3. Chapter 3
It is past midnight and I cannot sleep, so I do what I always do when my head will not shut off. I go looking for something to clean.
The station is different at night. Quieter.
The bay lights are killed down to a low amber glow, the engine sitting there like a sleeping animal, and the only sound is the hum of the icebox in the kitchen and the tick of the building cooling.
I like it, honestly. The whole place feels like it belongs to me for a few hours.
I pad into the kitchen in socks, underwear and a T-shirt and start wiping down counters that are already clean. There is half a pot of coffee left on the burner, stewed black and bitter, and I pour myself a mug just to have something to hold.
I am not expecting voices.
The captain's office door is cracked, a line of light spilling out across the floor, and I hear his low rumble and then the clipboard guy – whose name is Martin I discover – answering. I freeze, mug halfway to my mouth, because they are talking about me.
"…the Healy kid," the captain is saying. "How's he shaping up?"
"Green," says the other voice. "Talks too much. Chase'll knock that out of him."
A dry chuckle. Then the captain again, and this part lands different, slower, like a warning even though it is not aimed at me.
"Keep an eye on the two of them. Chase is the best I've got, but he's spent years building that.
A mentor gets too close to a probie, gets soft, starts cutting corners for him…
that's how people get hurt. And this house talks.
One whiff of favoritism and it's all anybody chews on for a month. "
"They're fine," the other voice says. "Chase rides him harder than anybody."
"Good. Keep it that way."
I back out of the kitchen before they can hear me, careful and quiet, my heart doing something stupid in my chest.
It is nothing. It is a captain doing his job, worrying about his crew the way he is supposed to. Nobody said anything about anything. There is nothing to say.
So why do I feel like I just got caught?
I take my coffee into the dark bay and sit on the rear step of the engine, where the metal is cool through my boxer-briefs, and I do the thing I have been avoiding doing for two days. I make myself think about it.
The buzz. That is the word I keep landing on.
There is a buzz under my skin every time Chase gets close, every time those rough hands land on me to fix my grip or my stance, every time he says my name in that flat, low voice.
I have been calling it nerves. I have been calling it adrenaline.
I have been calling it hero-worship, which, fine, is at least partly true, because the man pulled me off a collapsing floor like it was nothing, and I would follow him into a burning building tomorrow and the day after.
But hero-worship does not explain why I keep noticing his forearms.
Okay. Let us be adults about this. Let us make a list.
Reason number one this is a terrible idea: he is my training officer. He literally decides whether I pass probation. There is no version of whatever-this-is that does not look exactly like the thing the captain just warned about.
Reason number two: this house talks. Martin, the clipboard guy already has me pegged, already has a story about me, and it took him about four hours. If there were ever anything to gossip about, it would go through this place like fire through that warehouse.
Reason number three, and I save it for last because it is the one that should end the whole list before it starts: I am straight.
Chase is straight. We are two straight guys.
This is just what it looks like when a straight guy really, really respects another straight guy who saved his life.
That is all this is. Men can admire other men. It is normal. It is healthy, even.
I drink my bitter coffee and I run the list again, top to bottom, and it is a good list. It is airtight. Every single reason holds up.
The problem is that none of them make the buzz go away.
I think about the way he caught me looking in the drill yard and looked back.
Just for a second. I have been turning that half second over and over like a stone in my pocket, and the more I turn it, the less it feels like nothing.
There was something in his face. Something that was not annoyance, for once.
I do not have a name for it. I am not sure I want one.
That is the dangerous part, I am starting to understand.
Not the wanting. The naming. As long as I do not put a word to any of this, it stays small.
It stays a buzz, a nothing, a quirk of the adrenaline.
The second I name it, it becomes real, and real things have stakes, and the stakes here are everything I have ever wanted.
The job. The crew. The man who taught me how to keep myself alive.
So I will just not name it. Easy.
I am so busy not naming it that I do not hear him come in.
"You're still up."
I jump hard enough to slosh coffee over my hand. Chase is standing at the edge of the bay in a worn shirt and sweats, hair flat on one side from the pillow, looking rumpled and enormous and entirely too awake for the middle of the night.
His eyes glance down to my crotch, and I realize, embarrassingly, I’m semi-hard.
Thankfully. not enough to fully tent my boxer briefs, but enough to make it obvious.
I try to shift, make it less obvious, but I only make it worse.
Chase does little more than glance and lick his lips, but makes no comment.
"Couldn't sleep," I say. "Figured I'd, uh." I lift the mug like it explains anything. "Drink terrible coffee in the dark. New hobby."
He does not smile, but something around his eyes loosens. He crosses the bay and leans against the engine a few feet from me, arms folded, looking out at the dark as if there is something to see.
"You did good today," he says. "After the floor."
It is the closest thing to praise he has given me, and it lands harder than it should. It makes me harder.
"I almost died today," I point out.
"Almost doesn't count. You kept your head after. Stayed on me. Did the job." He shrugs, as if it costs him something to say it. "Most rookies, that rattles them for a week. You came back sharp."
I stare into my coffee so he cannot see what his approval does to my face. "I had a good teacher," I say. "Grumpy. But good."
That earns me the ghost of something. Not a laugh. The cousin of a laugh. "Go to bed, Healy," he says. "You're no good to me dead on your feet tomorrow."
"Yeah. Yeah, okay."
I stand. We are close, closer than I realized, and for a second neither of us moves. The amber light catches the side of his face, the stubble, the stillness. The buzz is back, loud now, and the list I built is nowhere, all those airtight reasons gone soft and useless.
Then his hand comes up and lands on my shoulder.
It is the kind of thing guys do. A clap on the shoulder, a steer toward the bunks, here-endeth-the-conversation.
I have had a thousand of them. This one is not like the others.
His hand settles, warm and heavy, and it stays.
One beat. Two. A beat longer than it has any reason to.
His thumb shifts, just slightly, against the side of my neck, and I forget the coffee, the captain, the list, my own name.
Then he takes his hand back and turns for the bunk room as if nothing happened.
"Night," he says over his shoulder.
"Night," I manage.
I stand in the dark bay for a full minute before my legs agree to work.
When I finally crawl into my bunk, I lie there on my back staring at the bottom of the bed frame above me, and I am more awake than I have been all day.
My cock is fully hard now and straining against the fabric of my boxers.
I put it down to not having any privacy to jack off.
The bunk room is dark and close, six beds, thin walls, the smell of bleach and sleep. Most of the others are fast asleep.
Chase is across the room, maybe ten feet away, and I can hear him breathing.
Slow. Even. Settling toward sleep. I should not be able to pick one person's breathing out of a dark room.
I should not be lying here cataloguing the rhythm of it, the soft drag of each exhale, the way it goes deeper as he drifts off.
My shoulder still feels warm where his hand was. I keep touching the spot without meaning to, as if there might be a mark.
I run the list one more time. Training officer. The house talks. We are both straight. I say it to myself like a prayer, as if the words will fix the thing that is loose in my chest.
They do not.
Across the room, Chase's breathing goes slow and deep and finally even. Asleep. I lie awake and listen to it anyway, hyper-conscious of every foot of dark air between his bunk and mine, and I tell myself, one more time, that this is nothing.
I almost believe it.
Almost doesn't count. He said so himself.