When we got back to the firehouse, I went over the van, cleaning up the trash from this call, and replacing every item that we’d used. I’ve got a lot of obsessive-compulsive traits, which made this an ideal calling for me. If we rolled out on a call with ten bags of IV fluids and we used one? No, it was not OK to roll out on the next call with nine. We rolled with ten, always, because that’s how it was done on our van.

Andrew and I had been partners for six months now. As the paramedic, he was the boss – the guy with far deeper and more technical medical training than I had.

When I landed at Seattle Fire Station 42, I’d been an EMT for all of six months, the ink hardly dry on my certification as far as seasoned pros were concerned. And I knew I was going into a world of shit, whether I had six months experience or six years.

The Seattle Fire Department had always paired two medics on a van, but as an experimental budget-cutting measure, the city government had decided to see if they could replace one medic with a cheaper EMT. Fortunately for me, they had to wait until one medic quit, so nobody got fired because of me.

I know that everyone at the station was rooting for the experiment to fail – after all, this is the kind of shit that foreshadows union busting, wage collapse, et cetera. But I knew it was more than that, it was something about me personally, that made the Captain hate me on sight.

I know we’re not supposed to call ourselves “straight acting and appearing,” yeah yeah, I know, self loathing homophobia la la. But I’m… a dude. I had always buzzed my hair with a #2 attachment, because I hate wasting time in the morning on stupid shit like playing with my hair. That was long before I learned that you don’t want long hair in the field, because then you’re just giving some cracked-out motherfucker something to grab onto.

I haven’t been to a “coat and tie required” restaurant since senior prom in high school. I have ten pairs of Nike Fingertrap Max shoes, because they’re the bounciest shit ever and I buy more on eBay every time I can, with no plans to buy any other shoes than those, ever, other than the boots I wear on the job. So there was nothing about me that remotely signaled metrosexual, never mind gay.

But, somehow, Captain Asshole figured me for it. It was as inappropriate and forbidden as all get out, but he clearly said these things as a test on the FNGs for his own satisfaction.

“If you want to get along here, you better work like a demon and cook like a faggot.”

Andrew’s not the only one with rage issues. It’s like a poker tell, you know; you can keep your face neutral but your pupils give you away. And I had no poker face.

So he knew how mad it made me to hear the F word. And he nodded, pleased with himself.

“You’ll be paired with Hazard.” Then he grinned and walked off.

Casey, my EMT partner on my old job, had just shaken his head when I put in my notice and told him where I was going.

“You’re fucked, man.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re only pairing the trial EMTs with one medic. You never heard of Andrew Hazard?”

“No.”

“He’s a fucking dick. He’s gone through seven EMTs in the six months of this trial program.”

I frowned. The last thing I needed was some little tinpot dictator know-it-all pushing me around. For the first time in my twenty years of life, I was skilled labor now, dammit. I’d gone to EMS school so I’d never have to work retail again, or customer service, or otherwise have to get treated like shit by people for a living.

(Little did I know at the time how very ungrateful some of the folks on my future calls would be.)

I’d arrived three hours early on my first day. And it was a good thing, too. An hour later, I was in the back of my assigned van, double checking, triple checking that we had enough oxygen, masks, fluids, meds, trauma dressings et cetera for a whole shift.

That was when I felt someone behind me. Maybe that’s bullshit, maybe you can’t “feel” someone, maybe it was just my body alerting me to a change in the heat behind me, my ears relaying soft breathing I couldn’t hear consciously, my nose picking up a subtle scent.

But I’m telling you, I felt him. Before I turned around the first time, some part of me was already in love with Andrew Hazard.

He was beautiful. Tall, strong, with dark hair and dark eyes that were all the more stunning against his pale skin – Black Irish, they called it, the legacy of the Spanish influence in Ireland. His uniform fit like it had been tailored to him, his shirt crisply ironed, a white t shirt exposed by the single undone button at his neck.

He was mad. His nostrils were flared, his mouth was turned down, and a vein was pulsing in his forehead. And I hadn’t done anything yet, never mind anything wrong.

“Get out of the way,” he growled, and I shivered. His voice sounded like he ate gravel for breakfast, deep and rumbling. He jumped up into the back of the van, both feet at once, like a athlete doing box jumps in the gym. He shouldered me aside, and I was torn between getting pissed off at the abuse and getting turned on by the feel of him – just a brush of hot steel deltoid against my own, his movement just brusque enough of a shove to be rude without hurting me.

His eyes traveled over everything in the patient compartment. He opened drawers, and counted electrode packs, trauma dressings, catheters, hot packs, cold packs. He snapped a glove on his right hand and looked under the stretcher, and ran his finger over the floor beneath it.

