Chapter 3
Jess
The generator kicks on at eight-fourteen, and the clinic contracts to a handful of rooms lit by battery lanterns and the green pulse of monitors I can't afford to lose.
I count the glow points from the break room doorway.
Two lanterns in the trauma bay. One in the supply closet.
One on the counter beside the emergency radio, its red power light blinking in a steady rhythm that reminds me of a heartbeat on a monitor.
Four points of light in a building designed for fluorescents and daylight, and outside the plywood-covered windows, the hurricane screams like it wants in.
Finn drops two cots from the storage closet onto the break room floor.
They land side by side with a metallic clatter, narrow as stretchers, separated by a path barely wide enough to walk through.
The vending machine in the corner glows blue-white, the only thing in the room running on generator power, and it casts Finn in cold light as he unfolds the legs and locks them into place.
"Cozy," he says.
I grab the second cot and drag it two feet further from the first. "Don't push it."
He grins. It fades when he reaches for the cot frame and I see the blood.
A gash splits the meat of his right palm, deep enough to see the darker green of tissue underneath. He must have caught it on a nail or a screw edge while boarding the windows, and instead of saying anything, he's been hauling generators and carrying supplies with his hand bleeding.
"Sit down." The first aid kit comes off the shelf above the microwave. "Let me see."
"It's nothing."
"Sit. Down. Now, Finn."
He drops onto the cot. The frame groans under his weight, the canvas sagging, and he extends his hand with the cut facing up.
The lantern slides closer when I drag it across the counter, I kneel on the linoleum, his wrist braced against my knee, and the size difference hits me the way it does every time I get this close.
My fingers look small enough to disappear inside his palm.
I could press both my hands flat inside one of his and still have green skin showing at the edges.
The antiseptic cap twists off with a snap, I tear a gauze strip. He tenses when the solution hits the wound, but he doesn't flinch.
"You don't have to do this."
"It'll get infected if I don't." I keep my eyes on the cut, dabbing the edges clean. The gash needs butterfly strips, not sutures. His skin runs too thick for standard needles, and I'd need the large-gauge kit from the trauma bay.
"That's not what I meant."
I look up. His face is closer than I expect. Close enough that I can see the pale edge of his broken tusk, the shadow his braid throws across his shoulder, the way the lantern light turns his amber eyes almost gold. He's not focused on the wound. He's focused on me.
"What did you mean?"
"You don't have to take care of me." His voice drops, all the charm scraped out of it. "You don't have to be nice to me, Jess. I know you don't like me."
My fingers go still on his palm. The antiseptic pad sits pressed against his skin, forgotten.
"I never said that."
"You don't have to." He holds my gaze. "You've been avoiding me for weeks."
The backing peels off a butterfly strip with a soft rip, and I press it across the wound. My knuckles leave a faint smear of his blood on my own wrist. "I've been busy."
"Liar."
A second strip goes down. "You don't know me well enough to call me that."
"I know you changed shifts twice to avoid the Sunday dinners at the clubhouse.
I know you left Sarah's barbecue before the burgers hit the grill.
I know you walked out of Crabby Bill's last Thursday the second my bike pulled into the lot.
" He pauses. "I pay attention, Jess. Even when you wish I wouldn't."
The break room shrinks. The wind shrieks against the plywood, and the generator's hum vibrates through the floor under my knees, and his hand sits in mine like an anchor holding me in place.
The last strip goes on smooth and flat, and I don't let go.
"The wedding," I say, and the word lands between us like a grenade I've been carrying since the reception.
He stiffens. "What about it?"
"You know what about it." I wrap the gauze around his palm, tight enough to hold, careful enough not to restrict.
Six years of wrapping wounds in field hospitals, in FOBs, in the back of armored vehicles with dust in my teeth and someone's blood on my hands.
I can dress a wound in my sleep. I can do it while my heart hammers against my ribs and his skin burns under my fingers and every cell in my body screams at me to lean closer or pull back or do anything except sit here in this purgatory of light touching.
He catches the pivot. "Is that why you don't date? The military thing?"
"I date."
"Tourist hookups don't count."
I tie off the gauze and sit back on my heels, meeting his eyes. "Like you're one to talk about hookups, Stone. You had that blonde's number before midnight at Sarah's wedding."
His expression changes. The easy charm falls away, and underneath it I see a version of Finn I've only caught in flashes.
"I didn't get her number."
"I saw you—"
"You saw me trying to forget you." His voice lands flat and certain, no humor in it at all. "But it didn't work."
My breath catches. The gauze roll sits loose in my lap, unwinding against my knee, and I can't make myself pick it up.
"What?"
"You kissed me and then you disappeared. By the time I went looking, you were gone." He draws his bandaged hand back, rests it on his knee, and the muscles in his forearm cord tight. "So yeah, I tried to move on. For about two hours. Then I went home alone and thought about you instead."
Neither of us moves. A gust slams the building hard enough to rattle the plywood over the windows, and I still don't move.
My fingers tremble against my thighs. I press them flat. "You're lying."
"Why would I lie?"
"And you don't even know me that's what you're going to say?"
"Well, you don't."
