"There's a vet clinic two blocks south." Finn straightens off the doorframe. "Animal-grade painkillers. Same compounds, different packaging. I passed it on the ride in—front window's boarded but the side door looked flimsy."
I look at him. "You want to break into a vet during a hurricane."
"During the eye of a hurricane." He holds my gaze. "Tell me what you need and I'll get it."
He means it. He'd walk into that storm for a box of medication because I need it, and the simplicity of that offer sits in my chest like a stone I can't swallow around.
"Ketamine," I say. "Tramadol if they have it. Grab anything with a dosage chart on the label—I can calculate the conversion. And Finn." He stops in the doorway. "Be back before the eye passes. I mean it."
He grins. "Miss me already?"
"I'll miss your blood type if someone starts hemorrhaging."
He's gone before I can take the words back, and the clinic feels too big without him in it.
He returns in fourteen minutes with a bag stuffed with vials and a laminated dosage chart he pulled off the vet clinic's wall. Rain darkens his shoulders and plasters his hair flat against his neck, but the eye still holds—pale gray sky visible through the gap in the plywood over the front door.
I sort through the vials on the counter, checking labels, calculating conversions in my head. The ketamine is clean. The tramadol will bridge the gap between morphine doses. Dean Bradley will make it through the night without me choosing between his pain and someone else's emergency.
"This works." I line the vials up beside the morphine ampules. My hands tremble, and I flatten them on the counter. "This actually works, Finn."
"Good." He leans against the counter beside me. Close enough that his arm brushes mine. "You had that look."
"What look?"
"The one where you're doing math in your head and the answer keeps coming up wrong." His voice drops the teasing edge. "I don't like that look."
I squeeze past him in the doorway. His arm doesn't move. I have to turn sideways, and my shoulder drags across his chest, and his scent hits me full force—warm and deep and entirely inhuman. The one my hindbrain chases even when my forebrain screams at me to stop inhaling.
His henley hangs past my hips. Black and soft, the collar stretched. I should have changed hours ago. The supply closet holds extra scrubs. I didn't reach for them.
I know why I didn't. I'm not ready to name it.
The break room closes around us. Two cots eating up the floor, one narrow aisle between, the vending machine glowing blue-white in the corner, its compressor humming in the quiet. Finn follows me in and the room shrinks by half.
I drop onto my cot and press the heels of my hands against my eyes. Sixteen hours since the first patient came through the door. My shoulders ache. The adrenaline that carried me through the night drained out somewhere around four AM and left nothing behind but a bone-deep exhaustion.
"You should sleep," he says.
"Can't."
"Jess—"
"If I close my eyes right now, I'll hear it." I don't mean to say it. The words fall out of me the way confessions do when you're too tired to hold the door shut—loose and unguarded, landing in the quiet between us like shrapnel. I drop my hands from my face, and Finn stands a few feet away with an expression I've never seen on him. No charm. No humor. No deflection.
"The convoy," I say, because apparently my mouth has disconnected from the part of my brain that knows how to shut up. "Every time something hits the roof, I'm back in that vehicle. Twelve hours of holding it together and my body still thinks a falling branch is an IED."
He doesn't move toward me. Doesn't reach for me. He crouches down the way he did during the flashback—bringing himself to my eye level instead of towering over me—and rests his forearms on his knees.
"The last guy I was with told me that my PTSD was too much to handle." The words taste bad. "The nightmares, the flinching, the way I'd freeze in a parking lot if a car backfired. He stuck around for four months and then he said I was exhausting to love." I stare at the floor between my boots. "He wasn't wrong."
"Hewaswrong."
"You don't know that. You've seen one flashback, Finn. One bad night. There are hundreds of them. They don't stop. They don't get smaller or easier. And eventually everyone gets tired of—"
"I love you."
The words hit the air between us and detonate.
