“Oh,” I whisper, because that’s all I have.
“I was months in,” he continues, his fingers curling tighter around the paintbrush, knuckles whitening. “Early mornings. Long nights. Running drills until my lungs felt like they were on fire. Studying until I couldn’t see straight.”
I can see it, and it makes my heart swell. Younger. Determined. Hopeful. Standing at the starting line of a life he trulywanted.
“I wanted it so bad,” he says, quieter now.
My chest aches with a dull pain as I press my lips together, afraid that if I speak, I’ll cry, and somehow that feels wrong. This isn’t about my tears.
“I thought I was right there,” he murmurs. “Right at the beginning.”
My heart cracks open.
“I never got the badge,” he goes on. His jaw tightens, as if the words hurt to say. “Never got to call myself one. Never got the chance to find out if I was any good.”
He finally looks at me then, and the grief in his eyes steals the air from my lungs.
“It ended before it really began.”
I swallow hard, my eyes stinging. “Reed…”
He shakes his head slightly. “I don’t really talk about it,” he says.
The lake is impossibly still as the paint sits untouched between us.
Everything feels suspended in that space between what was and what never got to be.
He drags in a breath, his shoulders rising and falling as he steadies himself.
His gaze drifts back to the water, his voice lowering. “It was supposed to be routine,” he says. “A containment drill. We’d done versions of it a dozen times.”
The breeze shifts the surface into broken ripples, and he watches the movement, dragging his hand over his jaw.
“Then we heard this hiss.” His eyes flick back toward the lake, and I notice the way he tightens his fingers around his knee, gripping the fabric as he relives this horrible memory.
I sit there patiently, watching him take deep breaths before he continues.
“We hit the floor hard, as the fire quickly grew. We couldn’t see a damn thing through the black smoke.” He pauses, swallowing thickly. “Both our SCBAs were blaring, alerting us we were low on oxygen.”
His dog tags clink against each other as he reaches up, enclosing his fist around them.
“Beau, my best friend, tank’s went dead first. I tried to give him mine, ripped my mask off, even though the heat was already scalding my skin.” His voice roughens, guilt rubbing with every syllable. “He pushed it back. Told me to go.”
He looks down at his scarred hand, and suddenly he seems impossibly breakable.
“I grabbed him, I wasn’t about to leave him there.” His next breath shakes. “But the ceiling collapsed, knocked me back, and when I looked up…”
He closes his eyes, blowing a shaky breath past his lips.
“All I could see was his helmet, burning, then the smoke engulfed the last piece of him I had.”
He reaches for his dog tags around his neck, again, twirling the metal chain. “His mother gave me these at his funeral; he served before he joined the academy. She said that he would have wanted me to have them.”
I finally set my brush down carefully. My hand moves toward him before I’ve entirely made the decision, and when my fingertips touch the scarred skin on his left forearm, his entire body becomes still.
The texture surprises me.
“Does it still hurt?” I ask quietly.
