Epilogue
Jack
Six months after I signed the amended contract, I deliver twins in the back of an ambulance stuck in Dorchester traffic. I lose a gunshot wound on the table four hours later, and drive home to a kitchen with the light on.
Tiernan is at the counter when I come in, two mugs already set out, the French press I bought him sitting between them. He's in a worn sweater, feet bare, reading something he sets aside the second he hears me.
He takes in the exhaustion on my face, the scrubs I haven't changed out of, and the way I'm holding my shoulders.
"Sit," he offers, pushing the chair out with a foot.
I fall into the seat.
He pours coffee, exactly right, and pulls out the chair beside me instead of across. He sits close enough that our knees touch. "Tell me."
So, I do. The twins, the EMT's steady hands, the nineteen-year-old mother who gripped mine hard enough to bruise.
The man we lost, twenty-three, and his mother's face when I told her.
He listens without interrupting, and when I finish he takes my hand and runs his thumb over the marks the laboring mother left.
"You saved five people tonight," he says. "The twins. Their mother. Two more before that."
"And lost one."
"And lost one." He doesn't tell me the percentages. He knows better. "What do you need?"
I think about it. Really think, the way I've learned to. "A shower. Food. You. In no particular order."
The shower is hot enough to scald the hospital off me.
When I come out there's pasta Callen made, and Tiernan sits on the edge of the bed.
Jamie's voice comes through on the speakerphone telling us both, again, that he passed his thermodynamics exam, the big one he's been panicking about for weeks.
He wants to take us to dinner. The burger place on Commonwealth with the secret menu, which Tiernan has been sent the address of three times and pretends is a real restaurant.
Jamie's debt is gone. Filed and discharged and witnessed, months back. He's taller every time I see him and he's stopped apologizing every phone call, which is its own kind of healing.
After he hangs up, the house goes quiet around us. The garden door downstairs is unlocked now, has been for months, the overgrown paths cleared, and I have a key to the keypad I have never once needed to use. The door it guards isn't a cage anymore. It's just a door.
Tiernan pulls me down onto the bed, and there's no hurry in it. We have time. That's the part that still catches me sometimes. There's no clock running, no days to count, no debt ticking over at three percent a week.
He undresses me slowly, like he's got all night, which he does. His mouth moves down my body without any of the urgency of the first time or the heat of the wedding night. There’s something deeper underneath it now, deliberate, and sure.
He knows me by heart at this point, knows where I breathe faster and what makes me arch and the exact spot below my ear that makes me lose my train of thought, and he takes his time using all of it.
When he settles between my thighs and puts his mouth and tongue on me in slow circles I'm already gone.
My fingers clench his hair, and he works me through it slow and patient until I'm shaking and saying things I don't track.
He comes back up my body and kisses me, lets me taste myself on him.
When he finally pushes into me it's unhurried, both of us watching each other in the low light.
His hand finds mine and laces through it the way he did the very first night.
It lasts a long time. There's nothing to outrun. He says my name into my skin like a fact he's confirming, again, and I say his. When euphoria finally takes us both, it's quiet and certain and it leaves me wrecked in the best possible way.
After, I lie with my ear over his heart and feel it slow. The radio hums. His hand moves idle through my hair.
"You got the shower,” he murmurs.
I nod. “Yeah, I did.”
“And the best food in the house,” he whispers into my hair. “What was the last item on the list?”
I grin and look up at him. “You.”
“Took care of that too.” He kisses me softly, then squeezes me tighter. “I’ve been yours for months, Mo Rúnsearc.”
His secret love, because we can be together openly, but his love is just mine. There’s no need to share it. I close my eyes and bury my face in the crook of his neck.
I think about the man across the city who still wants what's mine, the family that doesn't forget a humiliation, the night down the line when the war comes off the shelf and gets settled for real. It's out there. I'm not naive about it.
But it's out there, and we're in here. The door downstairs is unlocked, and I stopped trying to will myself to want to leave a long time ago.
I'm asleep before he stops holding me.
******