2. Chapter 2
The drill yard behind the station is a slab of cracked concrete with a training tower bolted to one end, and by noon it is the hottest place on earth.
I am sweating before we even start. The sun comes straight down and the turnout gear traps every degree of it, so I am cooking inside my own coat while Chase stands in front of me looking like the heat would not dare.
"Ladder raise," he says. "Show me."
I show him. I get the extension ladder off the rack, I throw it up against the tower, and I am pretty sure I look good doing it, right up until he says one word.
"Wrong."
"What part?"
"All of it." He steps in. "Your hands are too wide. You drop it on somebody, you kill them."
He puts his hands over mine on the rungs and slides them inward. His palms are huge and rough and warm, even through my gloves, and for some reason I notice that. The warmth. The weight. I file it under nerves and keep my eyes on the tower.
"There," he says. "Feel the difference?"
"Yeah," I say. My voice comes out a little weird. I clear my throat. "Yeah, that's better."
He steps back, and the heat of his hands goes with him. The yard feels strangely cooler without him crowding me. Which is dumb because it is a hundred degrees out here.
We run it again. And again. Chase is relentless.
Every time I think I have it, he finds something else, and every time he finds something else, he gets in close to fix it.
He cinches a strap across my chest that I left loose, and his knuckles drag over my sternum and I forget, for half a second, how breathing works.
"You don't leave this loose," he says, right by my ear. "It snags, it slows you down, it gets you dead."
"Got it," I say.
He is always saying things like that. Everything is life or death with him, which makes sense because in this job everything actually is.
But the way he says it, low and certain, with his hands still on the strap, lands differently than it should.
I tell myself it is just the adrenaline of the drill.
That is the lie I am going with today. Adrenaline. Nerves. First-week jitters. There is a whole list of perfectly reasonable explanations, and I run through them like a checklist every time he touches me.
We move to the air packs. He has me mask up, blacked out, and find the regulator by feel, over and over, until I can do it without thinking.
He stands behind me the whole time, one hand flat between my shoulder blades to keep me steady, and through the roar of my own breathing in the mask I am aware of nothing in the entire world except that one warm point of contact on my back.
"Again," he says.
I do it again.
"Faster."
My hands are clumsy. I want to be good at this.
I want it so badly that it is embarrassing.
Some of that is the job, the probation, the terror of washing out and having to tell my mom I could not cut it.
But some of it, if I am honest, which I am trying not to be, is just him.
I want Chase to look at me and decide I am worth the trouble.
When I finally nail the regulator drill three times in a row, he does not say good. He just grunts and pulls the mask off my face, and his fingers brush my jaw doing it, and I am very busy pretending that did not register at all.
We break for PT in the worst heat of the day, which I think is some kind of test. Push-ups, hauling weighted hose, dragging the dummy across the yard and back.
Chase does it all beside me, stripped down to a soaked gray T-shirt that clings to every line of him.
I keep my eyes on my own hands and the concrete and the dummy and absolutely not on the way his arms move.
Okay. Maybe a little on the way his arms move.
Here is the thing. I am straight. This is just a fact about me, like my blood type or the fact that I cannot whistle.
So I do not really have a word for why I keep clocking how big he is, how solid through the shoulders, the way the sweat runs down the side of his neck.
Guys notice other guys. That is normal. You see somebody built like that and your brain just goes, huh, that is what I should be working toward.
It is aspirational. It is basically a gym thing.
I am explaining all of this to myself, very thoroughly, when I look up and catch him looking at me.
Not at my form. At me.
It is a half second, maybe less. Then his eyes cut away and he barks at me to keep my hips down on the next set, and I drop and start pumping out push-ups like my life depends on it, my face hot for reasons that have nothing to do with the sun.
"What?" I say between reps, because I cannot leave silence alone.
"Your form's sloppy when you talk," he says.
"So I should stop talking."
"Years too late for that, Healy."
