8. Chapter 8
The problem with being happy is that you get careless.
It is one shift later and the station feels smaller than it has ever felt.
Too many people, too many eyes, walls thin enough to hear a man snore two rooms over.
And Chase and I cannot stop. That is the truth of it.
Now that the wall is down, we are magnets again, except worse, because now we know exactly what we are missing every time we make ourselves keep the eighteen inches.
It nearly ends us in the supply closet.
It is stupid. I know it is stupid even as it happens.
He follows me in to grab backboard straps, and the door swings half-shut, and we are alone for the first time all shift, and the air goes thick and charged the way it does, and his hand finds my hip in the dark, and I turn into him, and his mouth is on mine before I can think better of it.
Quick and hungry and reckless. My back hits a shelf.
Something rattles. His hand is fisted in my shirt and I am gone, totally gone, the whole station forgotten -
The door opens.
Light floods in. Martin, the clipboard guy stands there with his hand on the knob, mouth open around whatever he came in to say.
We are not kissing by the time the light hits us.
Barely. I have shoved back off the shelf, Chase has turned to the strap box, and there is maybe a foot of air between us.
But my mouth is wet and my shirt is twisted and Chase's jaw is tight and the air in that closet is so loud with what just happened that I do not see how anyone could miss it.
The Clipboard Guy looks at me. Looks at Chase. Looks at the foot of charged air between us.
"Cap wants the rig checklist," he says slowly.
"Got it," Chase says. Flat. Perfect. The mask is flawless.
The Clipboard Guy nods, slow, and backs out, and the door swings wide, and he is gone. But he knew. I am almost sure he knew. My heart is going so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
It gets worse in the kitchen.
We are all in there an hour later, the four of us, and Martin is stirring something on the stove. He says, not looking up, "You two are pretty joined at the hip lately."
Just like that. Light. Casual. A grenade with the pin still mostly in.
I laugh too fast. "He's my training officer," I say. "Kind of the whole job."
"Sure." The Clipboard Guy stirs. "Just saying. Hip. Joined at it."
Chase says nothing. Eats his food. But I can see the tension in his shoulders, the way he has gone very still, and I know him well enough now to read it: he is scared.
Not for himself. For me. For my probation, my career, the thing I have wanted my whole life that I could lose if this gets out wrong.
Then the captain's door opens.
He does not come all the way out. Just leans in the doorway, coffee in hand, and looks at the two of us for a beat too long.
"Healy. Chase." A pause. "You're running every call as a pair lately.
Make sure the rookie's learning from the whole house, not just one man.
Don't want him getting a narrow education. "
It is nothing. It is everything. It is the captain telling us, in the only language he has, that he has noticed.
"Yes, Cap," Chase says.
The door closes. And the kitchen feels like a box with the lid coming down.
Later, in the bunk room, Chase finds a second alone with me, and for once he is the one who says the dangerous thing out loud.
"This is going to cost you," he says, low, not looking at me. "Your shot at this job. You worked your whole life for it. And I'm…" His jaw works. "I'm a guy who can't keep his hands off you in a supply closet. That's not worth your career."
"Chase…"
"Get some sleep, Healy."
And he is gone, walls all the way back up. I lie in my bunk with the secret sitting on my chest like a turnout coat full of water, heavier than either of us can carry, and I am scared too. Because what if he is right? What if loving him costs me the thing I am?
I do not get to finish the thought.
The tones drop at four in the morning.
Fully involved structure, commercial, the dispatch voice already grim. We roll in ninety seconds and the glow is visible from blocks out, a sick orange dome over the rooftops, and my stomach drops, because that is a big fire, a bad fire, the kind they tell stories about at the academy.
It is an old warehouse, two stories, fire showing from half the windows on arrival. Reports of a security guard unaccounted for. Chase and I go in on the search while the engine works the water.
Inside is hell. The heat is a living wall.
Visibility is zero, smoke down to the floor, and we crawl through it on the line, sweeping, Chase ahead of me, his boot in my hand so I do not lose him.
The building is talking the whole time, groaning, cracking, dropping bits of itself out of the dark.
Above us, the fire is in the ceiling, in the walls, everywhere, and I have never been this deep in anything this bad.
We find the guard slumped against a loading dock at the back, alive, barely, and the relief is sharp and bright — and that is the exact second the building decides to come apart.
