Page 55 of Faking the Heat

I close my eyes.

“I’m in love with her,” I say.

It comes out flat and quiet, and afterward my ears ring the way they do walking out of a loud room.

“Okay,” Becca says. She sounds like she has been holding her breath. “Okay. Good.”

“It doesn’t fix anything.”

“It wasn’t meant to fix anything. It was meant to be true.” A pause. “How does it feel.”

“Terrible.”

“Yeah,” she says, and I can hear her smiling. “That’s how you know.”

We stay on a few more minutes. She tells me about a resident who made her cry in a supply closet on Tuesday and how she intends to outlive him. I tell her about the Saint Sterling crown Jake made for me. She makes me describe it twice.

“Sterling,” she says, right when I think we’re done. “One more and then I’m going to sleep for three hours and die.”

“Go.”

“You called me tonight and not Jake.”

“Jake would have made it a bit.”

“Jake would have made it a bit,” she agrees. “But that isn’t why. You called me because I’m the only one left who knew you before you built the thing you’re standing inside.” Her voice goes soft in a way that is much harder to take than the scalpel was. “I have watched you keep a professional distance from your own life since I was fourteen years old. I would like very much to see what you look like when you stop.”

“That’s a hell of a note to go out on.”

“I’m extremely tired and I’ve stopped editing. Go to sleep.”

“You go to sleep.”

“I love you, you enormous idiot.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I love you too.”

The screen goes dark and the bunk room is just the exit sign and the ventilation and three men breathing.

I lie back down. Sleep isn’t coming and I know it the way I know when a roof isn’t going to hold, so I don’t waste effort fighting it.

Somewhere across the city there is a woman asleep in my bed with a cat on her feet and her parents down the hall, and in four days she is supposed to pack a suitcase and walk back tout of my life and back into her own, and I am supposed to carry the boxes down to the truck for her.

I stare at the water stain shaped like Lake Michigan.

Near three I get up and finish the report, because it has to be filed before shift change. I fill in the narrative box the way I always do. Times, vitals, interventions, disposition. Plain language, no adjectives, nothing a lawyer could use.

Patient stabilized. Transported without incident.

It is accurate. It is also the smallest possible quantity of the truth, which appears to be the thing I am best at in the world, and for the first time in six years of writing these I sit with my thumb over the submit key and understand exactly what I have been doing.

Chapter twenty-four

The Green-Eyed Monster

Mandy

The bass from the speakers in the engine bay is vibrating in my molars. It’s a physical, rhythmic thrumming that makes the red-plastic cup of lukewarm Miller High Life in my hand ripple with tiny, concentric circles. Firehouse 99 has been transformed into a chaotic, brightly lit cavern of community goodwill, smelling of rendered charcoal, spilled beer, and the heavy, lingering scent of industrial floor cleaner.