Chapter 9 #3
"You are that medic, Jonah. You've been him this whole time.
You got down on the floor of my life when I was a dead man doing paperwork in the dark, and you didn't save me — I wasn't a call you could save, I was just gone — you did something better.
You made me not alone. For the first time since Ray you made me not alone, and I was so unpracticed at it I mistook it for danger and ran.
But it wasn't danger. It was the thing. It was the whole thing.
" His voice was going now, all the way, twenty years of walls just gone.
"Your worth was never the saving. I need you to hear that from me because I'm the one who broke it.
It was never how many you could keep breathing.
It's that you get down on the floor. It's that you don't let people be alone.
You didn't have to be enough. You just had to be there, and you have been, you have been so completely there, and I am so — I'm here.
I'm getting down on the floor. I'm not leaving.
I don't care what it costs, I did the math on what it costs to leave and it costs everything, it cost me eighteen months and it nearly cost me you, and I'm done paying it.
Let me be your wall. And let me — God, let me be yours to catch too, because I'm tired, kid, I'm so tired of being the only steady thing, I've been holding everybody up for twenty years and nobody's ever—"
And Jonah crossed the space between them and grabbed him, both fists in Dom's shirt, and pressed his face into Dom's chest and just came apart, finally, all the way, the sobs that had been waiting seven years and eighteen months and one terrible week, and Dom wrapped both arms around him and held on and let his own face go into the kid's hair and did not try to make himself cold, did not reach for the room behind the glass, did not do a single thing except stand in his own feeling and hold a shaking person and be held back.
"I've got you," Dom said, into his hair, wrecked, meaning it more than he'd ever meant anything. "I've got you. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to be enough. I've got you."
"You left," Jonah said, into his chest, muffled and furious and breaking. "You left, you can't just—"
"I know. I know I did. And I'll say it as many times as you need, I left, I was wrong, I'm not going to do it again.
I'm going to be the most annoying, most present, most impossible-to-get-rid-of man you've ever met.
You're going to get so sick of me being there.
You're going to beg me to leave you alone and I'm not going to, because I finally learned how to stay from a kid who taught me by staying. "
Jonah cried for a while. Dom let him. That was the whole gift of it, the thing Dom finally understood he was allowed to give — you didn't fix it, you didn't talk him out of it, you didn't find the words that made it stop.
You just stayed inside it with him and didn't leave, and let the crying be a thing they did together instead of a thing that needed managing, and eventually, on its own, the way weather passes, it passed.
And what was left when it passed was a young man with his face blotchy and his eyes wrecked, looking up at Dom like he didn't dare believe the man was still standing there, like he was braced even now for Dom to check his watch and remember he had somewhere colder to be.
"I keep thinking you're going to leave again," Jonah admitted, small. "Like — my brain won't turn it off. You're standing right here and my brain's already bracing for the door."
"Yeah." Dom brushed the wet hair off Jonah's forehead, careful, the way he was careful with everything that mattered.
"Mine did that for eighteen months. Braced for the next loss so hard I made it happen just to get the waiting over with.
It's a bad habit. We can have it together.
That's allowed — you're allowed to not trust it yet.
I'll just keep being here until your brain gets bored of bracing.
" He pressed his mouth to Jonah's forehead, held it there.
"I've got nowhere colder to be. That's the thing you don't know yet.
There's no cold place I'm keeping for myself anymore.
You took it. You walked into the coldest room I had and turned the lights on and I can't get it dark again and I don't want to. "
Then Dom pulled back just far enough to take Jonah's face in both his hands, the way he had in the bay, except everything was different now, everything, the walls all down, the drawer open, the photo — he'd turn the photo up when he got home, he already knew he would. "Ask me for the one night again."
Jonah gave a wet, broken laugh. "That's my line."
"I know. I'm stealing all your lines. Get used to it." Dom pressed his forehead to Jonah's. "Ask me."
"Stay," Jonah whispered. "Don't give me one night. Give me the—" his voice broke, "—give me the annoying one. The impossible-to-get-rid-of one. Give me all of it. Stay."
"Yeah," Dom said, against his mouth, against the pulse, over the place where you check for life. "Yeah. I'm staying. I've got you. I'm staying."
He kissed him then — slow, unhurried, the lights-on kind, the deciding kind — and it was nothing like the desperate ones, nothing like the bay, nothing stolen about it, because for the first time there was nothing to steal it from, no rule, no chain of command, no watch to check.
Just a big tired man and a wrung-out kid standing in a cluttered apartment as the first gray light came up in the windows, kissing like two people who had finally, after taking the long way around through every wall either of them owned, arrived.
Jonah made the small sound against his mouth, the wrecked one, the one Dom would spend the rest of his life listening for, and pulled him toward the couch he'd joked about not having, and Dom went, and let himself be pulled, and did not once think about leaving.
Outside, the city was waking up. Somewhere a rig was running hot toward somebody's worst morning, and somebody's steady hands were going to get there in time or not, the way it always was, the way it would always be.
But not theirs. Not this morning. This morning the two of them stayed exactly where they were, in the gray light, off the clock, and let the world save itself for a few hours without them.