Page 52 of Faking the Heat

“Are you finished.”

“Not remotely. Go ahead.”

I rub a hand down my face and sigh.

“We slept together,” I say.

Becca does not say anything at all.

“A few nights ago,” I say, because the silence is worse than the saying. “And last night. And I don’t mean it was a mistake, or her parents were down the hall and we got carried away, or any of the six explanations you’re currently lining up. It wasn’t that. She’d had a bad day, I’d had a worse one, and I came home wearing the whole call and she took me into the shower and washed it off me.”

“Sterling.”

“She was searching up PTSD stuff before I got home, Bec.” My voice does something I did not authorize. “The she stood there and got the grit out from under my fingernails one hand at a time and she didn’t stop until the water ran clear, and I have not been able to think in a straight line since.”

“Okay,” she says, and everything sharp has gone out of her voice. “Okay. I’m awake now.”

I wait.

“Are you going to say something?”

“I’m choosing,” she says. “There are about four things I could say and three of them are for my benefit rather than yours, so give me a second.”

“Take your time. It’s only the middle of the night.”

“You called me.”

“I’m aware.”

She takes a breath. “Does she know how you feel?”

“No.”

“Does she know you’ve felt it for six years?”

“No.”

“Do you know you’ve felt it for six years?”

Delivered flat, at two in the morning, by a twenty-six-year-old who has been performing this exact procedure on me since she was old enough to notice I needed it.

“I had a call today,” I say instead.

“That isn’t an answer.”

“It’s adjacent to one. Anaphylaxis, high-rise, forty-first floor. Patient turns out to be a woman I saw for a few weeks last fall. Cassandra. And once she’s stable and pink again she puts her hand on my arm and asks me to come by after shift.”

“Charming.”

“And I felt nothing. Not guilt, not temptation, not the polite version where you’re flattered and you decline. Nothing. Like somebody had pulled a wire out of the back of me.”

“And that frightened you.”

“More than the call did, and the call had a closed airway in it.”

“Why?”

“Because that was the entire system,” I say. “That was the arrangement I have run my adult life on. Three weeks, a decent dinner, a clean exit, nobody’s feelings get stepped on, everybody goes home intact. I was good at it. Jake made me a certificate.”