Chapter 6
Off the Clock
They were very professional about it for six days, and it was the worst six days of Jonah's life.
That was the thing nobody could have prepared him for — that the cold after would be so much more unbearable than the wanting had ever been.
Before the bay, at least the wanting had hope in it, some dumb animal optimism.
Now Jonah knew exactly what Dom's hands felt like on his face and exactly what sound the man made low in his chest when he stopped fighting, and he had to sit eighteen inches from all of it for twelve-hour shifts and call drug doses and pretend his whole body wasn't oriented toward the other seat like a compass needle that had found north and couldn't be talked out of it.
Dom was flawless. That was almost the worst part.
Whatever it cost him, he paid it out of sight — polite, precise, an FTO and nothing else, correcting Jonah's charting and quizzing him on cardiac rhythms and never once, not for a single second, letting the flat brown eyes go anywhere they shouldn't.
If Jonah hadn't been there in the bay, hadn't felt it with his own mouth, he'd have believed the performance completely.
That was the terrifying thing about Dom Cassar's control.
It was total. The man could stand in the ash of a thing and convince the whole world there'd never been a fire.
But Jonah had seen the fire. And on the sixth night, at the end of a nothing shift full of nothing calls, he watched Dom sign out and walk to his truck in the dark of the lot, shoulders set like a man carrying something up a hill, and Jonah stood by his own car and understood that he had a choice to make, and that both versions of it were going to hurt, and that only one of them was honest.
He got Dom's address off the crew roster he wasn't technically supposed to have memorized.
Six days. He'd lasted six days, which he thought, driving, was actually pretty good, an Olympic-level performance in the sport of leaving well enough alone, a sport Jonah had never once medaled in.
Marisol had texted him twice — you good?
and then, when he didn't answer well, Jonah.
tell me you're being smart. He'd sent back a thumbs up, which was a lie, and she knew it was a lie, because a thumbs up from Jonah was the emotional equivalent of a hostage blinking in code.
Then he drove there before he could talk himself out of it, which was the only way Jonah ever did anything brave — fast, and before the smarter part of him could file an objection.
***
Dom's building was one of those brick four-stories that had been nice around 1962 and had been getting by on dignity ever since.
Third floor. Jonah stood outside the door for a full minute with his heart going like he'd run the stairs, which he had, because the elevator had a sign on it older than he was, and then he knocked before the minute could become two.
The door opened on the chain. One flat brown eye and a slice of Dom, out of uniform, a dish towel over one shoulder.
"Rask." Not a question. A wall, going up. "You shouldn't be here."
"I know. I've got a whole list of places I shouldn't be.
I keep it updated." Jonah's voice came out steadier than he felt.
"Ten minutes. You can time me. If at the end of ten minutes you still want me to leave, I'll go, and I'll never bring it up again, and we'll be extremely professional at each other until I finish probation and then I'll transfer to a different shift and you'll never have to see my face.
I mean it. But you have to actually want it.
You have to say it and mean it. Not hide behind the — not use the rank thing.
Just you. Man to man. Tell me to go and I go. "
Silence, on the other side of the chain. The dish towel. The one eye.
Then the door closed, and Jonah's heart went straight through the floor — okay, that's the answer, that's a whole entire answer — and then he heard the chain slide, and the door opened again, all the way this time, and Dom stood back to let him in.
The apartment was the saddest thing Jonah had ever seen, and he'd seen the inside of a lot of apartments on the worst day of their owners' lives.
It wasn't dirty. It wasn't even messy. It was worse than that — it was maintained, the way you maintain a thing you've stopped living in.
Clean counters with nothing on them. One chair at a table built for four.
A couch, a TV, a single coffee mug in the drying rack.
Books, actually, a whole wall of them, which surprised him and then didn't — but everything else had the quality of a waiting room, a place a man passed through between shifts, a life reduced to its load-bearing walls and nothing decorative left standing.
There was one photo on the shelf, face-down.
