Page 49 of Love Again

Another deep cough sprayed the inside of the mask red. I ripped the mask off and wiped it with two sanitary wipes while she gripped the inside of the cab with one hand and tried to fix her gaze on something. The mask now clean, I pressed it to her face again, and we resumed our positions: me leaning against the truck and holding her head with two hands, and her, sitting on the edge of the track seat, her feet not touching the ground. She was almost completely limp.

Her breath started coming more evenly in about fifteen minutes. I had to swap the canisters. She managed by herself in the half minute it took to swap out the oxygen.

We did all of this one more time. At one point, she opened her eyes and looked directly at me, and that was when I saw those emerald greens—beautiful shards of mossy glass staring up at me. She raised a hand and put it over mine, the one that was holding the mask face, head nodding.

She was good. She wanted me to keep driving.

But I didn’t quite buy it.

Smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning can be lethal later. I didn’t have a pulse oximeter, either, and even if I did, it wouldn’t measure carbon monoxide. She could still be very sick, and I didn’t know what the blood was about. If she had fallen, she might have been suffering internal injuries and could have been bleeding out. Her trachea could have been burned. I had to get her to a hospital.

She started to slowly slide out of the truck. This time, when her boots hit the ground, she swayed slightly, but she was standing on her own at least.

The whole time, I hadn’t let go of her and she hadn’t let go of me. She tried to lift the mask from her face and I obliged.

Her voice was a whisper. “I need to get out of my pants.”

I handled the mask but let her guide it back to her face. Then she took both hands and held it there. I let go and kneeled, starting to work on removing her boots. The laces were almost completely fried, and the metal on one buckle was warped. She was in high heat.

I pulled both boots off, and again, was stunned by how small her feet were.

She stood again, one hand still pressing the mask to her face, the other on my shoulder, and I worked the top buckle at her waist. I unzipped her pants and she sat back down as I pulled them off, holding each leg. Her bare legs were well muscled and . . . beautiful. Her panties were white athletic cotton—nothing fancy. Why should they have been? Mine weren’t.

We were almost out of time with the canister, and I had to swap it out before we continued to the ER.

After reaching around for a third canister, I came back to her slumped against the seat, but at least the coughing had switched from hard and continuous to weak and intermittent.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

Her eyes rolled slightly, then opened lazily. “Devon,” she said, her voice a husky whisper.

“Full name.”

“Devon Russo.”

“Okay, Devon Russo. I’m Luke Walker.” I waited to make sure this registered.

She nodded.

“I’m going to check your mouth for burns. We need to figure out why you’re bleeding. I’m going to walk right over there to that stream and take this towel and wet it for you. You need to drink some water before we head to the hospital. Do you understand me?”

She nodded again and sat up straighter and gave me a determined look. She was signaling she didn’t need to be babied. We all do this.

Women in male-dominated fields have to be tougher than the guys. They feel as though they have so much more to prove because we made them feel that way.

Devon Russo didn’t have to prove anything to me, though. She just had to live.

΅

The ride to the hospital was long, and I had to stop for gas. Though she had no burns on the inside of her mouth, I could not ascertain why she was coughing up blood. I had to clean the mask several times on the ride in, and she ended up coughing into the damp towel. She took one corner that was still clean and put it over her mouth for a while and breathed the cool moist air in.

I’d done the same myself once before and hoped it was giving her the same relief it had given me.

They kept her overnight and released her in the morning, but I didn’t leave. I was off shift anyway, and my warden said I had a full forty-eight-hour break before I had to come back.

When the triage doctor returned, he said she’d broken blood vessels in the back of her throat from coughing so hard, but there was no permanent damage, and she wasn’t bleeding internally. The sense of relief that washed over me was more than I should have felt for someone I had just met.

There was something about Devon Russo.