Page 40 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

"Yes, ma'am," Beto says, and moves.

My hands are still shaking. My voice never heard about it.

They log-roll him to the board and he makes a sound through his teeth that I am going to hear at two in the morning for the rest of my life.

"Ma'am, we've got him," Randy says, gentle, the way you talk to family.

Family. I open my mouth to correct him.

Nothing comes out.

I climb in the rig. Nobody stops me. Nobody in this town would dare.

Beto's got the line in, Randy's calling County for ortho, and the doors are still open, rain blowing in, and Owen's hand comes off the board and finds my wrist.

Grips it. Hard. Fentanyl on board and his grip is still iron.

"Don't leave," he says.

He means the ambulance. He means ride along, stay in the rig.

That's what he means.

But his eyes are locked on mine and his thumb is pressed to my pulse like he's counting it, and the words go through me and hit something way, way down. Some floor I forgot my house had.

"I'm right here," I say.

The doors slam. The siren winds up. Beto calls a five-minute ETA and the rig rolls, and I sit there in soaked scrubs holding the hand of a man with his bone through his skin, a man who had half a second and spent it on me.

Eleven schools. A packed box in every closet I've ever had. Thirty years of leaving first because leaving first is tidier, and not one soul on this earth has ever put me down soft and taken the fall himself. e soul on this earth has ever, not once, put me down soft and taken the fall himself.

The monitor beeps. His grip doesn't ease.

And there in the screaming red dark of that ambulance, the truth lands on me heavier than any tree limb ever could.

He fell because of me.

Chapter twelve

Non-Weight-Bearing

OWEN

The ceiling has too many holes in it.

I count them because counting is the only thing my brain can do. Little gray dots in white tile. Fluorescent hum. There's a bag dripping into my arm and my right leg feels like it belongs to a bigger, angrier man.

"There he is." Tater's voice, thick with sleep. "Sleeping Beauty."

I turn my head. It takes a while. He's folded sideways in the visitor chair like somebody dropped him there from a height, boots on the rail of my bed, ball cap over half his face.

"How long," I say. My mouth is sand.

"Surgery was four hours. You've been out since." He tips the cap back. "You want the good news or the hardware list?"

"Hardware."

"Rod down the tibia. Plate on the fibula. Screws." He counts on his fingers. "Doc said you set off metal detectors now. Congratulations, you're the robot leg guy."