Things You Save in a Fire(38)

But it didn’t. He was Big Robby’s kid. He’d practically grown up at a firehouse. He knew the honor of being pranked. He laughed every single thing off, and I never saw him look even mildly irritated. Pretend OJ made out of mac-and-cheese powder? Awesome. Mayonnaise on the toilet seat? Epic. Fake poop in his bed? Hilarious.

One morning, I convinced him to pee in a plastic cup and leave it on the captain’s desk.

“You don’t want to mess around with drug testing, man,” Six-Pack chimed in. “We all turned ours in at the start of shift.”

“You don’t want him to think you’re hiding something,” Case added, all casual, from his perch in front of the TV.

The rookie looked around at all of us, deeply suspicious. But he took the cup off the table and started to walk out. “Don’t forget to label it with your name,” Six-Pack called after him, and flung a Sharpie at his head.

Ten minutes later, the captain came busting into the kitchen. “Callaghan!” he bellowed.

The rookie looked up from making a sandwich. “Yes, sir?”

“Why is there a goddamned cup of lukewarm piss on my desk with your name on it?”

The rookie squeezed his eyes closed as we all fell out laughing. He suppressed a smile and then shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. I was told you were collecting urine samples today.”

“And who the hell told you that?” the captain demanded.

But the rookie didn’t rat us out. “I can’t remember, sir.”

With the crew, my strategy worked. But with the captain, it backfired. As soon as he stopped thinking of me as a rookie, he started wanting me to deal with the rookie.

Which meant he threw us together even more.

Especially since, in the wake of my opening a can of whoop-ass on Tiny in B-ball, I now had a new problem. Nobody wanted me to play hoops because I was too good.

Ironic.

Somehow, in the afternoons, just as any pickup game was starting, the captain would send me off to practice essential skills with the rookie.

Which meant the one guy in the world I was desperate to get away from was forced to spend hours every shift putting his hands all over me. Repeatedly. Slowly. For long periods of time.

While the guys shot hoops out back, I had to let the rookie check my spine alignment with the pads of his fingers—all the way up and all the way down, again and again. I had to let him splint my hands, my ankles, and my knees, and strap me to a backboard and put me in a C-collar, leaning across and brushing against me as he worked the straps. I had to take off my shirt and sit in my sports bra while he practiced placing EKG pads in the right order on my chest. And all the while, the closeness of him would wake up all my senses like static electricity. The mouthwatering scent of his laundry detergent and his general manliness would waft past me in relentless waves.

In my real life, I never let anybody touch me.

But the station was different. I could—and would—withstand anything for the job. Even a beautiful man touching my body.

It was torture, but not the kind I would have expected. In general, I didn’t let people touch me because it stressed me out to be touched. But, for some reason, the rookie had the opposite effect. The more he touched me—moving my hair back to check my C-spine, sliding the stethoscope over my chest and back, wrapping my arm with the BP cuff—the more I wanted him to touch me.

Weird.

Maybe it was the frequency of it. The captain really did make us practice a lot. Maybe we crossed some basic barrier of familiarity I’d never gotten to with anyone else, where I could relax into it.

Because, relax I did. At a certain point, all he had to do was pull out the EKG kit and my body started tingling like I was sinking into a hot bath. Full-immersion anticipation.

It was funny, because I’d done these things with other people in other trainings and it had never, not once, been so, um … evocative.

I guess context really matters. My crazy crush tinged even the most pedestrian interaction—passing in the hallway, eating dinner, practicing a blood draw—with electricity. Plus, that was just an effect the rookie had on people: He put everyone at ease.

It was so good, it was bad. It was so wonderful, it was terrifying. It was so delicious, it was awful.

And it just kept getting better—and worse.

It stirred up something ancient and powerful inside me—some unfamiliar longing I had no idea how to handle. And I hated things I didn’t know how to handle.

But how I felt about any of it wasn’t relevant. The captain said to teach the rookie everything I knew? I taught him everything I knew. The captain said to spend hours letting the rookie put his hands all over me for the benefit of the fire service? I did it. Chain of command. No questions asked.

Whether or not the rookie was turning my body into a symphony of emotion was not relevant.

No matter what, I gave it my all. I showed him how to make an eye-wash out of a nasal cannula and an IV bag. I helped him practice his bowline knot and his clove hitch. I taught him to operate the handheld radio with his left hand so he could take notes at the same time. I taught him that if a patient’s wearing too much nail polish for the pulse oximeter, you can turn it sideways to get the read.

I also taught him not to look into his critical patients’ eyes. Pro tip.

“Why not?” he asked.

“It haunts you,” I said, shaking my head a little. “It just haunts you.”