“I’m really happy you have him.”
“I’m difficult,” I said after a pause. “It’s not easy being with me. I see how people like Bridget don’t understand, and I know that. I’ve read articles and?—”
“If I had to choose a brother, I would always choose you. You have friends, your team, your career, you are happy and alive, and you’re my brother. It’s easy for people to love you just the way you are.”
I didn’t have an answer, but I wanted to cry, as Matt reached across the table and put his hand over mine. Sable thumped her tail against the leg of the booth.
“He always warns me, you know,” I said at random.
“Huh?”
“Dane has started touching me in advance of contact. Touching my back or brushing my wrist before taking my hand, just to let my brain prepare for him.”
“Okay.”
“He gets me, Matt.”
Matt squeezed my hand. “I’m so happy for you.”
We went back upstairs. The baby was asleep. My mother was sitting in a chair watching them with the look of a woman who had decided she lived here now, and there was no sign of Bridget.
“I’m sorry about Mom,” Lena said, and I waved it away.
“I’ll be back tomorrow with gifts,” I said. “Yellow ones, not pink, is that okay?”
“Absolutely,” Lena said.
Matt kissed Iris’s head and Lena’s forehead, then sat on the arm of my mother’s chair. He put his head on her shoulder for a long minute, letting her hold him.
I stood in the doorway with Sable and watched my family for a while, but I had to leave to head to the team for tonight’s game; everything felt right.
I had a brother who had a daughter. I had a niece who would be my world, and I had a man I loved.
Chapter 12
Dane
Firefighters are supposedto fight fires.
It’s right in the job description. Fight fires. Firefighter.
Nowhere in that career outline does it say your commander yanks you from duty when the city is aflame to receive emergency medical care. Nor does it state the said firefighter is to be rushed to the nearest hospital for ABC—airway, breathing, and circulation—care, burn care, CT scans, X-rays for any internal injuries like blast lung, bleeding, or tympanic ruptures. To say Tim and I were pissy about being sent off-site when there was a massive fire to extinguish was putting it mildly. And if I could have yelled without my head exploding with the mere vibrations of speech, I would have shouted at whoever would listen.
Pitifully, I was too wobbly to protest much. Also, the need to puke combined with the ringing in my left ear prevented me from climbing out of the back of the ambulance to rejoin my brothers and sisters. That and the glower from Sully when I tried to spout off.
“Go. Now.” He barked with a look that said, “I do not have time for this shit, Rourke,” so I went quietly into the night. Or morning. Or afternoon. I kind of lost track of time as I rode alongwith a pair of very nice paramedics who were doing their very best for Tim and me. I kept dozing off on the ride. The oxygen mask they made me wear was annoying, but even a chump like me knew it was SOP for a firefighter injured on site.
I glanced over at Tim, then at the ceiling, wincing at the bright lights, then closed my eyes and drifted away once more. Once we arrived at Genesee, we were whisked into the ED, where I was hoping to see Dr. Robby, aka Noah Wyle, come in to massage my sore shoulder, but alas, I was tended to by a team of doctors who were not famous Hollywood actors. One could have been. He wasn’t as cute as Chip, of course, but few men were.
Shit. Chip. My brother. My phone. It was still on the engine. Fuck.
“Someone has to call my brother,” I coughed out before a different mask was slapped on my face and clean, pure oxygen was fed in. I’d not inhaled any of the toxic fumes that I was aware of. But given how flimsy my grasp of things was right now, maybe I had? “My head hurts,” I told a nurse who said something about a grapefruit? No, that wasn’t right. “I think I have a brain bleed. Did you just call me a grapefruit?”
“Rest,” she said. She was nice, so I did as she asked.
I woke up several more times during the rides to the CT room and X-ray. I’d lost track of Tim. I asked about the fire, but no one had anything to report. They just kept telling me to rest as they lowered the lights in whatever room they wheeled me into.
After a dozen tests, I was finally wheeled upstairs into a room with muted lights, thank all the gods. Another nurse entered, checked me out to her satisfaction with pupil checks that sucked, questions that made me ache to answer, and finally some meds for the nausea and the headache. The nice, not Noah Wyle, doctor had told me I had a concussion sometime in the past days, weeks, hours. Time was wibbly wobbly to quote a famous Time Lord.
