Page 35 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

The doors bang open behind us. Two more coming in, delayed presentations from the scene, a chest pain and a dizzy spell, and the night quits pretending it's over.

"You should go," she says, already moving.

"You short-handed?"

She stops. Looks at me a beat longer than the question needs. "Deb's out. Flu's got half the floor."

"Then I'm not going anywhere."

***

Here's what nobody tells you about the middle of the night in a small hospital. It runs on maybe six people and a coffee pot older than the engine we're raising money for.

I can't do nurse work. But I can lift, and carry, and hold a confused old man's hand while she draws his blood, and run to the pharmacy window, and stand in a doorway looking large when a drunk gets loud about his wait time.

Turns out I'm real good at looking large.

And here's the other thing. We don't fight. Not once, all night.

There's no time for it, but that's not why. It's the same thing that happened on Main Street with the little boy's arm, stretched out over six hours instead of six minutes. She says "I need," and my hand's already there with it. I move a gurney and she's turned sideways to let me through before I've said a word. Half sentences. Quarter sentences. A look across a bed that's a whole paragraph.

At two in the morning, she catches me watching her calm down a scared teenager, and she doesn't stop what she's doing, but the corner of her mouth moves.

At two-thirty I catch her watching me carry a sleeping toddler to radiology so his mama can fill out forms, and she doesn't look away.

We are in so much trouble, both of us. I know it the way I know a floor's about to go. You feel it in your feet before you hear it.

***

Three a.m. The board finally clears.

The dizzy spell's admitted, the drunk's sleeping it off, the chest pain was heartburn and a bad marriage. The lights in the back hallway are half-down, and the whole building breathes out at once.

I find her in the supply corridor.

She's standing at the shelving with a clipboard she isn't reading, and when I come around the corner she doesn't startle. Like she heard my boots and knew them.

"Restocking," she says.

"Uh-huh."

"It's a critical part of the job."

"Clipboard's upside down."

She looks at it. It is not upside down. She turns and glares at me and I'm already too close, and I don't remember crossing the space, and I don't think she remembers reaching out either, but her hand's got my sleeve and my back hits the shelving or hers does, I honest to God could not tell you which.

We stop with nothing left to stop.

Her forehead against mine. My hand's found the hem of her scrub top and closed into a fist in it, knuckles against her hip. Her fingers slide under the edge of my shirt and land on bare skin at my side, cool and steady, nurse's hands, and my whole body forgets what year it is.

"This is a bad idea," she whispers.

"Terrible."

"You're leaving in the fall."

"You're leaving in nine weeks."