Page 16 of Second Alarm
He raises one finger. "One thing."
"No."
"It's not about us."
I open my mouth. I close it. "What."
"It's one thing I want to say, and it's not about us, and then you never have to hear it again."
"Is this a rule you're making up?"
"No. It's a request."
I shake my head. "You can't make requests. There's no subsection for requests in the rules."
"I'm making one anyway."
I stare at him. He stares at me. He's, I realize, exactly as scared as I am. He's just better at hiding it.
"Fine. One thing."
He looks at his hands. His hands are on the counter. He unfolds his fingers and folds them again, and he looks at them like the hands are the part of him doing the talking.
"You were right to leave."
This was not what I thought he was going to say. My stomach drops, and my chest feels heavy, and neither of those things should be happening because we have rules now. "What?"
"At the academy. You were right." He isn't looking at me.
"Ty — "
"I'm not — " He holds up a hand. "I'm not — it's not a negotiation. I'm telling you. You were right. I should've seen it then, but I didn't. I was twenty-three and I was in over my head, and you needed to go be who you were going to be, and the version of me that asked you to stay didn't understand that yet. I do now. I'm not asking for anything. I just — "
"Ty — "
"I thought you should know." He's quiet now, and still.
He looks up. His eyes are the same steady dark brown they've always been, and I'd like to put my face in my hands and scream about this for about an hour, but I'm a grown woman, and a paramedic, and I work here now.
The punchline I need isn't coming.
I can feel my mouth try to reach for it. My mouth, which has gotten me out of approximately ten thousand emotionally inconvenient moments over the course of my life, is reaching for something — anything — to make his face laugh, or move, or do anything other than what it's doing, which is looking at me plainly and honestly like a man who's just handed me his heart across a counter of shared kitchenware and isn't going to take it back.
Nothing comes.
The silence stretches. I open my mouth. I close it.
"Oh, no you don't." It comes out finally, weakly.
"What?"
"You don't get to — "
"I didn't — "
"You don't get to make a request and then ambush me with earnest."
"I told you what it was."
