came back took your own mask off in a building that was coming down and you gave me your last breath.
And I have been trying to outrun this since the day you walked in talking too much, and that…
." His voice cracks. He pushes through it.
"A man gives you the air out of his own lungs, you stop running.
You'd have to be a fool to keep running.
And I'm grumpy, Jason. I'm gruff and I'm bad at this, and I'll probably say the wrong thing or no thing at all about nine times out of ten. But I'm not a fool."
"Chase." It is all I can get out. His name. The thing I have wanted him to call me in that low voice for weeks, and now I cannot even manage my own half of it.
"I want you," he says. Flat. Plain. The bedrock under all the rest of it.
"For real. Not in a closet. Not as a thing we pretend didn't happen in the morning.
The job, the gossip, the captain, my reputation, all of it…
" He shakes his head slowly, like he is setting something down that he has carried a long way.
"It can all go hang. I spent years building a reputation as the steadiest hand in the house.
You know what I figured out at four this morning?
I don't want to be the steadiest hand. I want to be yours. "
The whole lot goes quiet. Even the birds, it feels like.
And then I do the thing I have wanted to do in the open since the drill yard, since the first time he tightened a strap across my chest and pretended it was nothing.
I close the last of the distance and I kiss him.
In the parking lot. In the flat gold morning light.
Where God and the captain and the whole second shift could see if they looked out the window.
He makes a low sound and his bag hits the ground.
Both of his arms come around me, and he kisses me back like he is done hiding, done running, done with the eighteen inches forever.
No water to hide the sound. No closet door.
No adrenaline, no fire, no excuse. Just him choosing me, on purpose, in the daylight, because he wants to.
When we finally break apart, I am grinning so hard it hurts. He is looking at me like I am the sunrise, and I cannot resist it, I never can.
"So," I say. "That was a lot of words. For a guy who's bad at this."
"Don't." But he is fighting the smile and losing. "That was my whole year's supply. You don't get more till next spring."
"Worth it." I press my forehead to his. "I'll do the talking. You knew that going in."
"I did." His hand comes up to the back of my neck, the way it did on the lawn outside the burning house, except gentle now, claiming. "God help me, I did."
We stand there a while, just breathing each other in, and I feel something settle in my chest that has been rattling loose since the morning after.
The not-knowing is gone. He chose. Out loud, in the light, with his whole face turned toward me.
Whatever comes next -and there is a lot that could come next, the captain, the rules, the talk – we are going to walk into it as an us.
Not a secret. Not a thing we deny in the kitchen. An us.
"What do we do now?" I ask. "About the firehouse. The job. All of it."
"We do it right," he says. "I'll talk to Cap.
Get reassigned so I'm not your training officer anymore – clean, by the book, no favors. Whatever they need. And then…” he shrugs, and there is something almost light in it, something I have never seen on him, "…
then we just are what we are. Let 'em talk.
Half of 'em probably already know. You're about as subtle as the engine. "
"Hey. That's my line."
"Yeah, well." He picks up his bag. Picks up mine, too, and hands it to me, and his hand lingers over mine on the strap, in the open, where anyone could see. "You talk too much. Some of it was bound to rub off."
We walk to the trunks pf our cars together, side by side, no careful distance, his shoulder bumping mine.
The sun is fully up now, warm on the back of my neck.
The long shift is behind us, the whole bright day is ahead, and for the first time since I walked into Jonesville Firehouse desperate to prove I belonged, I am not chasing anything.
I already caught it. He caught me back.
"Hey, Chase," I say, getting into my car.
"Yeah."
"For the record." I grin at him over the roof. "It's real for me too."
And the grumpy, gruff, impossible man who could not look at me in the dark looks straight at me in the daylight, and he smiles – a real one, the whole thing, the one I have been chasing since my first shift – and says, "I know, Jason. I know."