Page 13 of Deacon

I reached Blue’s apartment mostly under control. Mostly.

She opened the door before I could knock a second time and needed only one look at me before she wrapped her arms around me. I let her. I had nothing left to hold myself upright with anyway.

Her apartment smelled like garlic, warm bread, and something sweet underneath it. The soft domestic warmth was so far removed from the hospital that it almost cracked me open again.

“Hey,” she murmured against my hair.

“Hey.”

Evan’s voice carried from the kitchen. “Welcome to Operation Unpack Today’s Chaos. I’m the morale officer.”

A laugh escaped me, or something close enough to pass, and that seemed to satisfy him.

Dinner helped.

None of us had much appetite, though Evan made enough noise about pasta and emotional-support garlic bread that Blue and I both ate more than we might have without him. Mostly, it helped because the evening carried the shape of normal life.

Plates scraped against the table. Silverware clinked. Evan talked with his hands while complaining about the vending machine options and the inability of straight men to communicate as though both were part of the same personal crusade. Blue rolled her eyes while stirring sauce, one hand occasionally drifting to the small of her back.

The familiar rhythm settled something inside me.

Later, we gathered on the couch beneath blankets and mismatched pillows, wearing softer clothes and looking frayed around the edges. I tucked myself between Evan and Blue, allowing their warmth to press against both sides of me.

Evan looked from one of us to the other, then clapped his hands once. “All right. We unpack the chaos now.”

Blue pointed at him. “You’re insufferable.”

“And yet indispensable.”

I pulled my feet beneath me and stared at the coffee table. The words already felt strange before I forced them out. “Okay. So. Jackson.”

Blue winced. “Deacon.”

I turned my head toward her. “You see the problem?”

A quiet huff of laughter escaped Evan, but his expression softened when he looked at me.

So, I told them.

Not every detail. Some were still too raw to drag all the way into the light, but I gave them enough. I told them about the gurney bursting through the ambulance bay, how I looked down, and my body recognized him before my mind caught up. I tried to explain what hearing Blue call him Deacon had done to me, how the floor seemed to shift beneath my feet while my hands continued working.

Saving him had felt like doing my job with one hand while the other fought to hold seventeen years of anger and heartbreak behind my ribs.

“I didn’t recognize him all at once,” I said. “It came in pieces. The shape of him first, then his face.”

Blue nodded slowly. “That’s how it happened for me too.”

Maybe she understood better than anyone else could.

Evan listened with unusual stillness, his eyes soft. “Okay,” he said, the humor stripped from his voice. “That’s a lot.”

“It gets worse,” Blue added.

We both turned toward her.

She told us what happened in the hallway with Priest.

Somewhere around the part where he grabbed her and kissed her, my hand found hers without any conscious decision to move. Blue squeezed hard enough to say everything she kept out of the story.