Chapter 6 #3
"He'd have liked you," Dom said, eventually.
Into the dark. "Ray. I keep thinking it.
He'd have liked you so much it would've been annoying.
He'd have adopted you inside a week." A breath.
"I haven't wanted to tell anybody about him in a year and a half.
And I keep wanting to tell you. That's — I don't know what to do with that. "
"You don't have to do anything with it." Jonah pressed the words into Dom's chest. "That's allowed. You can just — have it. We can just have this. It doesn't have to become a plan tonight."
"Tell me one thing about him," Jonah said, after a moment. "Not the ending. One good thing. You don't have to. But if you want to, I want to hear it."
Dom was quiet long enough that Jonah thought he wouldn't. Then: "He had the worst taste in music.
Truly offensive. Twelve years of the worst yacht rock ever recorded, at volume, on every transport, and he'd sing the harmony parts.
Badly. And patients loved it — dying people, scared people, he'd have them harmonizing on a Michael McDonald song in the back of the rig at four in the morning and they'd forget to be afraid for a minute.
" A rough sound that wasn't quite a laugh.
"I used to tell him to knock it off. I'd give a year of my life to hear him do it one more time. "
"That's a good one," Jonah said softly. "Thank you."
"Your turn." Dom's hand resumed its slow track up Jonah's spine. "You know that math from the wrong side. You said it yourself, on the step — you thought I didn't catch it. Who was yours."
And there it was — the door swinging open in the other direction, the trade, the thing Jonah had been both dreading and starving for. He pressed his face into Dom's chest so he wouldn't have to say it to a face, the same mercy Dom had given the sister, given him.
"Tomorrow," Jonah said, finally, and hated himself a little for the cowardice of it. "You gave me one. I owe you one. But not tonight. If I say his name in this bed I'll cry for an hour and I'll ruin the one night I asked you for. Let me keep it one more day. Please."
Dom didn't push. Of course he didn't push. He pressed his mouth to the top of Jonah's head and said, "Okay. Tomorrow," and Jonah felt him file it, gently, in whatever drawer he kept the things about Jonah, and not open it.
"You know it can't be nothing now." Dom's hand stilled on his back.
"And it can't be something. Not while I'm signing your evals.
You understand what I mean. There's no version of this that's safe.
I've got you here and I already know I can't keep you, and I'm forty-four, I should be smart enough to not—"
"Shh." Jonah tipped his head up, found Dom's mouth in the dark, kissed him quiet.
"Tomorrow. We can panic tomorrow. I'm extremely good at panic, I've got a real gift, I'll have us both fully panicked by lunch.
Tonight I just want to be a guy who got what he wanted for once.
Can we do that? Can I have the one night? "
Dom's arm tightened around him. "Yeah," he said, rough. "Yeah. You can have the one night."
They had the one night.
They did not, as it turned out, have much more than that, because the world does not wait politely outside the door while two people who aren't allowed to want each other steal a few hours — the world has a key, and it lets itself in.
***
The key, in this case, was Falk.
Jonah didn't clock it at first, two shifts later, back in the grind, both of them exhausted from the specific labor of pretending on four hours' sleep.
He'd slipped, was the thing. Just once. Dom had come back from a call with a graze on his forearm, nothing, a nail on a gurney, and Jonah had reached out and turned his arm to check it — a half-second, an ordinary partner thing, except that Jonah's thumb had moved over the skin in a way that was not ordinary at all, a way that remembered, and he'd caught himself and pulled back but not fast enough, because when he looked up Falk was standing across the app bay with a cup of coffee halfway to his mouth, not drinking it, watching them with an expression Jonah didn't like at all.
Falk didn't say anything. That was the part that put ice down Jonah's back.
A man like Falk, who ran his mouth about everything, about calls and management and the weather and the state of the world — that man went quiet, and looked at Dom, and looked at Jonah, and looked at the two inches of space between them that had, for one half-second, not been there.
Then he smiled, small, to himself, and took his coffee to the day room, and Jonah stood in the app bay with his heart pounding and understood, the way you understand weather, that the one night was going to cost them, and that the bill had just started coming due.
"Dom," he said, low.
"I saw." Dom's voice was flat. The wall, all the way up, but there was something under it now that hadn't been there before the one night — something with more to lose. "Go check the rig, Rask."
And Jonah went to check the rig, and behind him he could feel the whole careful impossible thing they'd built in a spartan apartment with the lights on beginning, very quietly, to come apart at a seam neither of them could reach.