“Meds,” he said roughly.

“Fully restocked, I got the report from the last crew on what they used up, and double checked it.”

“Expirations.”

“Double checked. Dates are all good.”

“Gas.”

“Full tank.”

Finally he looked at me, scornful and disbelieving. “This rig was out for 24 hours.”

“I got here an hour ago, took it out, and topped off the tank.”

“Hmm.”

Honestly, I think that it irritated him more that I hadn’t done anything wrong (yet), than it would have if I’d fucked something up.

Then he turned around, jumped out of the van, and walked away.

I knew I’d passed his first test. I’d bet my left nut all the other poor bastards who hadn’t lasted a month as his EMT had forgotten something their first morning, or had come in just in time for shift, with no time to double check every single thing on the daily inspection checklist.

Our first call together was a cardiac arrest. Of course, right? It couldn’t be an easy one.

The thing about a call is that one minute you’re sitting there, reading a magazine, or watching a movie, and the next you’re in motion, practically flying. I was too anxious to relax while waiting for calls, and too new to take anything for granted, and I knew better than to act like I was already “one of the guys.” I knew I couldn’t just take a seat on the couch with them and chill.

I sat at the kitchen table and read back issues of JEMS online, while the firefighters laughed it up at some Jim Carrey movie. Andrew was nowhere in sight.

The alarm rang for “ambulance only,” and I scrambled to the van. Somehow, from being nowhere, Andrew was already buckled into the passenger seat when I got in.

We hauled ass to the location. Andrew said nothing until we got into a particularly hairy traffic situation. As I was honking and trying to force a panicked, indecisive driver to get out of the way, Andrew asked out of the blue, “What’s on the far left on the second shelf of the medicine cabinet?”

“Narcan,” I replied automatically, checking the side mirror for any idiots who might be thinking about trying to pass me, taking advantage of stopped traffic. Seriously, you never know. “Preloaded intranasal doses.”

“How many?”

“Three,” I answered as I finally got past the car that had been blocking us.

“Is that enough?”

“Statistically? More than three opiate overdoses on one shift is highly unlikely.”

“Not in Seattle,” Andrew said grimly.

I nodded as we pulled up to the scene. “I’ll double it.”

* * *

I knew from my reading that you can tell just from looking at the people at the scene if the patient is alive or dead. They walk around shocked, crying, holding each other if it’s too late. They swarm you if it’s not, urging you to hurry even as they slow you down.

“It’s our dad, he’s dying! Help him!”

I was stunned when Andrew got out of the cab and raised his hands to stop the onrushing relatives.

“Hold on, everybody, show us where your dad is.” His voice still had that deep, rock-tumbler vibrato to it, but the rocks were polished now, warm and smooth and soothing. It was the complete opposite of the tone he’d always used with me.

We went into the living room, where a man in his mid-sixties was sprawled on the couch, his color ashen, his breathing shallow. His wife was crying, sitting next to him, holding his hand as he clutched it to his chest. He looked up at her with wide eyes, some part of him already saying goodbye.

“Ma’am, let us get to him, okay?” His eyes just flicked at me, and I knew what I had to do. I gently took the wife by the arm and helped her up and away from her husband the patient.

Andrew got on his knees next to the couch. “How are you doing, sir? What’s your name?”

“Andrew.”

“Hey, that’s my name, too. What were you doing when the pain started?”

“I was working on the… ow. Car.”

“What’s the pain like, is it dull, or sharp?”

He turned to me to ask for aspirin and glyceryl trinitrate, but I already had them in my hand.

“We’re going to get you to the hospital now, alright?”

“I don’t want to die.”

“You aren’t going to die. You know why?”

The old man looked up at him, eyes wide, dubious, curious. “No…”

Andrew’s eyes were solemn, holding the other Andrew’s gaze. “Because tonight when I got to the firehouse, before I walked in to start my shift, I looked up at the stars, and I said, ‘Nobody dies tonight.’ And when I do that, nobody dies on me.”

“Really?”

Andrew nodded, putting his big left hand gently on the man’s chest as if he was a faith healer. “Really.”

Absurdly, I found myself looking at Andrew’s hand, to see if there was a wedding ring. There wasn’t.

We loaded the patient into the back, and I got in the driver’s seat. I would run lights but not sirens; we’d do nothing to stress the patient out if we didn’t have to.

Just as I was ready to pull out, I heard Andrew mutter. “Shit. Fuck. Sorry, sir.”

