I Feel Every Injury My Soulmate Gets, and He's a Paramedic

The silence of the library was a carefully constructed thing, a delicate balance of rustling pages, soft footsteps on worn carpet, and the gentle hum of the ventilation system. Elara moved through it with a reverence that bordered on religious, her cart of returned books gliding noiselessly beside her. She loved the order of it all, the Dewey Decimal System a perfect, logical map for a world that was otherwise chaotic and unpredictable. Her world, at least.

She was reaching for an empty space in the 700s, her fingers extended to slide a heavy art history volume into place, when the pain struck. It was not her own. She knew that instantly, the same way she knew the sun would rise or that books needed to be shelved in their proper homes. This was his pain.

It was a sharp, explosive agony that flared across the knuckles of her right hand. White-hot and brutal, it felt as though her bones had been slammed against a brick wall. A gasp tore from her throat, swallowed by the high ceilings and the rows of silent stories. She dropped the book. It landed on the carpet with a soft, muffled thud, a sound far too quiet for the violence that had just coursed through her body.

Elara gripped the edge of the metal cart, her own knuckles turning white from the pressure. She squeezed her eyes shut, breathing through her nose as the initial, blinding flash subsided into a deep, throbbing ache. It was a familiar routine. The jolt, the pain, the quiet recovery.

She flexed her fingers, the phantom sensation of scraped skin and bruised bone radiating from a hand that was, to any outside observer, completely unharmed. She imagined him, this stranger whose body was tethered to hers. What had he done this time? Punched something? Someone? Fallen again? He seemed to be an impossibly clumsy man, a whirlwind of scrapes, bangs, and bruises that she was forced to endure from a distance.

A quiet resentment simmered beneath her concern. Her own life was a monument to caution. She took the elevator instead of the stairs, drank her tea lukewarm to avoid a burn, and had chosen a profession where the most dangerous thing she encountered was a papercut. She had built her world to be soft and safe, not just for herself, but for him. She would not be the source of his pain. It was a courtesy, she felt, that he flagrantly refused to return. The ache in her knuckles was just the latest piece of evidence. He lived his life with a recklessness she couldn't comprehend, and she was the one left to catalogue the injuries.

Elsewhere, the sharp, antiseptic smell of the ambulance bay did little to cover the lingering scent of burnt rubber and gasoline. Liam leaned against the cool metal flank of his rig, the adrenaline from the call finally starting to recede, leaving a familiar, bone-deep exhaustion in its place. The sounds here were harsh—the crackle of the dispatch radio, the slamming of doors, the shouted conversations of his colleagues. It was the soundtrack to his life.

He peeled the wrapper off a sterile wipe with his teeth and began cleaning the raw scrape on his forearm. He’d gotten it dragging a kid out of the backseat of a sedan that had accordioned into a telephone pole. Just a minor injury in the grand scheme of the day, but it still stung. As he carefully applied a strip of medical tape over a fresh gauze pad, another pain, entirely separate and minuscule, pricked the tip of his index finger.

It was a tiny, sharp sting. A papercut.

He paused, his hands hovering over his own arm. He knew that sensation intimately. It was hers. It was always something like this—a papercut, the faint burn of a too-hot mug, a stubbed toe. Her pains were small, domestic, and spoke of a life lived worlds away from the sirens and chaos that defined his.

A wave of guilt, so potent it was almost nauseating, washed over him. He thought of his knuckles, which were throbbing from where he’d slammed them against a stuck gurney latch earlier. That one would have been bad for her. A sudden, violent jolt of pain out of nowhere. He hated that. He hated sending that kind of brutality into her quiet, papercut world.

He pressed the tape down on his arm, his jaw tight. He worried about her constantly. The person on the other end of this invisible thread felt so breakable. He imagined a woman surrounded by soft things, a life without sharp edges. How could someone like that possibly cope with the visceral, ugly pain his job sent her way? Did she think he was some kind of monster, a reckless brute who couldn't get through a day without breaking a bone or tearing his skin? The thought made his stomach clench. He felt a fierce, protective urge to shield her from the world, even as he knew he was her primary source of physical suffering. She was too fragile for all this. Too fragile for him.

The man across the table, Arthur, was explaining the intricacies of his home insurance policy. His voice was a monotone drone, the verbal equivalent of beige wallpaper. Elara nodded, a polite smile fixed on her face, while her mind drifted. Her knuckles still carried a faint, phantom throb, a ghostly reminder of the afternoon’s violent intrusion.

“...and that’s why I opted for the comprehensive flood and fire package,” Arthur concluded, looking immensely proud of his prudence. “You can never be too careful. Predictability is the key to a peaceful life.”

His words landed like stones in the quiet pond of her thoughts. Predictability. Safety. Peace. Weren't those the very things she had structured her own life around? She avoided risks, chose the quiet path, all for the sake of the unknown man at the other end of their bond. She had done it to protect him from scraped knees and burned fingers.

Yet, listening to Arthur detail his color-coded filing system for receipts, a suffocating sense of dread washed over her. Had she gone too far? Had she curated a life so devoid of sharp edges that it had become utterly bland? This man was the living embodiment of the choices she had made. He was safe. He was predictable. And he was crushingly, painfully dull. Her soulmate, for all the trouble he caused, was at least… something. He was a force, a chaotic energy that slammed into her life without warning. He was the opposite of Arthur. He was, she was beginning to realize with a startling pang of longing, interesting.

The thought was disloyal, but it was there. She was living Arthur's life, while her soul was tethered to a man who lived with a passion that bruised his own body. A chasm opened up inside her, a sudden, cavernous emptiness. She wanted more than this quiet, beige existence. Maybe she wanted a little bit of the chaos, too.

---

The bar was loud, sticky, and blessedly anonymous. Liam nursed a beer, letting the meaningless chatter of his colleagues wash over him. It was better than the silence of his apartment, where every creak of the floorboards felt too loud.

“Seriously, man,” Jake said, clapping him on the shoulder hard enough to jostle his beer. “You save lives all day, you look like you haven’t been hit by a bus too many times. How are you still single?”

A few of the other paramedics at the table laughed, turning their attention to him. Liam forced a grin. “What can I say? I’m holding out.”

“For who?” another one chimed in. “Your soulmate? You ever think she felt you face-plant on that oil slick last week? Bet that was a romantic little jolt for her.”

The casual joke hit a little too close to home. He thought of the papercut from this afternoon—so delicate, so precise. He imagined her, a woman who probably organized her books by color and drank herbal tea. What would a woman like that do with the sudden, agonizing pain of his dislocated shoulder from last month, or the deep, throbbing ache in his knuckles from today?

He took a long pull from his bottle. “Nah,” he said, his voice lighter than he felt. “She’s probably far too sensible for a guy who gets beat up for a living. Probably a librarian or something. She’s at home right now, balancing her checkbook, and has no time for this nonsense.”

The table erupted in laughter, and the conversation moved on. But Liam’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. He stared into his beer, the image of her so clear in his mind. Sensible. Gentle. Safe. Everything he wasn’t. He was the nonsense she had to endure. The thought settled in his gut, heavy and cold as lead. He wasn't just worried she was too fragile for him; he was terrified he wasn't worthy of her.