There's a beat, the kind where he's reading something in my voice and adjusting. "Picked up another extra shift. I'm about six minutes from the hospital. Why? What happened?"
"I need you," I tell him, and I don't dress it up or explain it or walk it back, because I am standing in a hospital parking lot in the cold after watching a baby come into the world blue and silent and fight her way into crying, and I don't have the energy for anything except the truth. "Can you meet me in the parking lot?"
"I'm already turning around." No hesitation, no questions, just that. "Stay on the phone with me."
"You don't have to?—"
"Molly." His voice is tight and forceful, refusing to let me be by myself in this moment. "Stay on the phone."
I stay on the phone.
I can hear him driving, the low sound of the radio cutting off, the signal light clicking, and he talks to me in an easy voice. “What can you see where you are?”
I know what he’s doing, making me ground myself. It’s something we learn as first responders. What can we see, feel, or hear? It takes us out of the panic, and puts us right into the present. “I’m walking from the ambulance bay. I can see the backside of the parking lot, the tower of the main hospital.”
“What can you feel?” His deep voice questions, and it causes goosebumps to rise on my arms.
“The cold air. I didn’t grab a jacket. My feet hitting the pavement as I get further away from the bay.”
“Don’t go too far,” he cautions. “Make sure I can find you. What can you hear?”
“The pounding of my own heart,” my voice cracks at the last word.
“Good, good,” he soothes. “You’re alive, Pretty Girl. That heart is beating for you, it’s calming you down, that’s why it’s pounding.”
Minutes later, he’s still talking to me as his SUV pulls into the ambulance bay, and he's out of it before it's fully stopped, crossing toward me with that long, purposeful stride, still in uniform, and he doesn't say anything when he reaches me. He just pulls me into him, one arm around my back and one hand at the back of my head, and I put my face against his chest and let him hold me together for a minute.
The parking lot is cold and the concrete is hard just like it was before, but now I can handle it. His uniform jacket smells like the outside air and something underneath it that is just him, and I breathe it in and feel the last of the tension in my shoulders finally give.
"You okay?" he asks, his voice low against the top of my head.
"I am now," I tell him, and that's the truest thing I've said all night.
Chapter 17
Dakota
She's scaring the fuck out of me. I have no idea what's gone on here tonight, and as soon as she called me, I started looking for dispatch calls from the hospital. There were none, so I'm still in the dark, but I'm not willing to push her on whatever this is. Whatever has her this fucked up, it can't be good.
"I'm here," I whisper as I hold her under one of the lights in the parking lot. "Just breathe. All you have to do is breathe and hold onto me, Molls. I got you."
She cries, and I can feel her sobs against my chest. This breaks my fucking heart, because I don't know what I'm trying to fix. But at the same time I know I have to let her get through this.
"Can we get in your SUV, back there in the parking lot, while I get myself together?" She says the words in between huge gulps of breath.
"Yeah, yeah, come on."
I hustle her into the passenger side of my patrol SUV and then drive to a corner of the parking lot. I turn the lights off, and tell dispatch I'm taking myself off calls for a period of time. Then I get out, and job around the front of the SUV, and open the passenger door. She collapses in my arms.
"A baby almost died on me," she sobs.
Before now, I'm not sure whether I ever truly realized how much her job affects her. I hear most of the good stuff, and she's never brought hard stuff home to me, but this? It's breaking my heart. "But they didn't die, right?"
"No, she's alive. They were taking her to the NICU."
"Okay, okay," I whisper, pushing her hair back from her face as I cup her cheeks in my palms. "You're coming down from the adrenaline high. You're okay," I soothe her. "Come with me."
I pull her out of the passenger seat, and then pop open the back door of the SUV. Ours are a little bit bigger than LSPD because we sometimes have to transport animals. So there's enough room for me to have a seat with my back against completely flush, and pull my legs in before I tug her down on top of me. There isn't space for her to straddle me comfortably, but I sit her on my lap, and tuck my face in the curve of her neck.