CHAPTER SIX
Then the memory catches up, and I lie there another minute letting it settle, my father's hospital room, the chair at the oak table, the man asleep or working somewhere down the hall from where I'm lying now. I get up before the feeling can curdle into something heavier.
The kitchen is already occupied when I wander in, two prospects I don't recognize arguing quietly over whose turn it is to restock the coffee, and I step around them without thinking, measuring grounds into the old percolator the way I used to every morning of my life here, the specific ratio muscle memory instead of decision.
I've made this exact pot of coffee a thousand times.
My hands know it better than my head does.
I don't notice Thane in the doorway until the percolator starts its first low gurgle.
"You still make it too strong," he says, and there's something careful in his voice, like he's testing whether the observation is safe to make out loud.
"I make it correctly. You've just gotten used to whatever weak imitation someone else has been serving you." I don't turn around, focus fixed on the coffee, though I'm aware of him in the doorway the way you're aware of a change in air pressure before a storm.
He crosses further into the kitchen, close enough now that I can feel the shift in the room, and reaches past me for a mug from the cabinet, close enough that his arm brushes mine, brief and probably accidental, though neither of us moves away from it as quickly as either of us should.
The kitchen is small enough that this is unavoidable, I tell myself, though some more honest part of me knows the room has always been exactly this size and we used to navigate it without ever touching by accident at all.
"Nobody else makes it at all, actually. We've mostly been drinking gas station coffee for three years." A pause, and when he speaks again there's something more exposed underneath the joke. "It's strange, watching you do that. Like no time passed."
"Time passed." I finally look at him, and something in his face, tired, a little raw around the edges from whatever kept him up after I left the garage last night, makes me soften the observation before it can land too hard. "It's just coffee, Thane."
"Sure." He doesn't sound convinced, and I'm not entirely convinced myself, but neither of us pushes it further, and the moment dissolves into the ordinary business of two prospects fighting over the last clean mug.
I'm three sips into my own cup, standing at the counter reading old messages from Tabby I haven't answered yet, when the shouting starts in the garage bay, sharp and urgent in a register I recognize instantly from a hundred ER shifts.
I'm moving before I've fully decided to, mug abandoned on the counter, years of training overriding whatever caution three years away might have built into me.
A younger member, one of the new prospects, is on the concrete floor beside a bike that's clearly come off its stand wrong, his forearm bent at an angle that makes my stomach drop even from across the room, blood already soaking through his shirt sleeve from what looks like a deep laceration along the same arm.
"Somebody call it in," I say, already crouching beside him, voice dropping into the flat, controlled register I use for exactly this. "What's your name?"
"Dax." His voice is thin with shock, eyes too wide. "Dax Jr. My dad's."
"Okay, Dax, I need you to look at me, not at your arm.
" I check his pulse, his color, run through the mental checklist that's saved more lives than I could ever count, aware in some peripheral way of the room going still around us, of Thane crouching on Dax's other side, steadying him, of someone already on the phone with dispatch.
"You're going to be fine. This looks worse than it is, I promise you. "
It's not entirely true. It's true enough.
I get pressure on the wound with someone's jacket, splint the arm with a length of wood someone hands me without being asked, and by the time the ambulance actually arrives twelve minutes later, Dax is pale but stable, cracking a shaky joke about how his dad's going to kill him for wrecking the bike before the bike had the decency to actually kill him first.
Someone, I don't even see who, presses a folded towel into my hands to wipe the blood off, and it's such a small, automatic gesture of care that it nearly undoes me more than the injury itself did, this room remembering how to take care of its own without needing to be told, remembering, apparently, that I'm one of its own too.
I stand in the aftermath with my hands still faintly red, adrenaline draining out of me in the particular hollow way it always does, and I become aware, gradually, that half the garage bay is looking at me with an expression I haven't seen directed at myself in three years.
Not surprise exactly. Recognition. Like a piece of the room has clicked back into a shape it's been missing.