I turned around. Andrew was struggling to get the IV in. No surprise; he was an old guy, with old skin, shrunken veins, and poor circulation.

“I got it,” I said, jumping in the back and taking over without asking his permission. He rolled out of the way, knowing better than to argue in front of the patient, but I could feel his dubious eyes on me, ready to shove me out of the way if I fucked it up.

I got the IV in on the first try. Don’t ask me how. They called me “The Vein Whisperer” in EMT school – it was like I just knew. Everybody’s got their median cubital vein in a different place in the crook of their arm, and some are bigger or better than others, and sometimes you just have to find a different vein. But nine times out of ten, unless the veins were all collapsed, I could hit it, even the shyest ones. Old, young, junkie, whatever, I could find the one good one, and get it in, even if it was below the tough skin on the top of the hand.

Andrew looked at me like I was a real person for the first time. “Let’s get going.”

I flew back into the driver’s seat and pulled out, listening to Andrew calmly radioing in the details to the ER.

I’m sure some people were pretty damn shocked to see an ambulance flying past them, lights on, with the driver grinning like a maniac.

* * *

“Do you really do that?” I asked him after we’d delivered the patient to the ER. “Talk to the sky every night?”

He looked at me for a minute, confused. Then realization dawned on his face and he looked at me, confused.

“Don’t you?”

“I… um…”

He laughed. “I’m fucking with you. Hell no. That’s some Hollywood bullshit I make up for the patients.” He looked at me seriously. “But you know what? Hollywood bullshit works. If it keeps them going, keeps them awake, alive? Work it.”

I nodded. Now that made sense.

* * *

Pretty soon, the other guys started calling me and Andrew the Psychic Friends Network. When it was a big call, multiple vehicle accidents or apartment fires, lots of fire trucks and ambulances on scene, I knew the firemen watched the two of us work when they got a chance, nudging guys who hadn’t seen us yet to check out the show.

Some of it was my training, sure – I graduated at the top of my class. Some of it was my continuing education, the information I hoovered up everywhere, from EMS journals to anecdotes from Reddit’s /ems subreddit. But a lot of it was… unexplainable.

I didn’t have the experience that Andrew had, but I just knew most of the time what equipment he was going to ask for, what he wanted me to step in and do. I was like a nurse who’d been with a surgeon for twenty years, and we’d only been together a month by the time our psychic link became apparent.

Even so, in the firehouse, I was still pretty cut out of the unit cohesion activities. I was an imposition, the living embodiment of some dumbass plan, thought up by a city government bean counter who was risking lives to save a nickel, who’d never asked the boots on the ground how his brilliant plan just might really fuck shit up.

And besides, given the way that Andrew had been kicking the other EMTs to the curb in a matter of weeks, they figured that I’d be gone before most of them even learned my name. So nobody was bothering with me any more than a WWII infantry squad would bother to get to know the FNG, since he’ be taking one in the chest before you even learned his home town.

I’d been there six weeks when one night, while I was reading my journals alone at the kitchen table, a firefighter named Red dropped a bag of microwave popcorn in front of me.

“Heat that up, buddy.”

I nuked it, filled the bowl, and brought it in to the TV room, ready to hand it off and GTFO. Without a word, and without taking his eyes off Talladega Nights, Red moved down the couch, pushing another guy over, and made room for me.

I didn’t cry, but what I felt then? Fucking pride. Brotherhood. Accomplishment. Something I’d never felt at any job ever, any sport, anything ever.

Then, out of nowhere, one of the guys brought in a cake, with a sparkler on it, and put it on the coffee table in front of me, and they all started singing “Happy Birthday to You.”

I blinked. “Thanks, but, it’s not my birthday, guys…”

Red put an arm around me. “Oh but it’s your anniversary. You have now officially been Andrew Hazard’s EMT bitch for a world record 42 days. Hey, speak of the devil!”

Andrew walked in, clearly as surprised as I was by the cake and the surrounding festivity.

Red got up, and gestured towards me with a flourish. “May I present, the winner of Survivor: Andrew Island. Mr. Nick Carpenter!”

Someone shoved the “Happy Anniversary” card into Andrew’s hand, along with a pen. Andrew looked at it. Opened it. Found an empty spot. Signed it.

He looked at me. Levelly, evenly, no love, no hate, no nothing. Handed me the card. Walked out.

The room was silent. “Still a cold fuckin’ fish,” Red said.

I opened the card, heedless of all the other good wishes scribbled in it, looking only for Andrew’s message.

I laughed when I read it.

All he’d written was, “You don’t suck.”

It was the greatest moment of my life.