Chapter 6 #2
Boone is in the rehab center for his own patient rotation, and I catch myself tracking his hands across the room while he adjusts a resistance setting for Petty Officer Dawes, the same hands that held a Sig at 0237 this morning, the same hands that made me grip the headboard and forget my own name.
He moves through the clinical space with the focused calm he brings to everything, and twice I lose half a second of attention to the shift of his forearms, the flex of tendons under tanned skin, before I drag myself back to Welling's shoulder and the rage that should be occupying every available circuit.
He catches me looking the second time. The corner of his mouth shifts, barely, and the heat in his glance is brief and deliberate and aimed.
"Eyes on your patient, Calloway," he says, low enough that only I can hear.
"Eyes on yours, Senior Chief."
The banter lands like a match strike, quick and hot and gone, and we both go back to work.
Falk passes through the treatment area twice. She's efficient, quiet, professional, and I watch her the way I watch everyone now: with a clinical eye overlaid with suspicion. She adjusts a therapy band on station three and checks a calibration readout.
She nods to me as she passes, and I nod back, and the interaction is so unremarkable that it makes my skin crawl.
Rivera's team arrives during my ten o'clock session. I see them through the glass partition, two agents in the storage corridor, gloves and evidence bags and the flat, purposeful expressions of people who process crime scenes for a living.
My pharmaceutical storage room has become a crime scene. The space where I measure healing has become a space where someone measured harm.
By afternoon, Rivera has a preliminary assessment. The medication tampering window narrows the suspect pool to personnel with access to pharmaceutical storage: myself, Boone, Falk, Dr. Navarro, and two supply chain contacts who handle delivery and restocking.
Six people with keys, and one of them altered dosages with enough care to slow recovery without killing anyone. The calculation in that restraint is more disturbing than recklessness would be. This was deliberate, designed to go unnoticed.
Boone is with me when Rivera delivers the briefing. The stillness in his body while he listens is predatory, coiled and patient. His face gives away nothing. His hands, resting on the arms of his chair, are completely relaxed.
But his eyes are recording every detail Rivera provides, and I can feel the operational assessment running behind his composure the same way I can feel a patient's muscle tension through a therapeutic contact.
When the briefing ends and Rivera leaves, Boone stays seated for a moment, his jaw set, his gaze on the door Rivera just walked through. Then he looks at me.
"How are you holding?"
"If you ask me if I'm okay, I'll reassign you to the therapy pool."
"I'm asking how you're holding. Different question."
"I'm holding by my fingernails and my professional ethics, and right now the ethics are doing more of the work." I lean against the briefing room table and the exhaustion hits in a wave. "Someone is poisoning my patients, Boone. While I'm standing ten feet away treating them."
He stands, crosses the room, and puts his hands on my hips.
The grip is firm and grounding and claiming, and the contact snaps me out of the spiral and into the physical reality of this man in front of me, his thumbs pressing into the crease above my hip bones, his body close enough that the heat of him seeps through my scrubs.
"You found it," he says. His voice is low and certain. "You caught what someone designed to be invisible. That's not failure. That's you being exactly as good as you are."
I let myself lean into him for three seconds, just three. His body is solid and his hands are sure and the soap-and-salt smell of him is familiar now in a way it wasn't before this morning, familiar from proximity and sweat and the sheets of my bed, and the intimacy of that recognition aches.
Then I straighten, and his hands release my hips, and we walk back to the rehab center as colleagues.
The afternoon is long. The sessions are normal, because I refuse to let them be otherwise, and the patients who sit on my tables and trust me with their recovery deserve the full measure of my focus.
I give it to them. I give it with sure hands and an even voice and an anger that stays exactly where I put it: underneath everything, fueling the focus instead of fracturing it.
My body, though, is running a parallel track that has nothing to do with professionalism. Every time Boone passes within arm's length, I feel the proximity in my skin, a low hum of awareness that wasn't there yesterday because yesterday I didn't know how his weight felt pressing me into a mattress.
I'm sore in places that make me shift in my chair during charting, and every shift is a reminder, and every reminder heats a current that runs directly counter to the anger about the vials.
Both exist, the anger and the want, and I carry them both through the afternoon without letting either one crack the surface. By the time we leave the rehab center, the day has the heavy, exhausted quality of a day spent holding too many things at once.
Boone walks beside me to the parking lot, and his hand finds the small of my back without discussion. The touch is light and grounding, and his thumb traces one slow circle against my spine that is invisible to anyone watching and devastating to the woman feeling it.
"Sandbar," I say. "Nox texted. The group is meeting."
"You want to go?"
"I want to sit in a booth and drink bourbon and pretend for ninety minutes that my facility isn't a crime scene."
"I can do that."
The Sandbar is dim and familiar and exactly what it always is: the place where the sharp edges of the day get smoothed by good bourbon and better company.
Nox is already in the back booth. She looks at me with the appraising directness of a woman who processes data for a living and is currently processing the fact that I came in with Boone's hand on my back.
"Calloway." She tilts her wine glass a fraction. "You look like you've had a day."
"I've had a day."