Oliver is swaying on his feet by the time we close his brother. I’m fine, clear-headed and alert, until we stitch Alex up and let the nurses take over. Exhaustion hits me like a brick wall to the face as soon as my responsibility to my patient is over, though. I feel drunk as Oliver and I strip off our surgical gloves, masks and gowns and throw them in the HAZMAT bins.
Outside the OR, Oliver loses it. His composure abandons him as he slides down the wall and begins to cry. “Oh my god. Olly, he’s gonna be fine. You did a good job. Hey, don’t worry.” I crouch down and wrap my arms around him, holding him to me as his body shakes. I know this meltdown isn’t about fear for Alex’s safety. The guy should be okay, providing nothing awful happens. This is just shock. The pressure of having to keep himself together for so many hours has taken its toll.
“Thank you. Thank you. I wouldn’t have trusted anybody else,” Oliver says, drawing in a deep breath. “Fuck, this is stupid.” He dashes away his tears with the backs of his hands, and then heaves himself to his feet. His face reddens a little when he looks back over my shoulder. “I think I’ve monopolized enough of your time, Romera. Looks like you’re needed elsewhere.”
Zeth is leaning against the wall down the corridor, hands in his pockets, watching us. He looks down at his feet when he sees he’s been spotted.
“Yeah, I swore I’d be home for Christmas day,” I say.
“Then you should go.” Oliver gives me a gentle shove in the back.
I really should, too. Zeth has never once broken a promise he’s made to me. I aim on honoring my promises right back. “If anything happens, you know you can just call me right away,” I tell Oliver.
“I do.”
“Okay. I’ll see you in a couple of days, Ol.” I head off down the corridor, but he calls out to me, stopping me before I reach Zeth.
“Hey, Romera?”
“Yeah?”
He gives me a halfhearted, weak smile. “Merry Christmas, right?”
“Yeah. Merry Christmas, Ol.”
Zeth
She looks like she’s ready to pass the fuck out. I think I’m gonna have to catch her when she collapses against me, face pressed into my chest, but I don’t. She’s just tired and leaning on me. I fold my arms around her and hold her up anyway, because that’s what I’m here for. Always. Being there for her to lean on will be my primary job from now and until the day I die, and boy do I have a serious case of job satisfaction.
“You okay?” I breathe into her hair.
She nods, grunting something inaudible into my leather jacket. I kiss her on the top of her head, smoothing down the strands that have escaped her ponytail.
“I’m taking you home now, angry girl. You got anything to say about that?”
She looks up at me, eyes already drooping, and gives me a lazy smile. “I say thank god for that.”
She falls asleep in the car, forehead pressed up against the cold glass of the passenger window, and I can’t fucking help myself. At every available opportunity, I find myself looking at her out of the corner of my eye. I need to make sure this miraculous woman is real.
I saw it the first time at Julio’s compound when Carnie brought Alexis in and laid her out on the table. Sloane was a force of nature, unstoppable and single-minded as she worked over her sister’s broken body. She’d saved Alexis’s life when she would have died otherwise, no two ways about it. Watching her then had taken my breath away. The same thing happened tonight, watching her work over the guy on the table in that operating room. She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t stop and she did not once give up. Not even when the chief of medicine, sitting next to me, had started swearing like a marine when the guy had coded not once but twice.
My angry girl is a fucking hero.
The ugly ass Hummer Rebel left behind with us in Seattle struggles to make it up the narrow, winding road to our house as we leave the city. Snow coats everything—the road, the trees, the mountains in the distance. The whole world is white under the headlights of the car as I drive us back to the warmth of home.
She’s still sleeping when I pull up outside. I don’t have the heart to wake her, so I take off my jacket and put it over her as I lift her out of the car and carry her carefully inside.
The fire’s gone out, but Ernie’s still coiled up in a ball in front of the embers. He lifts his head when we come inside, but he doesn’t bark. Terrible fucking guard dog he’d make. I think we’ve accepted the fact that Ernie’s more likely to studiously ignore an intruder than attack them.