6. Chapter 6
Here is what nobody tells you about deciding to let something go. It does not let go of you.
Three shifts have passed since the locker room. Three. I have counted every one. I told myself, that first awful morning after, that I was going to be a professional, do my job, stop moping over a man who clearly wanted to pretend nothing happened. I gave myself a whole speech about it.
The speech is not working.
Because distance, it turns out, only makes it worse.
The more Chase keeps his careful eighteen inches, the more I want to close them.
The more he says "Healy” in that flat voice, the more I hear “Jason” underneath it, low and rough, the way he said it that night.
I am a disaster. I hover. I find reasons to be wherever he is.
Oh, you're checking the SCBA bottles? Wild, me too.
Oh, you're in the kitchen? What a coincidence, I am suddenly extremely thirsty.
He has to know. There is no way he does not know. I am about as subtle as the engine.
And here is the thing that is slowly driving me out of my mind: he lets me.
He could shut it down. He could tell me to knock it off, give me a wide berth, ask the captain to reassign me.
He does none of that. He just lets me orbit him, pretending not to notice, his jaw a little tight, his eyes cutting away every time I catch them on me.
Which is more than they used to. I am not imagining it. I catch him looking all the time now.
The bruise is the worst part. Or the best part. I genuinely cannot decide.
It is healing, the big ugly spread of it across my shoulder blade down to my hip going from black to that sick green-yellow, and every single shift, without fail, Chase checks it.
He does it under the cover of being my training officer, all business, you took a beam, regs say I monitor it.
But there is nothing regulation about the way he does it.
He has me sit. He lifts my shirt with two fingers, slow, and he goes quiet, and those rough hands map the edges of the bruise the same way they did that first night, feather-light, as if he is reading something only he can feel.
He presses, gentle, asks if it is still tender.
It is. I tell him it is not. He presses again anyway, as if he does not believe me, as if he needs to know for himself.
His hands trace across my back, and I’m hard again. His fingers dip under the waistband of my underwear to check the bruise at my hip, and I’m leaking pre-cum. But he fails to notice the tent pole at my crotch.
Instead, he runs his hands over my bruises and then he re-tapes it.
Smooths the edge down with his thumb. And every time, every single time, his hand stays a beat too long against my back before he pulls away and clears his throat and tells me I am cleared for duty in that flat voice that is starting to sound like a lie even to him.
I live for those thirty seconds. I am ashamed of how much I live for them.
Because that is the tell, isn't it? A guy who genuinely felt nothing would not fuss over a fading bruise three shifts running.
A guy who wanted to forget would not go so still and careful every time he touched me.
He is saying one thing with his flat voice and another thing entirely with his hands, and I do not know which one to believe, so I just ache, all the time, in a low constant hum that has stopped pretending to be anything but what it is.
There. I named it. To myself, anyway, lying awake in my bunk. I want him. Not respect, not hero-worship, not a gym thing. I want Chase. The whole stupid airtight list is ash and I want him so badly it is a physical thing, a pull in my chest every time he walks into a room.
And the worst part, the part that keeps me up, is that I am almost sure he wants me too. He is just better at the wall than I am.
The possessive thing starts on the fourth shift, and that is when I really lose it.
We catch a car accident, nothing dramatic, but Martin, the clipboard guy, and I are working a patient together and he grabs my arm to steer me around the wreck, just steering me, totally normal, and Chase - from across the scene, hands full of equipment - goes rigid.
I see it happen. His whole body locks. And the second we are clear he is there, between me and the clipboard guy, not saying anything, just there, a wall of him, herding me back toward the rig with a hand at my shoulder that is not gentle the way the bruise checks are gentle. It is something else. It is mine.
"I had it," I tell him, a little breathless.
"I know," he says. He does not let go.
Martin gives the two of us a long look. I pretend not to see it. My heart is doing the idiot-dog thing again, slamming up against my ribs, because that was not a training officer keeping tabs on a probie. That was something with teeth.
It builds all shift after that. He does not like anyone else handling me.
He does not say so, would probably rather eat the Halligan than say so, but I see it now that I know to look.
The way he steps in. The way his attention swings to me whenever I am out of his reach.
The way he checks, always, that I am where he can get to me.
I should hate it. It is exactly the favoritism the captain warned about, the thing that could blow up both our careers, the thing the whole house would chew on for a month. I should hate it.
I do not hate it. I am drunk on it.
The near-miss comes late, after dinner, in the engine bay.
He has me at the side compartment doing a tool inventory, the two of us crouched in the narrow space between the rig and the wall, half-hidden, the rest of the crew somewhere in the kitchen.
I am running through the compartment and he is checking my work, close, his shoulder against mine, and I become aware all at once of how alone we are.
How quiet. How warm he is along my whole side.
I turn my head. He is already looking at me.
And there is no wall. For one long second the flat mask is just gone, and what is underneath is so raw and so hungry that the breath goes out of me.
His eyes drop to my mouth. Mine drop to his.
The eighteen inches collapse to nothing.
I can feel the heat coming off him, smell the coffee and smoke, and we are both leaning, slow, helpless, like two magnets that have stopped fighting it…
"Chase! You back there?"
The clipboard guy's voice, from the kitchen doorway, not even close, but it does not matter.
We spring apart so fast I crack my elbow on the compartment door.
Chase is on his feet, all business, calling back something about the inventory, his voice perfectly level, and only I am close enough to see his hands are not quite steady.
"Almost done," he says to the room. To me, quieter, not looking at me: "Finish the list."
Then he is gone, back into the light and the noise, leaving me crouched in the dark by the rig with my elbow throbbing and my whole body screaming.
We almost did that. In the open. Where anyone could have walked in. We were one heartbeat from it, and neither of us was stopping.
I finish the inventory with shaking hands. I do not remember a single item I count.
Because it is not just me anymore. That is what I know now, kneeling there in the dark. Whatever this is, it is pressing on both of us, undeniable, getting heavier every shift. He feels it. I saw it. He is hanging on to that wall with everything he has, and the wall is losing.
The only question left is which one of us breaks first.
And I have a sinking, electric feeling it is going to be me.