Chapter 10 #2
“I’d also recommend taking it easy for the rest of the day,” Fir added. “You’ve lost a fair amount of blood. No driving until you’ve had fluids and food, and your color improves.”
“I’m fine.”
I stood, my hand finally dropping from Mac’s arm. “He’s coming home with me.”
Both men looked at me—Mac with an expression caught between resistance and something I couldn’t name, and Fir with a faint, knowing smile that he was kind enough not to let Mac see.
“I don’t need—” Mac started.
“You need fluids, food, and a couch, and I have all three.”
Mac looked at me for a long moment with those blue eyes that were duller than usual, the brightness dimmed by pain and blood loss, and I watched him fight the war between his pride and his body. Finally, he surrendered. “Fine.”
Fir excused himself quietly, squeezing my shoulder as he passed me in the doorway.
It was a small gesture, the kind of thing colleagues did without thinking, but I felt the intention behind it.
I felt the friendship. I felt the fact that Fir had done something for me that went far beyond professional courtesy, and he’d done it without requiring acknowledgment, gratitude, or even a conversation about what it meant.
He’d simply seen me. And had acted accordingly.
My eyes stung, but I blinked it away. There was a man on an exam table who needed to get to my couch, and I could process my emotions later, when no one was around to witness it.
The drive to my house took three minutes. Mac sat in the passenger seat with his bandaged hand cradled against his chest and his head back, his eyes closed.
At the house, I gave him clean clothes of mine to change into—sweatpants and a thick T-shirt that would be easy to pull over his injured hand.
Once he had done that, I got him settled on the couch with a pillow under his injured hand and a glass of water that I told him to drink all of.
He was too drained to argue, which was how I knew he was in worse shape than he was admitting.
I made him a sandwich because it was quick and he needed food.
He ate it slowly, one-handed, with the frustrated clumsiness of a man who was used to being capable and hated being anything less.
I sat in the armchair across from him and watched him eat with the same useless, aching attentiveness I’d watched Fir treat him.
When he finished, I took the plate and refilled his water.
I didn’t hover, even though every cell in my body wanted to.
“Stop looking at me like that,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m going to break.”
“You’re not going to break, Mac. You’re going to sit on my couch and drink water and let the blood your body lost replenish itself. That’s basic physiology, not fragility.”
He gave me a look that might’ve been annoyance or amusement. With Mac, they could be the same thing.
I sat back down. The house was quiet. The boys were still at school for another two hours.
The afternoon light came through the living room windows and fell across Mac’s face.
His eyes were getting heavy, the blood loss and adrenaline crash pulling him under despite his obvious efforts to stay alert.
“Sleep,” I said. “I’ll be right here.”
He didn’t respond, but his eyes closed, and within minutes, his breathing deepened and evened out.
The hard lines of his face softened into something approaching peace.
The jaw unclenched. The shoulders dropped.
The constant vigilance that lived in every muscle of his body released its grip, leaving a man who looked his age and also somehow younger, as if sleep had peeled back a layer.
I sat in the armchair and looked at him. Silver hair against my pillow. The bandaged hand resting on his chest. The rise and fall of his breathing under my shirt he was wearing. The scars on his forearms, each one a story I didn’t yet know but wanted to.
I thought about Fir’s hand on my shoulder in the doorway.
Fir knew. About Mac, about whatever this was, about the thing I’d been filing under every insufficient label I could find.
He knew, and he hadn’t judged, but he’d made sure I didn’t compromise myself.
He’d drawn the line I couldn’t because I was too deep inside it.
Mac shifted on the couch, a small sound escaping him, and I watched his face for any sign of distress, like a nightmare or a flashback, the kind of thing his sleeping mind might produce in a strange environment.
But he settled, and his breathing stayed even.
He slept while I sat three feet away with my hands in my lap, feeling the last wall of professional distance collapse, quietly and completely, like a sandcastle meeting the tide.
I cared about this man. Not as a doctor. Not as a concerned community member. Not as a fellow veteran looking out for a brother in arms. And not as just a friend.
I cared about him in a way that made my chest ache and my hands want to reach and my throat close when I saw him in pain.
I cared about him in a way I had spent weeks denying, rationalizing, and redirecting, and none of it had worked because the feeling hadn’t diminished.
It had steadily grown, the way the creek on his mountain grew with snowmelt—fed by every visit, every text, every silence we’d shared, every time those blue eyes found mine across a room and held.
And it was one-sided.
That was the part I hadn’t let myself arrive at until now because arriving at it meant standing in the full, unobstructed truth of it.
By all indications, Mac was straight. He’d been married to a woman. He had a son. Nothing in his behavior toward me suggested anything beyond friendship, and the fact that he’d built me a chair, bought me coffee, and invited me to his mountain meant he valued my company, not that he wanted me.
Yet I was falling for him anyway. At forty-five, with two kids and a life I’d built deliberately to avoid exactly this kind of complication. The irony was almost elegant.
I sat with the knowledge, letting it exist because there was nowhere else to put it and no one to hand it to. Whatever this was, it was mine to carry. And I would carry it carefully, the way you carry something precious and breakable: close to the chest, where no one could see it or be hurt by it.
Especially not Mac.