A very intentional, very generously proportioned toy.
Sitting right next to her reading glasses like the two items share a nighttime routine that I am absolutely, categorically not going to think about.
Is it also a vibrator? Because the shape suggests?—
STOP.
She is your patient. She is your chief. She is semi-unconscious with a fever and a nosebleed and you are NOT going to catalogue the specifications of her personal pleasure devices while she’s lying three feet away in YOUR shirt.
Get the glasses. Close the drawer. Maintain the shred of professionalism you have left, Torres.
I extract the glasses case with surgical precision, close the drawer with enough control that the contents don’t shift audibly, and stand with an expression that I have forcibly calibrated toneutral medical professionaldespite the fact that my brain is now running a background process I cannot terminate.
She’s reaching for them.
Halfway through the motion—her hand extended, fingers outstretched toward the case in my grip with the automatic expectation that I’ll hand them over because that’s how transactions between independent adults work. But I’m already moving, stepping forward and unfolding the frames with a fluidity that bypasses the handoff entirely.
I put them on her face.
Gently. One arm hooked over her left ear, then the right, the pads of my fingers brushing the damp blue hair at her temples as I settle the frames into position. The lenses are rectangular, slim, the kind of understated design that exists to be forgotten the moment they’re on—but on Hazel Martinez, they do the opposite. They frame her eyes in a way that sharpens the hazel-brown irises into focus, adding a dimension of vulnerability to features that are usually too guarded to permit any.
She looks up at me.
And the surprise on her face is so unfiltered, so completely shorn of the professional composure she wears like chain mail, that I feel it land against my sternum with the physical specificity of a hand pressing against my chest.
She wasn’t expecting me to do that.
She was expecting to take care of it herself, the way she takes care of everything herself, because the alternative—letting someone else handle something for her—isn’t in her operational vocabulary.
And you just…did it anyway. And she let you.
When she can see me clearly—when the lenses bring the world into the resolution her brain demands before it can fully engage—the confusion doesn’t decrease.
Itincreases.
As if seeing Deputy Oakley Torres sitting beside her bed at god-knows-what-hour-of-the-night in a town she didn’t choose with a fever she can’t control is somehowmoredisorienting than not being able to identify the blurred shape in the chair.
I smirk.
Can’t help it. The expression is as involuntary as breathing, the default response of a face that has never successfully maintained neutrality when the alternative is warmth.
“Alaric came to notify you about an incident at the station,” I explain, keeping my voice low, unhurried, the tempo of someonewho has nowhere else to be and no intention of making her feel like she’s behind on the briefing. “He was at your door. You answered. Then your nose started bleeding, and you passed out before you could get to your uniform.”
I let each sentence settle before offering the next, watching her process the information in real time—the flicker of memory returning in fragments, the slight tightening of her expression as the pieces reassemble into a timeline she’d missed from the inside.
“He caught you,” I add, because the detail matters, even if she won’t acknowledge why. “Alaric paged us. I came over to handle the medical side. Roman’s outside on watch.”
The deliberate relaxation of my posture—leaning back in the chair, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, hands resting in my lap with the easy stillness of someone who is not in crisis and is not going to create one—seems to have the effect I’m aiming for. She doesn’t tense. Doesn’t reach for the Glock I’d moved to the bathroom counter during the clothing change. Doesn’t deploy the eucalyptus frost or the sharp tongue or any of the defensive systems that she maintains during daylight hours.
She just…absorbs it.
I don’t rush her. Don’t fill the silence with unnecessary elaboration or the kind of hovering reassurance that people who are used to being in control find suffocating rather than comforting. I just sit. Present. Available. Unhurried in a way that communicates, louder than words:I’m not going anywhere, and there’s nothing you need to do about that right now.
When she finally speaks, her voice is a croak.
Exhaustion layered over dehydration layered over the raw aftermath of screaming into a towel—though she doesn’t know I know that, and I won’t tell her I do.
“I…passed out.” The words come slowly, each one costing effort, her throat working against the dryness. Her eyes searchmy face behind the rectangular frames, looking for…something. Confirmation. Judgment. The particular expression that people wear when they’ve witnessed someone’s weakness and are deciding how to use it. “And you…stayed?”
