Page 52 of Homecoming for Beginners

Ollie settled as deeply into his seat as he could and told himself it was the water making his cheeks feel warm. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to stare.” Then he shook himself out of it, reached for the beer near him, and stopped. “Actually I think we have to trade these too.”

Laughing, Ty handed over Ollie’s bottle. “You’re probably confused, right? Didn’t know being a paramedic was so dangerous?”

“Kinda wondering if you got into it because you had a lot of personal experience sewing yourself up,” Ollie admitted before raising his beer to his lips.

“Well, only a handful are from the job. The shoulder thing—got stabbed in a bar fight.”

Somehow Ollie managed to swallow without spraying beer into the hot tub. “Seriously? What was it about?”

“No fucking clue, man. I was a bouncer at the time.” He shook his head. “Only a couple of my tokens are from the job I have now. This one”—he pointed at the slight puckering around his jawline—“was the first and almost last injury I ever got as a paramedic.”

Ollie shivered involuntarily and pressed back deeper into the power of the jets. Ty was right, this side was better for his back. “What happened?”

“OD, first week on the job. Should’ve known better, but I panicked.”

Ollie raised an eyebrow.

“Before administering Narcan, always check to make sure the patient doesn’t have a weapon.” He winced. “Or in this case, a broken bottle. They can wake up disoriented, still high, angry that they’renotstill high….”

“You saved somebody’s life and theystabbed you in the face?”

“I mean, I don’t think it was personal. Kind of a gut reaction.”

“Still.” Ollie tried to imagine that happening to him and still wanting to help people afterward. Nope. He was too cynical. “What else have you got?”

The tattoo on his chest was a compass rose, not perfectly vertical but with the axis tilted so it pointed over his shoulder. The right forearm smudge was a Maltese cross for the Chicago Fire Department, with a smaller six-pointed star of life inside. There was a scar half hidden bythe hair of his eyebrow—“Hit my head on a glass table as a kid,” Ty said with a crooked smile, likeWhat can you do?—and a burn mark on the inside of his left ankle from “sitting on a motorcycle wrong.”

Ollie could only blink at that explanation.

“That was my preparamedic days,” Ty assured him. “Believe me, you see one motorcycle accident from my end of things, you never want to be on the other. Actually I don’t even want it from my end.”

Without thinking, Ollie brushed his thumb over the smooth skin of the burn. When Ty did show-and-tell, he got up close and personal with it.

Ty shivered, and Ollie let his foot go.

“All right, I showed you mine.” He leaned forward and then paused. “Uh, unless you have, like, PTSD or military-related trauma about them, I guess.”

“About what? Scars? I don’t have any tattoos.”

Ty blinked, suddenly ramrod straight again. “Wait, seriously? I didn’t think they let you out of the military before you had some ink on you.”

True, most of the people Ollie had served with had something somewhere. But Ollie had never felt like he fit well enough to want a reminder on his skin forever. “Guess I’m lucky they didn’t look that close when they discharged me, then.”

Ty laughed. “Guess so. Okay, no ink, then, but….”

Only now Ollie was thinking about it, and—“No scars either.”

Ty’s jaw dropped. “What?! You were on active deployment.”

“I got shotat,” Ollie said. “Nobody hit me. Got a couple nasty bruises from bumpy landings. Nothing that left a mark.” Other than on his nightmares.

He should’ve expected Ty would lean into the bit. “No way. I don’t believe it.” He gestured as he rose from the water. “Come on, stand up. I want to see. The Army might not’ve looked too close, but I am determined.”

Something about it felt ridiculous, but it had been so long since Ollie felt like hecouldbe silly. First sitting on the floor to watch a movie, and now this. He didn’t have to be serious with Theo all the time—kids needed someone to joke with—but it was different to play along with his kid. He stood up and spread his arms at his sides, raising an eyebrow as he did.

The night air was cold after the heat of the tub. The wet hair on his arms and the back of his neck stood up, and his nipples pebbled, which made him feel… strange.

Only for a second, though—the next he was back to mild amusement as Ty lifted his arm farther to peer under it.

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