Chapter 7 #3
"Don't put that on me," he said.
His voice came out flat. The still-room voice. The parking-lot voice. And he watched it hit Jonah, watched the wide-open face flinch like he'd been struck.
"Dom—"
"I can't be that for you." Each word a brick, set down cold, and his hands were shaking now, both of them, and he shoved them in his pockets so the kid wouldn't see the one true thing, that this was costing him everything, because if the kid saw that he'd hope, and hope was the cruelest thing Dom had left to take away.
"You're looking for a medic on a floor from seven years ago.
That's not me. I'm your training officer.
That's all I am, that's all I can be, and two nights ago was a mistake, and this — you falling apart on a scene, grabbing your FTO in the open where anyone could—" He made himself say it.
Made himself use the blade. "This can't happen.
It's done. It was done before it started.
I never should have let it get this far, and that's on me, and I'm fixing it now. "
"You don't mean that." But it came out thin.
Uncertain, for the first time. Because Jonah was good at faces, and Dom knew Jonah was reading his, reading the flatness, and Dom held the flatness in place with everything he had, held it like a tube, like a life depended on it, because in his own broken logic a life did.
"Dom. I just told you about Sam. I've never told anybody about Sam. And you're—"
"I know." Dom looked at him. Made his eyes dead.
Did the cruelest thing he had ever done to another human being, which was to look at Jonah Rask holding out the truest thing he owned and set it down on the ground between them unheld.
"I'm sorry about your brother. I am. But it's not mine to carry. Neither are you."
He watched it land.
He watched the last light in the kid go out — not flicker, not dim, go out — watched Jonah understand that he had cracked himself all the way open on the worst night of his life and handed the pieces to a man who was, right now, choosing not to catch them.
Watched the wound close over so fast and so hard it would take a crowbar to ever get back in.
"Right," Jonah said. His voice had gone somewhere flat and formal, the place it went when he was furthest from okay, and Dom hated that he knew that about him, hated that he had the map. "Copy. Sorry. Won't happen again, FTO."
He walked back toward the rig, and his shoulders were set the way Dom's own were set, the way you carry a thing up a hill, and Dom stood alone in the cold clean dark with his shaking hands in his pockets and the note still on the counter behind him and understood that he had just done, on purpose, with malice, the single most protective and most unforgivable thing of his entire life.
It's the right call, Dom told himself.
His hands shook in his pockets. The brother was still in the building somewhere saying I don't know, I don't know. Somewhere in a locker two miles away a stethoscope sat in a drawer Dom had not opened in eighteen months.
It's the right call. You just saved his career. You just saved his life. You pushed him off the edge before it could give out under him. That's the only thing you know how to do for someone. That's love, the only kind you've got left.
He almost believed it.
That was the worst part. Standing there in the dark, with the best thing that had happened to him in a year and a half walking away with its heart in pieces because Dom had thrown it back — Dom almost, almost believed it was the right call.
But there was a thing he couldn't get out of his ear, and it wouldn't stop, and it was the kid's own voice, from two nights ago, in a spartan bedroom in the dark, warm and certain and forgiving him in advance: you told me not to do what you did, and then you turned around and made me go away — that's the whole entire thing you do, it's your only move.
Dom had done it anyway. Worse this time.
On the worst night. At the exact moment the kid had handed him the one thing he'd never handed anyone.
Sam. He'd told Dom about Sam, cracked seven years of silence open on a stranger's sidewalk, and Dom had said it's not mine to carry and walked him back to the rig.
He understood, standing there, that he had just done to Jonah the exact thing the drawer did to Ray. Shut him in the dark. Refused to open the door. Called it grief, called it self-protection, called it the right thing — and left a person he loved sealed away where it couldn't hurt to look at them.
Eight hours left on the shift. Twelve inches of rig cab between them for every one of them.
Dom made his hands stop, because he could still do that one thing when he had to, and went to sit in the front seat next to a kid who wouldn't look at him, and rode out the rest of the night in a silence that was nothing like the good ones.
He would have the whole rest of the shift, and the drive home, and the long gray days after, to find out how wrong he was.