Page 39 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

He's two rungs above me, boots still level with the gutter, when the gust comes out of nowhere.

The tarp corner rips loose with a crack like a gunshot, whips past my face, and I flinch, and the ladder feet skate on the wet gravel, and the whole world tilts.

Here's what I will remember for the rest of my life. He has half a second. Half a second, both of us falling, and I watch him choose.

He twists. Grabs my jacket with both fists and throws me. Not down. Up and sideways, onto the low slope of the porch roof, where I land on shingles and sliding and safe.

Owen takes the fall alone.

There's a sound. I hear it through the rain and I know it, because I've heard it in trauma bays, and it is never, ever good.

"Owen!"

He's on the flagstone path. On his back. Not moving the way people move when they're okay.

I don't remember getting off the roof.

Then I'm kneeling in the gravel and the nurse takes over, thank God, because Nellie is screaming somewhere in the back of my skull and the nurse is calm as church.

Airway clear. He's breathing. He's conscious. Pupils fine.

His right leg is wrong.

Lower leg, angulated, mid-shaft. And below the knee, through the soaked denim, white. Bone. Open fracture, tib-fib, the storm hitting it.

"Okay," the nurse says with my mouth. "Okay, sugar, don't move. Don't you move."

"Nellie." His voice is gray. His face is gray.

"Don't look at it. Look at me." I strip my jacket and pack it around the leg. My hands are shaking. My voice isn't. I don't know how the body does that. "Can you feel your toes?"

"Yeah."

"Wiggle them."

"They're wiggling."

"Good boy." I get my phone out. Water on the screen, three tries to dial. "This is Nellie Greer, I'm an NP at Willowbend General, I need a rig at 1287 Juniper Lane, adult male, open tib-fib fracture from a fall, alert and oriented, send them now."

I put the phone on speaker in the gravel and hold pressure and count his breaths and watch the rain wash pink off the stones and my heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth.

He's watching me. Fool man is smiling.

"Don't," I say.

"See?" It comes out thin. Broken through the pain. "Told you I'd catch you."

"Shut up. Shut up, Owen." My eyes are burning and it is not rain. "You didn't catch me, you idiot, you threw me at a roof."

"Same thing."

"It is not the same thing!"

"You're not hurt." He says it like a diagnosis. Like it settles everything. "So it worked."

The sirens come up Juniper Lane loud enough to feel. Lights turn the rain red, then blue, then red. Randy and Beto pile out with the gurney, and Randy sees who's on the ground and says a word his mama wouldn't like.

"Fall from about ten feet," I hear myself say. Steady. Flat. A stranger's voice using my mouth. "Open tib-fib, right leg. Distal pulses present. No loss of consciousness. He needs a splint, fluids, and fentanyl, and he needs County, not us. Move."