Jonah didn't have to ask who was in it. Nobody lays a photo face-down of a person who's still alive.
"Say your piece," Dom said, from the middle of his own spartan room, arms crossed. "Clock's running."
And Jonah, who had rehearsed something smart in the car, something with structure, opened his mouth and said the true thing instead, because the apartment had knocked the strategy out of him.
"You told me not to do what you did. In the bay.
You said don't carry it alone, don't be you, and then you turned around and made me go away, which is the whole entire thing you do, it's your only move, and I get it, I do, I know why, I know about Ray—" Dom flinched, small, at the name in his own living room.
"—but I'm not a bad call you can push off before it gives out under you.
I'm not going to break because you got close to me.
And I'm not asking you to promise me anything.
I'm not asking for forever, I'm twenty-four, I don't even have a couch.
I'm asking for you to stop lying. That's it.
That's the whole ten minutes. You kissed me because you wanted to and then you told me it didn't mean anything, and I've been walking around for six days with a thing that meant everything to me and nothing to you, and I can't — I would genuinely rather you hated me than that.
Hate me. That I could work with. Just don't stand there and tell me the fire wasn't real when I've still got the burn. "
Dom didn't say anything for a long moment.
His arms were still crossed. His face was still flat.
But Jonah was good at faces now, he'd earned a doctorate in this one specific face, and he watched the flatness cost more and more to hold, watched it start to tremble at the edges the way a dam does right before, and he made himself stand still and not fill the silence, the one lesson Dom had actually managed to teach him.
"It meant something," Dom said.
It came out of him like it hurt. Like each word had to be brought up from somewhere deep and load-bearing.
"I know," Jonah said, gentle now. "I know it did."
"That's the problem." Dom's arms came uncrossed, dropped to his sides, and without the armor of them he looked, suddenly, tired and enormous and unbearably human, a big man alone in a room he'd stopped living in.
"It's not that it didn't mean anything, kid.
It's that it meant too much. On day four.
After eighteen months of nothing, of making sure it was nothing, and you walk in with your two coffees and your — and I felt more in a laundromat than I've let myself feel since I found him, and that's not — do you understand that's not a good thing?
That's not romantic. That's a warning. Every time I've let something matter that much, I've—"
"You didn't kill Ray."
"You don't know that."
"I know that being close to somebody isn't a murder weapon.
" Jonah took a step closer, into the sad clean middle of the room.
"I know it feels like one at three in the morning.
I know that better than you think I do. But you didn't do it by loving him and you won't do it to me by wanting me, and I'm so tired, Dom, I'm so tired of both of us standing in our separate apartments being noble and alone about it. "
He was close now. Close enough to see Dom's hands, at his sides, not quite steady.
Close enough that the next move was a real move, and Jonah — who said the true thing first, always, who walked into everything — reached out and took one of those hands, the steady famous hands, the ones that had been the last true thing, and he held it, and he felt it shake, and he did not let go.
"Ten minutes is up," Dom said, rough, looking down at their hands.
"Yeah." Jonah's pulse was in his throat. "You want me to go?"
And Dom Cassar looked at him — looked at him the way he looked at a scene, taking all of it in, cataloguing, except there was nothing cold in it now, nothing flat, just a man reading the one thing in the room he wanted and had spent eighteen months teaching himself he wasn't allowed to have — and he turned Jonah's hand over in his, deliberate, and brought it up, and pressed his mouth to the inside of Jonah's wrist, right over the pulse, where you check for life.
"No," he said, against Jonah's skin. "I don't."
***
It was nothing like the bay.
The bay had been the after, adrenaline and desperation, a thing that happened to them, over before either of them could be accused of choosing it.
This was slow. This was a decision, made out loud, made with the lights on, and that was almost more than Jonah could stand — that Dom kissed him now like he had all the time in the world, one hand cradling the back of Jonah's skull the way he'd cradle a patient's neck, careful of him, careful, walking him backward through the too-clean apartment with his mouth never leaving Jonah's.