And I laugh, surprised, because that is almost a joke, and then he almost smiles, just a flicker, and we both kind of shake our heads and look away at the same time, like two guys who accidentally got too sincere.
Straight-guy stuff. Bust each other's chops, never mean it, never sit in it.
I know this dance. I have done it my whole life.
So why does my chest feel weird about it?
We are still catching our breath, sucking down water in the shade of the tower, when the tones drop.
I am getting used to the way the alarm rewires the whole day in a single second.
One heartbeat we are two sweaty guys ribbing each other in a parking lot.
The next we are running, and the water bottles are forgotten on the concrete, and Chase's whole face has gone flat and focused in that way that means it is real.
Commercial structure this time. An old warehouse on the edge of town, light smoke, possible squatters inside. We roll. On the way Chase drills me again, fast and clipped, the same rules as before. Stay on him. Do not freelance. Tell him what I see, do not chase it.
"And the floor," he adds, eyes on me hard. "Old building like this, the floor lies to you. You sound it before you trust it."
"Sound it," I repeat. "Right."
Inside, it is dark and close and full of that hot chemical haze that makes the beam of my flashlight look solid.
We move in a crouch, Chase ahead of me, me on his heel like he ordered.
My heart is slamming. I am trying to remember everything at once and mostly just trying to keep his boots in sight.
We push deeper, checking rooms, and I get a little ahead of myself.
Just a step. Just enough to feel like I am contributing instead of following.
I put my weight on a stretch of floor without thinking, without sounding it, because I am twenty-one and immortal and I forgot the one thing he told me twenty minutes ago.
The floor gives way.
It is not even loud. That is the part that stays with me later. There is just a soft, sick crack and then the boards are gone and my stomach drops because the rest of me is about to follow it down into whatever black hole is under this building.
And then I do not fall.
A fist closes in the back of my turnout coat, hard, and I am hauled backward off the failing floor in one violent yank, off my feet, slammed into something solid that turns out to be Chase.
He has me. Both arms, dragging me clear, putting his own body between me and the hole like the hole might still want me.
The boards finish collapsing into the dark behind us. We both stare at the gap. It is maybe four feet across. It is exactly where I was standing.
"I told you," Chase says. His voice is not even angry. It is worse than angry. It is shaking, just slightly, just at the very bottom. "I told you to sound it."
"I know," I manage. "I'm sorry. I know."
He does not let go of me right away. His hand is still fisted in my coat, holding me upright because my legs are not totally on board yet, and through two layers of gear and a glove I would swear I can feel how hard his heart is going. As hard as mine. Maybe harder.
I realize my cock is also hard, throbbing against my pants. It strikes me as strange, but all I can think of is Chase grabbing my coat, refusing to let me fall.
Then he lets go, all at once, as if he just realized he was holding on, and turns back to the job. "On me," he says. "And this time stay there."
The rest of the call is nothing. No squatters, light smoke, knocked down fast. By the book. But I do every single thing exactly the way he taught me, and I sound every inch of floor before I trust it, and I do not get more than a foot from his back the whole time.
Later, back at the station, scrubbed and fed and lying in my bunk in the dark, I cannot sleep.
I keep replaying it. Not even the falling part, really. The catching part. The way he had me before I knew I needed it. The way he grabbed me from the drop without a flicker of hesitation, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, as if I was something worth not losing.
Across the bunk room I can hear Chase breathing, slow and even, already asleep or doing a good impression of it. I lie there and listen to it longer than I have any reason to.
My chest still feels weird, and any thought of him gets me so hard, I’d be jerking off if I was alone.
I tell myself it is the adrenaline. It is the close call. Anybody would feel rattled after a day like that. It is completely normal to lie awake thinking about the guy who just saved your life.
I am very good, it turns out, at not finishing certain thoughts. My cock throbs even more at my taboo thoughts.
I roll over, face the wall, and make myself stop.
I do not examine why.