The man in bay four was seventy-eight years old and had been married for fifty-one of them. Megan knew that because his wife kept saying it, out in the hallway, to anyone who would stand still. Fifty-one years. Fifty-one years in June.
They worked him for forty minutes. Terrence had brought him in, kneeling on the stretcher doing compressions while his partner drove, and when they crossed the threshold he didn’t step back the way most medics did. He stayed. He traded off compressions with Megan and the resident until his navy uniform shirt was soaked dark down the spine, and when Dr. Patel finally looked at the clock and said the time, Terrence was the one who put his big hand flat on the old man’s chest for a second, like a goodbye.
Megan went out and told the wife with Dr. Patel. She held the woman’s papery hands while she folded in half. Then she charted, restocked, took two more patients, and at six forty in the morning she walked out through the ambulance bay doors into the cold and stood there, not crying, just breathing.
It was the last week of October. The sky over the parking garage was going from black to bruised violet, and somebody had taped a paper skeleton to the bay doors. Medic 9 was backed into the far slot with its rear doors open. Terrence sat on the bumper with a cup of vending-machine coffee, steam curling past his face.
“Hey, Doyle,” he said.
“Hey, Hollis.”
For seven months it had been like this. Jokes at the bay. Him bringing her the good coffee from the place on Fifth when he knew she was on. Her sending him back out with a granola bar shoved in his breast pocket and a hand on his chest a beat longer than it needed to be. Thirty-five, six-foot-three, skin a deep warm brown, a short beard he kept neat and a voice so low it seemed to come up through the floor. Half the nurses had a crush on him. Megan had a crush on him and had decided, firmly, at thirty-two, that she was too tired to do anything about it.
He held out the coffee. She took it and sat on the bumper beside him, their shoulders touching.
“You okay?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “You?”
“No.” He rubbed his face. “He looked like my grandpa. Same hands.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder. He smelled like smoke and sweat and the cold. After a minute he said, very quietly, “I’m off till Thursday.”
“I’m off till Wednesday.”
“I live eight minutes from here.” He didn’t look at her. “I make really good eggs. That’s all I’m saying. Eggs.”
Megan laughed for the first time in twelve hours. Then she lifted her head and looked at him until he looked back.
“Terrence,” she said. “I don’t want eggs.”
His place was the top half of an old brick two-flat with radiators that knocked and a kitchen that faced east. The sun was just clearing the rooftops when they came in, laying long orange stripes across the floor. He dropped his keys in a bowl. She dropped her bag by the door. Then they stood there in the kitchen in their work clothes like two people who’d forgotten how this part went.
“I’m disgusting,” she said. “I’ve got God knows what on me.”
“Shower’s down the hall.” He swallowed. “I can wait.”
“I didn’t say I wanted you to wait.”
He crossed the kitchen in two steps. She had imagined this kiss for months, in break rooms, in her car, in bed alone at noon with the blackout curtains drawn, and every version had been wrong. It wasn’t urgent. It was slow and searching and almost careful, his hand coming up to cradle the back of her head, his thumb tracing behind her ear. He kissed her like he was asking a question and wanted to hear the whole answer. She answered by fisting both hands in the front of his shirt and pulling him down.
He lifted her onto the counter like she weighed nothing. Her thighs opened around his hips and she felt him through his uniform pants, hard and heavy and pressing right where she was already aching, and she made a sound into his mouth she’d never made in her life.
“Shower,” he said against her throat, half laughing. “Shower, Megan, or I’m gonna take you right here on the counter.”
“Is that supposed to be a threat?”
The shower was hot and small and they barely fit. She peeled his soaked T-shirt off and put her hands on his chest, her pale fingers spread across dark wet skin, and looked down, and lost her breath.
She’d heard the jokes at the station. She’d assumed they were jokes. He was already hard, jutting up toward his stomach, long and thick and so heavy it curved with its own weight, the skin dark and smooth under the running water. She wrapped her hand around him and her fingers didn’t meet.
“Oh,” she said faintly. “Oh, that’s—Terrence.”
“We go slow,” he said, his voice gone rough. “Or we don’t go. Your call. Always your call.”
She looked up at him through the steam. “I want to,” she said. “I really, really want to.”
He laid her down on his bed with the sun coming through the blinds in gold bars across her stomach. He took his time. He kissed down between her breasts and sucked her nipples until they were tight and flushed and she was arching off the sheets. He kissed the soft inside of each thigh. Then he put his mouth on her and kept it there, broad slow strokes and then a tight, patient circle, his big hands pinning her hips flat, until her toes curled into the comforter and her thighs started to shake against his ears.
“Don’t stop,” she begged. “Please—right there—don’t—”
He didn’t. He slid one thick finger into her, then two, curling them, and she came apart with her hand clamped over her mouth and her heels drumming the mattress.
He reached for the nightstand. The condom looked strained on him. He knelt between her knees and she propped herself up to watch, because she wanted to remember this—the dark, swollen head of him resting against her pink, wet opening, the sheer size of him against the pale curve of her thigh.
“Look at me,” he murmured.
He pushed in slowly. The stretch was immediate and enormous, a hot burning fullness that stole her breath and made her eyes sting. She gripped his forearms. He stopped and waited, kissing her face, her eyelids, her mouth, until she nodded, and then he gave her more, and more, rolling his hips in shallow patient waves while she gasped and opened around him.
“God,” she moaned. “God, you’re so big. I can feel you all the way—”
“You’re doing so good,” he breathed. “So good, baby.”
When he was finally all the way in she was trembling everywhere. He held still, buried deep, his forehead against hers. Then he began to move—long, slow strokes, almost all the way out and all the way back in, so deep she felt it in her stomach. Every thrust pulled a moan from her throat. She wrapped her legs around his waist and dug her heels into the backs of his thighs, and he groaned and went faster.
He rolled them so she was on top. She sank down on him an inch at a time with her palms on his chest, her mouth open, until she was sitting fully on him, stuffed so full she could barely breathe. She started to ride him. Slow at first, then harder, her breasts bouncing, her hair falling loose across her face, his hands gripping her hips and pulling her down to meet every upward thrust. The headboard knocked the wall. Pale skin on dark. The wet, filthy sound of him sliding into her over and over.
“Megan,” he groaned. “Megan, I’m close—”
“Me too—don’t stop—don’t stop—”
The second orgasm hit her so hard her whole body locked. Her thighs clamped and shook around his hips and she clenched down on him in long, rhythmic pulses, crying out his name. He flipped her onto her back and drove into her deep and steady through all of it, until he buried himself to the hilt and came with a long, broken groan against her neck, his big body shuddering over hers.
She woke at two in the afternoon to the radiator knocking and the smell of butter.
He came in carrying two plates. Eggs. She laughed so hard she had to sit up, holding the sheet to her chest, and he grinned and sat on the edge of the bed.
“I told you,” he said. “Really good eggs.”
They ate with the plates on their knees. Halfway through, he set his fork down.
“That man last night,” he said. “Fifty-one years. I keep thinking about his wife. Who she’s gonna have breakfast with now.” He looked at her. “I’ve been working next to you for seven months, Megan. I don’t want this to be a one-shift thing. I want to be the guy who makes you eggs after the bad nights. And the good ones.”
Her throat went tight. She thought about the old woman in the hallway. Fifty-one years in June.
“Okay,” she said. “Yeah. Okay.”
He kissed her. Outside, the late-October light lay low and golden across the rooftops, and neither of them had anywhere to be until Wednesday.