"I know you take your coffee black but you steal the creamer when you think nobody's looking.
I know you hum when you're stitching and you don't realize you do it.
I know you call your mom every Sunday at seven even when Sarah's dragging you to a cookout.
" He leans forward. "I know you laugh different when something's actually funny versus when you're being polite, and I know which one I got in that garden. So don't tell me I don't know you."
My mouth opens. Closes. I have no answer for that because every single thing he listed is true, and I didn't think he noticed any of it.
"Don't." My voice cracks on the word.
"Don't what?"
"Don't do this to me. Not here. Not when I can't—"
"Jess, I—" His voice drops into something low, rough and unguarded, I can see it forming on his face, the thing he's about to say, the words lining up behind his lips—
The emergency radio screams to life.
"Nightfall Medical, this is Rescue Seven. Multiple-vehicle accident on Highway 1 near mile marker twelve. Three casualties inbound, ETA ten minutes. One possible spinal, one with a compound fracture, one walking wounded. Do you copy?"
I'm on my feet before the transmission ends.
The conversation, all of it drops away like dead weight. My heartbeat steadies. The part of me that deployed twice into active combat zones locks into place, and my body remembers the drill even when the rest of me falls apart.
"Copy, Rescue Seven. Nightfall Medical standing by. Bring them in."
The trauma bay doors bang open under my shoulder before the radio clicks off. Gloves ready, tray prepped, IV stand positioned, the defibrillator with the cracked housing powered up and waiting. Finn appears beside me without being told.
"What do you need?"
"Backboard from the supply closet. C-collar, top shelf, blue package. Grab every clean towel you can find." I snap the overhead surgical light on, running off the generator, and it floods the table in white. "And roll the crash cart to the foot of the bed."
He moves. No questions, no hesitation, no jokes. The crash cart rolls into position before I finish arranging the instrument tray.
The first stretcher comes through the door ten minutes later, two rescuers hauling a man in his fifties strapped to the backboard—good, we don't need to use ours.
His head is immobilized but blood seeps from a laceration across his scalp, pooling in the collar.
The second stretcher follows close behind—a woman, early thirties, screaming, her left forearm bent at an angle that makes Finn go pale.
The walking wounded trails them in, a teenager pressing a blood-soaked towel against his own arm, eyes glassy with shock.
Triage kicks in like a second heartbeat, and I'm moving before my brain catches up.
The spinal takes priority. I check the collar Finn fitted, verify responsiveness, run through the neuro assessment with commands barked over my shoulder while Finn holds the man's head steady on the backboard.
He doesn't waver. His grip stays firm, absorbing every shift as the wind slams the building and the lights flicker and the man on the table groans through gritted teeth.
"Pressure's dropping," I tell Finn, reading the monitor. "Hold him. Don't let him turn his neck."
"I've got him."
His voice carries the same steady weight I heard when he told Knox he'd stay with me. I shove the break room out of my head and throw away the key because I can't think about it now, not with blood on my gloves and a man's spine on the line.
The woman with the broken arm screams again.
I set the bone, splint it, push morphine from the kit, talk her through the breathing until her sobs thin to hiccups.
The walking wounded, a teenager with glass cuts across his arms and a stunned expression, sits in the corner and watches me work with wide eyes.
I clean his cuts, bandage them, press a bottle of water and a blanket into his lap.
Two hours. Fluid bags swapped, vitals charted, the spinal patient stable enough that I allow myself a breath.
Through all of it, Finn anticipates what I need.
He passes the gauze before I reach for it.
Holds the IV bag at the right height without being asked.
Moves a chair into position for the screaming woman before I turn to look for one.
Every time. Without a word.
Between charting the spinal patient's vitals, I catch him against the wall, arms crossed, his focus locked on me.
The mask he wears for everyone else is gone.
The grin, the swagger, the easy deflection.
The expression underneath is open and unguarded and aimed at me with an intensity that makes my pen skip across the chart.
I don't know what to do with that look.
The patients sleep. The teenager curls up on a cot in the waiting area, the woman with the splinted arm dozes in a recliner with an ice pack propped on her forearm, and the spinal patient's vitals hold steady enough that I stop checking every five minutes.
He needs a CT and an MRI and a neurosurgeon, none of which I can give him in a clinic running on generator power.
But I can keep him alive and stable until the medevac routes open back up.
Finn brings me a bottle of water from the break room. Our fingers brush on the plastic, I jerk away too fast, he notices, and neither of us says anything.
The nurse's station holds my weight when I lean against it, and I drink half the bottle in one long pull.
My scrubs have blood on the hem. My shoulders ache from hunching over the table.
The adrenaline drains out and leaves behind a bone-deep exhaustion and the echo of his voice saying Jess, I— before the radio cut him off.
I know what he was going to say. I know it the way I know my own pulse, and that terrifies me more than anything the hurricane can throw at this building.
We're in sync. Not the fumbling teamwork of two people figuring it out as they go—the real thing, the kind I had with my unit, where you stop needing words because the other person is already there.
I set the water bottle down because my hands shake again and I don't want him to see how much he is affecting me.
I'm terrified of what that means. I'm more terrified that he would have meant it.