Chapter 9 #2
She was wet through. Jeans dark to the waist. Hair stuck in a wet rope along the side of her face. The water was forty-eight degrees in October. She'd been in it ninety seconds, maybe two minutes, and the only reason she wasn't already shaking was the adrenaline holding her upright.
I gave it about another thirty seconds.
She started to shake.
"Easton."
"I know."
I pulled my fleece off over my head in one motion, the cold finding my arms before the fabric cleared my chin. She turned to say something. I didn't let her get to it—draping it around her shoulders, I hauled the front of it closed, and held it there until her hands came up to take over.
"Easton. You'll be cold."
"I won't."
"You're in a T-shirt."
"And you were in the lake."
She put her arms through the sleeves because she couldn't keep arguing and get warm at the same time.
The fleece came down past her hips. The cuffs went past her hands.
She pulled the sleeves down over her thumbs with the opposite hand, the same way she pulled her own sweaters at her kitchen counter at night.
"Don't make it a thing," she said.
"I'm not."
"Easton."
"I'm not, Astrid."
She looked at me then. Really looked. Honey-brown hair wet on one side, freckles I hadn't seen, eyes I'd known for fourteen years, and I was finding I didn't know at all. Something in my chest moved over and made room for that.
"Let's go home."
I picked up her pack off the gravel where she'd dropped it.
She watched me do it. She didn't argue.
I slung it over my shoulder with mine and clipped the leashes back on the dogs.
Penny was where I'd left her, tied to the maple at the top of the slope, sitting on her haunches with the patient, unimpressed expression of an old dog who had been very clear about her objection and had been overruled.
I bent and untied her, scratched behind her ear, and told her she was a good girl.
She huffed at me because she was twelve and she knew what she'd been denied.
Astrid walked next to me this time. Not three paces ahead. Not three paces behind. My fleece swallowed her. She had her hands tucked all the way up inside the sleeves. Her boots were squelching on the trail.
We did the first quarter mile without speaking.
Then she said, low, "I haven't done any of that on a person before."
I looked over.
"Dogs. Cats. A goat one time. I did a CE last spring on pediatric trauma because the textbook was on sale, and I sat at the kitchen counter in the brownstone and read the whole thing on a Saturday because I had nothing else to do and Brett was at his mother's.
" A small huff. "Of course it would be that.
Of course, the thing I taught myself out of boredom would be the thing I needed today. "
"That wasn't boredom."
"What?"
"You renewed your license every two years. You did your CE. You read a pediatric trauma textbook on a Saturday because you wanted to. That wasn't boredom. That was you keeping yourself alive."
She didn't answer.
She walked beside me in my fleece with her hands in the sleeves and her boots squelching every other step, and I let her have the rest of the trail without trying to fill it.
We came out onto the road where my truck was parked.
I put the dogs in the back. Penny on the quilt. Moose curled in beside her. Then I went around to the passenger side and stopped before I opened the door.
"You're not getting in my truck like that."
She looked up.
"What?"
"You're soaked through. Hartsdale's twenty minutes. By the time we hit Maple, you're going to be hypothermic. Change."
"I'll change at home."
"You'll change here."
"Easton."
"I'm not driving you home in wet clothes. I've seen the back end of it on shift. People talk themselves into I'm fine all the way up to the part where they aren't anymore."
"I don't have anything to change into."
I turned, walked to the toolbox in the bed, and popped the lid.
I'd kept a change of clothes in there for two years, ever since a structure fire in February put me in soaked-through gear at the end of a sixteen-hour shift and I drove home in it.
Never made that mistake twice. I pulled out the bundle.
Sweatpants. A thermal. A clean T-shirt. A pair of cotton socks rolled the way my grandmother taught me.
I handed it to her.
She looked at the bundle. She looked at me.
"Are you serious?"
"I'm serious. Take the cab. I'll stay out here. Dogs need water."
"Easton."
"Astrid. Take it."
She took it.
I shut her door behind her. I walked around to the front of the truck, put my back to the windshield, and looked at the trees.
The dogs got water out of the gallon jug I kept in the bed. Penny drank slowly. Moose drank like he'd been on the trail for a week. I scratched their ears and ignored what was happening behind me.
She knocked on the windshield.
I turned around.
She was in my sweatpants rolled twice at the ankle, the cuffs of my thermal pulled down past her thumbs, her hair half-dry on one side. The fleece I'd given her at the bank was folded on the seat beside her.
She rolled the window down.
"Thanks."
"Yeah."
"For the clothes."
"Anytime."
She let a beat go by.
"That's not a thing you should say lightly to a woman who's already made off with your T-shirt."
I laughed before I could stop it.
"Get in the truck, Matthews."
"I am in the truck."
"Stay in the truck."
She pulled the fleece back on over the thermal. I went around to the driver's side and got in.
I cranked the heat to full and put it in drive.
I drove us home with a woman in my passenger seat dressed entirely in my clothes, and something in my chest I wasn't prepared to do anything with yet.
About a mile from Maple, she let her head go back against the headrest and closed her eyes.
The shaking had stopped. I put my hand on her knee without thinking.
She put her hand over mine and left it there.
I'd been a firefighter for twelve years.
I'd seen people move in a crisis—probies freezing on their first real call, seasoned guys with twenty years on the job hesitating at the wrong second.
I did it myself, a few times, the kind of hesitation a man learns to be honest with himself about because lying about it would get somebody killed.
I'd seen a lot of people move under pressure.
I'd never seen anyone move like her.