He swears under his breath in Spanish, a word I’ve heard him say three times in my life: when his sister spun out on black ice in ninth grade, when my father’s heart stopped for nine seconds in the ambulance, and right now.
Captain coughs pointedly, not unkind. “Lovers’ quarrel later. Downhill now.”
Axel releases me, but not all the way; his palm stays at the back of my pack for the next fifty yards like he doesn’t trust the trail not to eat me if he blinks. I don’t tell him to stop. I like the feel of his hand there too much. I like the implicit claim in it. I hate that I like it. I keep moving.
The lot appears like a miracle. We load Evan into the ambulance, crank the heat, start warm fluids. His numbers climb, grudgingly. His face slowly loses the death shadow.
“Ride with him,” Axel says, and I don’t argue. He knows what I am in the back of a rig: stubborn enough to wrestle a body out of the dark. He also knows exactly how the inside of that box messes with me when our past is breathing down my neck.
I climb in. The doors close. The world becomes white noise and warm air and the measured beeps that let my shoulders drop a centimeter. I keep my hands moving, my words steady, the blanket tucked like it’s a promise I’m not breaking.
Through the small window, I watch Axel in the passenger seat of the engine pacing us down, eyes flicking to the mirror like he’s willing the ambulance to get there faster. Every time he looks back, he finds me. Every time I find him, my pulse does something that isn’t professional.
Devil’s Peak General swallows us and spits us back out twenty minutes later, Evan alive and cussing about pancakes. Captain claps his shoulder and promises him a lecture about jackets when he’s discharged. I wash my hands at the sink until the sting of the scrub matches the sting under my skin.
When I push out into the evening air, Axel is waiting on the side of the bay, one shoulder to brick, head tipped up like the sky wrote something he’s trying to memorize.
He straightens when he sees me. The look he gives me is not casual. It’s the kind of look that strips you to the bone.
“You okay?”
I nod that I am.
“You’re sure?” he says. No preamble. No flirting. Just the thing that matters.
“I’m sure.” My voice comes out low. “Thanks to you.”
His jaw ticks. He stares past me toward the ridge, eyes going dark in that way that says he’s replaying a dozen angles and none of them end with me on my feet.
“Axel.”
He looks at me. I step closer and stop where his heat touches my face.
“I had it until I didn’t. You had me when I didn’t. Thank you.”
His throat works. “Don’t make me watch that again.”
The words hit deeper than they should. I hear everything he didn’t say under them: I can’t lose you. Not like that. Not like anything.
“I’ll try to schedule all slips for your day off,” I say, aiming for light and missing by a mile.
He huffs; it sounds like pain trying to be a laugh. “I’ll just sleep in the trailhead lot.”
“You already drive by my house like a very handsome raccoon.”
He doesn’t smile. His eyes drop to my mouth. The air frays. Heat crawls up my neck that the hospital’s fluorescent bulbs never gave me. He steps in, not enough to touch.
“Say the word,” he says, voice rough velvet. “Tell me to back off and I’ll give you distance you didn’t know existed.”
“And if I don’t?” I ask, not backing up, not breathing right.
His nostrils flare. “Then I start making lists of ways to keep you warm that don’t involve hypothermia blankets.”
A short, shocked sound escapes me that might be a laugh if it didn’t shake like a warning bell. “Axel.”
Someone yells our names from the bay. Cole. Of course. The spell pops. We step apart a fraction, both of us breathing like we just ran the ridge again.
“Debrief,” Cole calls. “Then paperwork. Then I’m buying pancakes for this idiot when he’s cleared, and if either of you argues I’ll reassign you to hydrant checks for a month.”
