Page 50 of The Shield
He had one arm across my chest, high and tight, his forearm under my collarbones in a rescuers’ hold, pinning me to him without apology. His other hand found the slick of my belt, then slid, then found again, anchoring us both to a strap some good Samaritan had thrown. The strap hummed with the weight of us.
“Breathe,” he ordered, as if I had forgotten how. “Breathe for me.”
I tried. Water laughed at me and slid across my lips. He tipped my face with the heel of his hand, canting my mouth toward air. Someone upstream had made a human chain from a lamppost and a traffic barrel—Owen’s work, I recognized the stubborn choreography of it even now—and their bodies bore the current so ours could cross it.
A mounted officer’s gelding stood braced at the far curb, eyes white but steady, haunches set like a tent peg. Granddaddy was somewhere I couldn’t see, shouting in a way I had never heard in my life, cussing God and gravity and men who drove jacked-up toys into water like it was a joke.
A camera hung above us, just out of reach, rain speckling the lens, its little red eye fixed and unblinking. The city had never looked away from me. It wasn’t going to start now.
“Hold,” Ethan bit out, to the chain, to the horse, to me. “On my count. Three.”
He didn’t say one. He shifted with the water, reading it with his body the way he read a horse, the way I read a map. He let it give us an inch and then he took a foot. He was bigger than the flood and quieter than it. He was the calm that doesn’t brag.
“Two.”
Somewhere, Atlas’s voice barked an answer on a radio I couldn’t see. Somewhere, Kimmy prayed in a way that sounded like cussing. Somewhere, Owen saidI told you she’s not done yetand dug his heels deeper into the grit.
“Three.”
We moved.
He hauled me not up—there was no up—but across, angles and leverage and the ruthless math of muscle. The strap sang. The chain tightened. The horse slid and then held. We gained a yard, then another, then lost one, then took two. I felt the curbscrape the back of my calf and almost sobbed with the small, stupid relief of a fixed edge under all that moving.
Half on the street, half in the river, Ethan rolled, taking me with him, his body between mine and the water like he was built for that exact job.
My chest unlocked with a cruel little cough. I choked, gagged, spit up a thin stream of creek and storm and the city’s old iron. The first breath stabbed, the second burned, the third was ragged and enormous. The fourth was mine on purpose.
“Good girl,” he said, so soft only I could hear it, and because I was vain even now, I didn’t cry. I saved it.
Hands reached. A firefighter’s bulk blocked the light and made a doorway for us to pass through. The mounted officer slid his horse’s shoulder in tighter to give us a wall. Owen’s palm smacked the back of my calf, then my knee, then found my boot and pulled. Kimmy’s sob broke and turned into laughter. Granddaddy’s voice dropped to a prayer I knew he’d make sound like a story later.
The camera saw everything: Ethan’s arm locking across my chest and refusing to negotiate with the current, his mouth shaping my name like a command and a caress in one breath, the way his face didn’t change when the strap bit into his palm hard enough to cut. It saw the chain of bodies. It saw the horse. It saw me, hair a dark snarl, eyes open and stubborn, coughing.
We rolled onto the high crown of the road, water licking our flanks. Ethan braced on one hand and slid the other under my head like it weighed something precious. Someone shoved a blanket at him and then another, and he ignored both until I had air for more than two seconds running. The Public Information Officer skidded on his knees in dress shoes he’d regret later, stuck a mic in my face and then forgot to ask a question because he was crying. The crowd that had gathered at the curb made a sound I had only heard in stadiums.
“Back up,” Ethan said, not loud, not mean, and the circle widened like a pupil, everyone obeying without needing to admit they had.
A paramedic I knew—Rosa’s nephew—leaned in with an oxygen mask. “Ms. Kennedy,” he said, voice steady, “I’m going to?—”
“Yes,” I rasped, and reached for his wrist to say thank you. The mask settled over my face, soft and perfect. The air tasted like plastic and mercy.
“Stay with me,” Ethan said in my other ear, because, apparently, he thought I might try something dramatic. I could feel the fierceness in him, that quiet engine that never coughed, the one he pretended was just discipline and I knew was devotion. His hand was huge and hot on my shoulder. His palm covered the skinny rise of my collarbone like he was claiming it and protecting it and scolding it for scaring him all at once.
I turned my head a fraction under the mask. His mouth was right there, so close I could have fogged his skin if this had been a different kind of story. “Forward,” I tried, the word thin and wobbly. The mask turned it into a whisper. He heard it, anyway. Of course, he did.
“Only,” he finished, and his mouth twitched.
Behind him, Kimmy’s phone was aloft, catching all of it—the rescue, the mask, the hand over my collarbone, the way my fingers found Ethan’s shirt and pinched, rude and certain.
#CharlestonLoveStory was already sprinting again, because the internet loves a sequel even more than a surprise. #TheShield appeared—where did that come from?—and I could hear panelists somewhere in a studio arguing about infrastructure while our little clip played in a box at the corner of the screen.
Granddaddy bent over me in a shadow that felt like home and kissed my forehead like he had in his kitchen when I was fiveand had dared him to say no to a second popsicle. “You scared five years off me,” he said, voice rough and not pretending. “I can’t afford five years.”
“Stop … fussing,” I said, fighting a smile under the mask because apparently I couldn’t stop being myself even when my whole body had just been used as a cautionary tale. His laugh cracked. He swallowed it.
Owen appeared on the other side with a roll of caution tape hanging like a necklace and said, wild-eyed, “You owe me new shoes,” and then, when I squeezed his wrist, “Okay, but I’m sending you the receipt.”
Kimmy leaned into the frame and didn’t care that she was crying on the internet. “You’re not allowed to die on camera,” she said. “It’s tacky.”
