Storm’s Coming
Storm's Coming
SLADE
Irun until my lungs burn.
The resort path loops through the pine forest and back along the creek and I run it twice, my breath coming in clouds in the chill October air, my shoulder aching from the jarring of the trail. I don’t slow down.
I run because it’s the only thing I know how to do with the physical energy vibrating inside me from what just happened in that tent.
My wife’s round lush tits beneath my grip. The softness of her skin. The sound she made when I—
I run faster.
I’ve been in high-pressure situations before. I know how to compartmentalize. I know how to put my feelings in a lockbox and close the lid and carry on.
The box isn’t closing this morning.
Control. I’ve always prided myself on my iron self-control. I’ve spent years honing my body through punishing physical labor, honing my mind through strict meditation practice. I’ve gone years without indulging in sex or rich food or alcohol or drugs. It wasn’t even hard to resist temptation.
Now resisting temptation seems like the hardest thing I’ve ever done, all because of her. Day one of being married and all that self control has apparently just… vaporized. Even my subconscious is down bad.
By the time I get back to the tent Lila is gone, at breakfast, presumably. I shower and change and stand in the middle of the canvas structure that I put us in like an idiot and look at the bed. Housekeeping has already made it up neat and tidy with fresh sheets.
Like nothing happened.
Because nothing did happen.
Except that “nothing” felt like a whole lot of something, and my dick is getting hard again just thinking about it.
I take a cold shower and go to breakfast.
Lila’s at a table by the window with coffee and a plate of scrambled eggs, fruit, and some Belgian waffles. Her sketchbook is open beside her. She looks up when I come in. Her eyes are warm and careful simultaneously.
“Hi,” she says.
“Morning.”
After pouring myself a cup of coffee, I take a seat across from her. She’s wearing a soft-looking sage green sweater. Her hair is loose. There’s a small smudge of pencil graphite on her wrist from the sketchbook.
I want to wipe away the smudge for her. I want to gather that silky loose hair between my fingers and tug her towards me for a kiss. I want to see that sweater on the floor of our bedroom because I tore it off her.
“How was your run?” she asks.
“Good.”
She looks at me for a moment. Then back at her sketchbook.
Once again, I wish I was better with words. I’m not Walker, who makes millions off stringing perfectly-chosen words together into a song. I’m not a silver-tongued devil like Tanner, a man who could sell sand at a beach.
I don’t know what to say to make this awkwardness between me and Lila easier. I apologized for touching her without asking, without meaning to, and she seems okay with it all, but I don’t know where we go from here.
So I decide to just take the idea literally: we’ve just got to keep moving.
“There’s a trail,” I say. “North face. Resort map says it goes up to a ridge with views of the whole valley.”
She looks up. Her expression brightens. “You want to go for a hike?”
“If you want to.”
“Yes,” she says, favoring me with a luminous smile I don’t deserve. “Let’s go.”
The trail starts easy. Wide and well-marked through the pines, the ground soft with fallen needles, the air cold and bright.
Lila walks beside me when the trail allows it, behind me when it narrows.
She’s wearing hiking boots and a cozy fleece.
Her pink hair is braided and she’s wearing a little hat with a tuft of fur on top.
Her cheeks are pink from the cold and she looks so fucking cute I can’t stand it.
She asks about the trees. The birds. The tracks we cross in the mud. Elk, I tell her, probably last night. She crouches down to look at them and I watch her and look at the sky.
The sky is… going wrong.
It was blue just an hour ago and now it’s getting leaden. Heavy with moisture, a damp chill sinking into the air. The clouds are moving faster, the wind picking up and bending the tops of the trees. No doubt about it—storm’s coming.
I check my watch. We’re forty minutes out from the resort.
“We should turn back,” I say.
Straightening up, Lila looks at the sky, then at me. “How bad?”
“Don’t know yet. But I’d rather not find out up here.”
She doesn’t argue. We turn around.
We don’t make it ten minutes before the sleet hits.
It comes fast the way Montana weather always does. One minute cold and clear, the next the wind is driving ice crystals horizontal and the trail is gone under a sheet of grey. Lila pulls her fleece tighter. I pull my jacket off and put it around her shoulders.
The storm is a nasty one, and I have to get us to shelter. I have to protect her.
“There’s a supply shack,” I say. “Quarter mile east. I saw it on the trail map this morning. Come on.”
We move fast. The sleet is getting heavier, the temperature dropping, the trail slick under our boots. I keep one hand at her back, watching her footing, watching the tree line for the shack.
She slips.
One moment she’s beside me, the next her boot catches a wet root and she goes down hard. I lunge for her and get a hand on her arm, but it’s not enough to fully stop her fall. Her ankle twists as her knees buckle.
She makes a sound, small and pained but bitten-off, and I’m on my knees beside her instantly.
“Lila,” I say urgently. I cup both hands to her face. Her eyes are wet, but she’s holding it back with everything she has, blinking fast.
“Where does it hurt?” I ask. “Knee or ankle?”
“Ankle,” she says.
“Let me see it.” My hands move to her ankle, careful, feeling through the boot. She pulls in a sharp breath when I press on the outside of the joint. Her eyes fill with tears and she looks up at the sky and blinks hard.
