The brothers move through the aftermath efficiently, without ceremony, each man doing the thing that needs doing and finding the next thing. Recon is on the radio with Templar going over the perimeter report. Sisco is at his desk doing whatever Sisco does at four in the morning when the club needs its institutional memory running. West and Sting are in the lot cleaning up what Judge left out there, which is not a thing I'm going to think about too directly.
I sit at the long table with my laptop closed and my hands around a cup of coffee Kourtney pressed into them at some point, and I look at the wall.
I'm not shaking. That's the thing I keep noticing. My hands are steady, my breathing is even, the delayed reaction hasn't come and might not come at all. Seven years of field work teaches your body to save the falling apart for later, and later keeps not arriving.
Remy's blood is still in the creases of my palms. I washed my hands twice and can still feel the ghost of it there. I didn't look at her face while I worked on her. I looked at the wound, at where my hands needed to be, at whether the pressure was enough.
Looking at her face would have made it personal, and personal would have made it harder, and I learned that from photography. The minute you start seeing the person instead of the frame, your hand shakes.
My hand didn't shake. I keep coming back to that fact, turning it over, not sure what it means about me. Maybe nothing. Maybe it just means that seven years of teaching yourself to be useful in difficult situations produces something that looks like courage from the outside and feels, from the inside, mostly like focus.
Whatever it is, Remy is alive because of it. And whatever she thought of me before tonight, something shifted in her face when she looked up at me in the dirt, and something shifted in mine when she nodded from the infirmary cot, and neither of us needs to say what that was.
Judge is somewhere in the compound. I've been aware of his absence from the common room the way I'm always aware of him in any room: precisely, peripherally, the specific frequency of his presence that I've been cataloguing since the truck. He dealt with the aftermath and the debrief and then he disappeared somewhere, and the compound has been moving around the space he vacated without quite filling it.
I pick up my coffee and go find him.
The light is on under his door.
I knock once. He says come in, which means he knows it's me, because Judge doesn't say come in to people he isn't expecting.
His room is sparse. There’s nothing on the walls except a framed photograph of men in a place that looks like Afghanistan, all of them young and squinting into the sun. Six men.
His cut is on the back of the chair. His boots are by the door. He's sitting on the edge of the bed with his forearms on his knees, still in his clothes from the night, and he looks up when I come in.
The night is in the room with us. In the weight of his shoulders and the way his hands are clasped between his knees and the specific quality of his face right now. That face issomewhere else. What's here is the man underneath it, and he's been carrying something alone for the past three hours, and it shows.
I cross the room and push open the bathroom door.
"Shower," I say.
He looks at me. A long moment of it, the way he looks at things before he decides what to do with them.
"You've been carrying what happened tonight on you for hours," I say. "Shower."
Something in his face releases. Not relief, because Judge doesn't do relief visibly, but the specific thing that happens when a man who has been holding everything together is given permission to stop.
He stands. He goes into the bathroom, and I hear the water start.
I sit on the edge of his bed and look at the photograph. Six men squinting into the sun in a place that looks hot and flat and far from Mississippi.
Military, from the gear and the posture. Young, all of them. Judge is in there. I can see it, the specific way he holds himself that doesn't change, only gets more settled. I don't know who the others are or what the photograph means or why it's the only thing on his walls. I file it the way I file things I don't yet have context for: present, significant, to be understood later.
I think about Remy's face when she looked up at me in the dirt; the way shock moved toward something else, something that recognized what had just happened between us without either of us having to say it.
I think about Judge pulling me down behind the truck, placing himself between me and the remaining threat without hesitation, like the placement was already decided before the situation required it.
I stand up, take off my clothes, and go into the bathroom.
He's under the water with his back to me, hands flat against the tile, head down, and he's already stripped. Everything’s gone, just him and the steam and the water running down his back. He turned it hot. The room is thick with it.
He doesn't move when I come in. He knows it's me.
I reach past him and turn the temperature up another degree because the water should be hotter than that. Then I step in behind him, put my hands flat on his back, between his shoulder blades, and feel the tension in him. The whole night held in the muscles of his back, the specific tightness of a man who has been braced for hours and hasn't let go yet.
He turns.
He looks at me the way he looks at things he's already decided about completely, the deciding done. His hands come up and frame my face, thumbs at my jaw, and he looks at me in the steam with water running between us. I look back at him, and neither of us speaks.
