Page 170 of The Fire Line

Harris glared at Jay. “Some.”

“You’re both getting checked.”

Harris had no energy left for an argument he clearly wasn’t going to win. Another firefighter went toward Red while Rain remained loose beside them, exactly where she had chosen to stay, and Jay sagged a little more heavily against Harris.

Harris adjusted his arm around him and felt the solid warmth of Jay’s body, the movement of his breathing, the fact that when Harris shifted his grip Jay shifted with him.

Still here.

For now, that was enough.

28

Ash

The next thirty-six hours passed in fluorescent fragments.

Jay remembered oxygen being fitted over his face before he fully understood they had reached the hospital, somebody cutting away the burned edge of his shirt, and a nurse asking the same questions often enough that he eventually learned the answers by repetition. He remembered Harris disappearing behind a curtain with his hand wrapped in gauze and returning later with a proper dressing from palm to wrist.

Mostly, he remembered Harris.

Jay slept too much for the memories to arrange themselves properly. Sometimes he surfaced to find Priya beside the bed, or Della insisting he drink something, or Eli returning his phone after apparently fighting several people for possession of it. But whenever he woke after enough time had passed to leave him disoriented, his attention went first to the chair.

Harris had developed an impressive ability to pretend he wasn’t watching him. It might have worked on somebody who had not spent months studying the man for a living.

The mountain came back with less order. Heat against Jay’s face. Granite inches above him. Harris’s hand around his forearm while Jay tried to remember how breathing worked. The uneven rhythm of being carried uphill with his cheek against Harris’s back. Other pieces existed only as sensation: an arm beneath his shoulders during a coughing fit, fingers at the back of his neck, Harris’s voice close to his ear telling him not to talk and to breathe when he could.

And Come on, baby.

That remained inconveniently clear.

Jay had tried once to decide whether Harris had actually said it or whether his smoke-addled brain had improved the dialogue after the fact. The effort gave him a headache, so he stopped.

What he knew for certain was that Harris had been afraid.

Jay had seen him worried, angry, grieving and exhausted without ever seeing him lose the part of himself that knew what needed to happen next. Beneath the granite, that control had remained, but Jay had finally seen what existed underneath it. Harris’s hand had trembled against his face. His voice had changed whenever Jay stopped answering. Somewhere on the climb, in pieces Jay could not fully recover, the fear had become something raw enough that remembering it left him strangely unsteady.

He did not know what to do with that knowledge yet.

He knew only what it had felt like to wake and find Harris there.

During their first night in observation, a coughing fit brought Harris out of the chair despite the fact that he was supposed to be resting too. He stood beside the bed with one hand between Jay’s shoulder blades until it passed, then straightened the blanket with the grim concentration of a man completing an unpleasant chore.

“You know there are nurses,” Jay managed.

“I know.”

“They’re employed specifically for this.”

“Go to sleep.”

Jay did, mostly because arguing required functioning lungs.

Several hours later he woke to find Harris asleep in the chair, his bandaged hand resting against his chest. Even then he seemed to be guarding his injured side, his breathing shallower than usual and one boot planted firmly on the floor, as though some part of him had refused to relax even after exhaustion won.

Jay watched him longer than necessary and then closed his eyes again.

By late the following afternoon, neither of them needed anything the hospital could provide better than medication, rest, and instructions they were unlikely to follow properly. They spent the night at Elise’s mother’s house. Jay slept badly, woke coughing twice, and once heard someone moving through the hallway outside his room.