"You didn't lose a step." Gunnar's voice, quiet, beside me. "Not one."
"Adrenaline doesn't really care how long you've been away." But something in my chest is warm despite the deflection, a specific, complicated pride I haven't let myself feel in this building in years.
Ravinia finds me a few minutes later, once the ambulance has pulled out and the garage bay has started settling back into its normal rhythm, her expression open and unguarded in a way that catches me off balance every time.
"That was extraordinary." She says it simply, no performance in it. "I've seen a lot of injuries handled in clubs like this one. I've never seen anyone handle one that fast, that calm."
"It's just muscle memory. Same as anyone's job."
"Maybe." She studies me for a moment, something more careful entering her expression, and tucks a loose strand of hair back before continuing.
"I grew up around a charter myself. Different one, obviously.
I know what it looks like when someone's adopted this life because it suited them, and I know what it looks like when it's bred into someone's hands.
What you just did back there is the second kind.
It's obvious, watching you work, that this was always yours before it was ever a choice. "
"For what it's worth, I understand why they kept your chair the way they did. I didn't, before today. Now I do."
It's such an unexpected, generous thing to say that I don't have a ready response for it, and she doesn't wait for one, just offers a small, genuine smile and steps away to check on one of the other members, leaving me standing there turning the comment over, trying to figure out where to file it in a mental system that hasn't had a category for her kindness.
The garage bay empties out slowly over the next half hour, members drifting back to whatever the morning was supposed to hold before Dax's arm interrupted it, and I find myself alone near the workbench where I sat with Thane last night, hands still faintly stained, exhaustion catching up to me now that the emergency's passed.
Thane appears beside me without my quite noticing him cross the room, setting a glass of water down on the bench within easy reach, the same instinct he had last night in the hospital hallway before either of us had said a word about needing anything.
"Drink that," he says. "You look like you're about to remember you haven't eaten yet."
"I haven't." I take the glass anyway, more grateful for the gesture than I probably show. "You used to do this. Bring me water after something like that. I forgot you did that."
"I didn't forget." Quiet, simple, no weight added to it that I can see, though something underneath the plainness of it lands heavier than the words themselves. "I remember most of it, actually. All of it, if I'm honest."
I don't know how to answer that, so I drink the water instead, and for a moment we just stand there together in the loud aftermath quiet of a garage bay slowly returning to normal, close enough that I can feel the specific warmth radiating off him, far enough that neither of us has to do anything about it yet.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, breaking whatever fragile thing was building in the silence. Gilda's name again, and my stomach drops on instinct before I've even read the message, the last twenty four hours having taught my body to associate her name with news I'm not ready for.
Your dad's asking for you, she's written. Doctor moved him to a step down room, wants to talk while he's still lucid and alert. Come when you can, no rush, but don't wait too long either.
I look up to find Thane watching me read it, something attentive and careful in his expression, already reading the shift in my face before I've said a word.
"Everything okay?"
"He's stable, moved to step down. Gilda says he wants to talk.
" I set the glass down, already reaching for my keys, the warm, unhurried moment from thirty seconds ago dissolving back into the more familiar urgency that's defined every hour since I got Gilda's first call yesterday morning. "I should go."
"Go," he says simply. "I'll be here."
I'm almost to the door before I let myself register what those three words actually mean, how quietly they echo the ones Gunnar offered yesterday, an open door with no conditions attached, and how much harder that kind of offer is to walk away from than any argument would have been.
I glance back once before I'm out of the garage bay, and he's still standing exactly where I left him, glass forgotten on the workbench, watching me go with an expression I don't have time to fully name before the door swings shut behind me and the cold morning air replaces the warmth of the room I'm leaving.
I sit in my car for a moment before starting the engine, hands not quite steady on the wheel, and let myself feel, just for a second, how strange it is that the hardest part of today so far wasn't the blood or the ambulance, but three ordinary words spoken by a man I still haven't figured out how to be careful around.