It starts as a crack so loud I feel it in my chest. Chase shoves the guard at me, into my arms, and shouts "Go! Get him out!"
He turns back to grab the man's legs – and the ceiling comes down.
Not all of it. Enough. A section of the floor above lets go in a roar of fire and timber and burning debris, and it comes down right on top of him, and the world fills with sparks and noise and the orange light of the open structure above us pouring fire down into the room.
"CHASE!"
I do not remember dragging the guard to the door.
I do it on training, on instinct, hands shoving him toward the crew coming in.
My low-air is vibrating but I am turning back, screaming his name into the smoke, and through the haze I can see him - down, pinned, a beam across his legs, and worse, so much worse, his low-air alarm is screaming.
That high shriek that means a man is seconds from running out of breath.
He is pinned and he is out of air in a building that is coming down around him.
Everything in me wants to panic. I do not. I cannot. He drilled this into me on the apparatus floor a hundred times and his voice is in my head now, calm, gruff, do the next right thing, just the next one.
I get to him. The heat is unbearable, the fire chewing down the wall toward us, and I get my shoulder under the beam.
I feel the bruise, pain screaming through my body, but I force it down.
I drive up with my legs the way he taught me, screaming, every muscle tearing, and it shifts – an inch, two = and he drags himself out from under it, coughing, his mask fogged, and his alarm still screaming.
His air is gone. I can hear him fighting for it.
I do not think. I crack the seal on my own mask, jam it over his face, share my air the way the academy taught me, both of us crouched in the roar with one almost empty bottle between us.
I get an arm under his and I haul. I drag him, foot by foot, toward the gray square of the door hoping we make it out before I run out of air for the pair of us, or the flames consume us.
Meanwhile. the room behind us goes fully to fire.
Hands grab us at the threshold. The crew. They pull us out into the night, into cold air and red light, and we go down together on the pavement in a heap, both of us coughing our lungs out, and I rip the mask off his face and his eyes find mine and he is alive, he is breathing.
I cannot speak. I cannot do anything but kneel over him with my hands fisted in his coat, shaking so hard my teeth rattle, while the medics swarm in.
It is past dawn before they clear him. Smoke inhalation, a wrenched knee, burns on one shoulder where the debris caught him, but alive.
Whole. When we finally manage to get away, the fire contained, and other local fire crews on the scene, I find him sitting on the back step of the rig with a blanket around his shoulders and an oxygen mask hanging off one ear.
The station is finally, briefly empty around us, the others showering or doing the after-call grind.
And I do for him what he did for me that first night. I help him to the locker room, the rest of the crew vacating it. freshly showered.
Martin the Clipboard Guy, puts a hand on my shoulder.
"Do you need a hand, Probie?" he asks.
I shake my head.
"I've got this," I say.
He nods and leaves us.
I kneel down and I peel away Chase's scorched coat, his ruined gear, layer by layer, my hands shaking, cataloguing every burn and bruise on the body I almost lost. He lets me.
He does not say a word. He just watches me with something cracked wide open in his face, the wall not just down but gone, like the fire took it.
"You could have died," I finally manage. My voice is wrecked. "You shoved the guard at me and you almost…" I cannot finish it.
"I know," he rasps. "You shouldn't have come back. It was too dangerous."
And here is the thing I understand, kneeling there in the cold dawn with his blood and soot on my hands.
A few hours ago I was scared loving him would cost me the job.
I am not scared of that anymore. I held his life in my hands tonight.
I shared my last breath with him on the floor of a building that was trying to kill us both.
And next to that, the gossip, the captain, the probation, all of it - it is nothing. It is so small it is laughable.
I almost lost him. And I have been hiding this, hiding us, for what? For fear of a thing that matters less than the air in my lungs, the air I just gave to him.
"I'm glad I did," I tell him.
I am done hiding.
I do not say it yet. He is hurt and shaking and the others are just outside and could come in any moment. But I know it now, all the way down, with the same flat certainty he had when he looked at that smoke and said it is gonna light.
This is going to come out. I am going to let it. Because nearly losing him has made keeping the secret feel exactly as pointless as it is.
I smooth the blanket over his burned shoulder and I keep my hand there, in the open, where anyone could see, and I do not move it.
And he does not tell me to.