Chapter 2 #2
"Nah," Jonah lied, warm as a blanket. "You were a perfect gentleman.
Your daughter, though — she's got a mouth on her, I gotta say.
" The man huffed something that was almost a laugh, and behind Jonah the daughter made a sound that was half a laugh and half the other thing, the thing that falls out of people when the terror finally lets go of them all at once and there's nowhere for it to land but their own throat.
They still had to talk him into transport.
He was fine now, he insisted, he was fine, he wasn't going to any hospital, it was a Tuesday, he had things to do — and this was where Dom finally spoke, one flat sentence from the doorway.
"You went down hard enough to move that coffee table.
That leg's not sitting right. You refuse us, I come back in four hours, and I don't like coming back.
" Which was not comforting, and was not built to be, and worked precisely where every ounce of Jonah's warmth had not. The old man went.
***
"Femur," Dom said, in the rig, after they'd cleared the hospital.
"I did not miss the—"
"You clocked the sugar, treated the sugar, and you were so pleased with yourself about the sugar you'd have let him refuse on a leg with a mid-shaft break in it.
" Dom pulled out of the ambulance bay, unhurried, signaling to nobody.
Didn't raise his voice. Never once, all day, raised his voice.
"Sugar's a save you can feel. Fun. Feels like being a hero on a poster.
The femur's boring. Femur's just watching, and geometry, and being willing to be the guy nobody in the room likes.
You went for the save you could feel. Every time you get to choose, you're gonna go for the one you can feel.
That's the thing you have to beat out of yourself. "
Jonah opened his mouth to defend himself, and then shut it, because — damn it — because it was true, all of it, right down to the studs.
He'd loved the sugar. He'd loved the sunrise of it, the daughter's ragged laugh, the old man's face coming back online like a house getting its power restored.
He'd have taken that feeling and let it walk him straight past the leg.
"Okay," Jonah said. "Yeah. Femur. I hear you."
Dom glanced over. It was the first time all shift he'd looked, for half a second, genuinely surprised — like he'd braced for the argument and Jonah had declined to hand it to him.
"Huh," Dom said.
"What."
"Nothing. Most of you argue."
"I'm not most of me." I'm a guy who ran through walls for men who wouldn't say good job, and I found the biggest wall in the city, and here I am, buckled in next to it. "I'm a fast learner. Allegedly."
"Cohort's a classroom. This isn't a classroom."
"No kidding. Nobody swung at me in the classroom.
" Jonah let his head fall back against the seat.
His hands, now that the call was behind them, were doing the after-thing — a fine tremor, the adrenaline draining out of him through his fingertips — and he tucked them flat under his thighs where Dom wouldn't see, because he'd already learned that in this rig a man's hands were currency, and shaky hands were the oldest rookie tell there was.
He needed Dom to think he was steady. It mattered to him so much that Dom think he was steady that it scared him a little, how much.
He did not know — could not have known, day two — that Dom Cassar had spent twenty years learning to read exactly that. A man hiding his hands. From the inside.
***
The next two calls were nothing, which Jonah was learning was most of the job.
A lift assist for a woman who'd slid out of her wheelchair and just needed two strong people and no lecture — Dom got down on her level and was, to Jonah's genuine shock, almost courtly with her, none of the cold, and she patted his cheek like he was a nephew and called him by a name that wasn't his and Dom let her.
Then a psych eval that turned into a long quiet wait with a young guy on the worst day of what had clearly been a very bad month — sitting cross-legged on his own kitchen floor, not a danger to anybody but himself, and only maybe.
Nothing to do but wait for the crisis team, and the crisis team was ninety minutes out, and so they waited.
Jonah would've filled it. Jonah's whole instinct was to fill it, to talk the guy out of the dark with sheer wattage, and he opened his mouth to start and Dom caught his eye and gave the smallest shake of his head.
No. Not this one. And Dom just sat down on the floor across from the kid — forty-four years old and down on the linoleum like it was nothing — and didn't say much of anything, and let the silence be a thing they were doing together instead of a thing that needed fixing.
When the guy finally talked, it was to Dom, in pieces, and Dom took the pieces without trying to reassemble them into something more comfortable.
Jonah watched him be still with the guy — not warm, exactly, but present, solid, a wall you could put your back against instead of a wall you ran through — and thought, oh.
There it is. There's the medic everybody keeps almost telling me about.
The one from the before. The one Kayla wouldn't finish the sentence about.
In between, in the long dead stretch afterward, posting again under a highway overpass with rain starting to spit on the windshield, something loosened. Twelve hours will do that. You cannot sit that close to a person that long and keep every wall standing; the body gets tired of holding them.
"You always been at the Twelve?" Jonah asked, careful this time, offering it instead of lunging.
A pause. The wipers went once, twice, on the intermittent setting.
"Started at a service two counties over," Dom said. "Transferred in at twenty-six. Never left." Another pause, and then, unprompted, a whole extra sentence, which from Dom was practically a monologue: "Married the city instead of a person. Bad trade, financially. Great benefits."
Jonah laughed — surprised, real, out loud — and Dom's mouth did a thing at one corner that wasn't a smile but was in the same zip code as one, and for one second the cab of Medic 6 in the rain was not a place where a hard man tested a soft rookie.
It was just two guys, tired, dry, hiding from the weather.
"That was a joke," Jonah said, delighted. "You made a joke."
"I make one a year. You used it up. Ration accordingly."
"That's not — okay, you can't say something like that and then just go back to being a gargoyle. That's not how conversation works. That's entrapment."
"Learn to sit in the quiet, Rask." But the corner of his mouth was still doing the thing, holding it, and Jonah understood that he was being messed with, gently, for the first time — that somewhere in the last twelve hours he'd been promoted from problem to something a half-step warmer, and that Dom would sooner eat the drug box than admit it out loud.
I would like to see you do that again, Jonah thought, and had the sense to not say it, and looked back out at the rain so his face couldn't be caught doing whatever it was doing.
He tucked the moment into his messy cabinet, the one with the door that didn't shut, and knew he'd take it back out later and hold it up to the light.
Which was, he'd realize much later, the exact moment the trouble started. Not the calls. The joke.
***