She’s trying so hard not to cry in front of me.
“I’ve got you, sweetheart,” I say, brushing her tears away with my fingers. “I’ve got you, okay? Just breathe.”
She takes a deep, shuddering breath. The sleet is coming harder now. I need to get her out of this.
“I’m going to pick you up,” I say.
“Your shoulder—”
“Not an issue right now.” I position myself beside her. “Arms around my neck.”
“Slade.” Her voice breaks slightly on my name. “I’m sorry. I’m not…I don’t usually cry like this.”
“You don’t have to be tough,” I say gently. “Not with me.”
She puts her arms around my neck and I lift her.
There’s so much adrenaline pumping through me now I barely feel the pain in my shoulder, but I know I’ll pay for it later.
I’ve played through separated shoulders and cracked ribs in service of winning playoffs and championships, but all of that is a distant second to the importance of what I need to do now.
I can carry my wife a quarter mile in a Montana sleet storm without making it her problem.
I find the supply shack where the map said it would be. It’s a small structure at the edge of the tree line, weathered grey wood, a rusted tin roof. I get the door open with my good shoulder and carry her inside.
It’s maybe twelve feet by twelve feet. A wood stove in the corner. A stack of split wood beside it. A rough wooden bench along one wall. Everything is coated in dust.
It’s dry, though, and that’s what matters. So does the fact that I have enough cell phone reception to call emergency services and the resort to coordinate them getting to us as soon as the storm passes.
As sleet pounds down on the tin roof above us, I set her down on the bench as carefully as I can and get the stove going. There’s kindling in a box beside the wood and matches in a tin on the shelf above it. The fire catches on the third match.
“Let’s take the boot off,” I say. “Slowly.”
She works at the laces with careful fingers. I crouch in front of her and do it for her, easing the boot off, then the sock. Her ankle is already swelling on the outside, a soft puffy look to it that I don’t like.
“It’s not broken,” she says.
“You don’t know that.”
“It doesn’t feel broken.”
“You’ve broken an ankle before?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t know what broken feels like.”
She looks at me. “Are you always this argumentative when you’re worried?”
I don’t answer that. I take her ankle in both hands, gentle as I can. She hisses but doesn’t pull back.
“Can you flex it?”
She flexes it and wince, biting back another pained sound.
Okay. She can move it. Likely not a break, then. I’ve broken enough bones to know that if you can move it, it’s not broken.
“Probably a sprain,” I say. “But we’re getting an x-ray right away. We can be back in Marble Falls in under an hour by helicopter.”
She looks at me with sad eyes. “We’re on our honeymoon.”
“Nothing to be done about it,” I tell her. “We gotta get you looked after by a doctor.”
Outside the sleet has turned to hail. I can hear it against the tin roof, like a thousand pebbles raining down on us. The fire is going now, throwing warmth into the small space as the logs crackle. I sit back on my heels and look at her ankle.
“I’m so damn sorry,” I tell her. “It’s my job to keep you safe, and I’m failing hard.”
She reaches out and touches my jaw gently. “You’re not failing at anything.”
That’s a lie, and we both know it. I come up from my knees and sit next to her on the cot and lean back, feeling frustrated with myself and helpless to fix this.
“You can back out of this at any time,” I tell her. “Wives have divorced their idiot husbands for less.”
“Stop talking like that,” she says. Sharper than I’ve ever heard her.
My eyes lock on hers.
She swallows. “I like being married to you, all right? I like talking with you and spending time with you. And I know we’re still figuring things out, that there are—there are bumps in the road and there will be plenty more to come—but I’d like to think we’re on that road together.
That we’ll weather this storm and any other with each other.
As a team. Isn’t that what you promised me?
At least for the year we’re together, before this ‘clean break’ we’ll make of it? ”
She’s got me dead to rights. That’s exactly what I promised her. Because that is what I want to give her, and that’s what I want for myself, but I’m fucking scared that the closer I get to her, the more impossible a clean break will ever be.
“You’re right,” I say. I take my baseball cap off and push a hand through my damp hair, starting to dry in the warmth of the fire now.
“I don’t know how to do relationships,” I admit. “My only real friends are my family, and that’s because they’re blood and they won’t let me disappear on them.” I look at the fire. “And now I’m your husband and I don’t have the first clue how to do that right. Even on paper.”
She gives me a small, hesitant smile. Takes my hand in her small, cool one. “I’ve never been a wife, either. But I’m enjoying it so far. So maybe we can figure this whole ‘married couple’ thing out together. What do you say?”
“I’d like that,” I say quietly.
She squeezes my hand. “Good. See, look at us, learning to communicate. Progress.”
“Progress.” I offer her a smile of my own in return. Small and maybe kind of stiff, like those are muscles I haven’t used in a while, but it feels good.
“And Slade, honey?” she says. “You don’t need to run away every time you get a hard-on. I actually know how to handle that kind of thing.”
I just stare at her, my dick swelling very inconveniently and inappropriately.
And I think, not for the first time, that I’m hopelessly outmatched by my wife.