Chapter 5 Tex
I know the exact time because I've been checking my phone every few minutes, tracking the storm's progress through the emergency alerts that keep buzzing through even with the cell towers struggling.
The hurricane is raging outside. Power out, the first floor underwater, the wind shaking the walls like a dog with a chew toy. And this kid who won't let me within arm's reach just dropped his head on my shoulder and went still.
I don't move.
I don't breathe, at first. Then I breathe very carefully, shallow and slow, keeping my chest from rising too much because any movement, any shift, might wake him.
I keep my arm pinned at my side even though it's going numb under the angle of his weight.
My hand stays flat on the floor. I keep every single part of my body exactly where it is because this moment is made of glass and I will not be the one who breaks it.
He's light. That's the thing that gets me. His head on my shoulder feels like nothing. A little bird. He's too light for a grown man, too thin. The warmth of him through the t-shirt is the kind of warmth that comes from someone whose body doesn't have enough insulation to hold heat on its own.
I sit there and listen to him breathe. It's the first time I've heard him breathe without that tight, controlled quality, that careful rationing of air that he does when he's awake. In sleep, he breathes like a normal person. Slow and even and deep.
The storm roars outside. Something crashes against the building, a deep boom that shakes the floor, and I tense, waiting for him to jerk awake.
He flinches. A small, full-body twitch that runs through him like a current.
But he doesn't wake. His body settles. His head presses a little harder into my shoulder, like he's burrowing in instead of pulling away.
That does something to me. I'm not too proud to admit it. It's not romantic. It's not attraction. It's older than that, more fundamental. It's the feeling of someone small and scared choosing you to protect them. The instinct that says, 'I'll trust you.' Just for a minute.
My arm is completely numb now. I don't care. I would sit here until the sun comes up while my whole body goes dead if it means he gets one hour of sleep without being scared.
Someone hurt this kid. Badly. Repeatedly. The kind of hurt that rewires a person so that every interaction is filtered through one big question.
What does this person want from me, and what will they do to me to get it?
I don't know who. I don't know what. But I know the shape of it, the shadow it casts, because I've seen it before.
Not in my own life, thank God, but in people who've come through my bar over the years.
People with that same careful way of moving, that same radar for hands and exits and locked doors.
People who learned the hard way that trust is a luxury they can't afford.
He makes a sound in his sleep. Not a word, just a small, soft sound in the back of his throat that could be the beginning of a dream. I hold still. He settles again.
The noise of the water below us is audible now.
Not just the slap of surge against exterior walls, but the interior sound of water moving through the first floor, shifting furniture, pushing against doorframes.
I can't see it from here but I can hear it, and I can picture it too.
My dad's bar top going under, the hardwood floors flooding, the pool tables and the jukebox.
Thirty years of my dad's legacy being swallowed by the damn Gulf of Mexico he loved so much.
I close my eyes and push it down. The bar top is bolted to the floor.
The building is concrete and steel. Everything else can be replaced, rebuilt, refinished.
I've done it before. I'll do it again. But knowing that doesn't stop the ache of hearing your dad's bar fill up with saltwater while you sit in the dark and can't do a damn thing about it.
The surge peaks around 4 AM. I can tell because the sounds have stabilized. The water stops rising and starts holding. The crashes against the exterior settle into a constant, rhythmic pressure instead of the escalating assault of the last few hours. It didn't reach the second floor. Not yet.
Thank fuck. It was close, though.
I can smell it. That brackish salt-and-mud smell of water mixed with everything it picked up on its way inland, and it's strong enough that I know the waterline isn't far below us. But the second floor stayed dry.
The foundation held. We're not floating down the beach road.
Thank you, Dad. You built a hell of a bar.
The wind eventually starts to drop. It's not sudden. It's a slow retreat, the roar declining by degrees until it's a howl, then a moan, then just rain. Heavy rain, coming down in buckets, but rain I can think through. Rain I can talk over. Normal rain.
Stormy shifts on my shoulder. His breathing changes, that slow, deep rhythm turning shallower, more conscious. He's waking up.
I stare straight ahead at the opposite wall. I don't look at him. I don't move my shoulder. I close my eyes and wait.
He lifts his head. There's a pause. A beat of stillness that lasts maybe two seconds but feels like ten, and I can sense the exact moment he realizes where he was. The air between us changes. Tightens.
He pulls back. Not fast, not panicked, but deliberate. Creating space.
"I think Peter's running out of steam," I say, like nothing happened.
Like I didn't just sit motionless with a dead arm so a stranger could sleep on my shoulder during a hurricane.
"Listen. Hear that? The wind's dropping.
Worst is over. We made it and we didn't even have to hang onto the roof or swim. "
He's quiet for a moment. I can feel him wondering whether I'm going to acknowledge what just happened or let it go.
He needs me to let it go and I do.
"What time is it?" he asks. His voice is rough from sleep, lower than usual, and it sounds almost normal.
"Almost five. Landfall was around midnight, so we're about five hours past. The backside is winding down. Should be clear by sunrise." I stand up and shake out my arm, which feels like it's not even there. "Let's check the damage."
We go to the balcony door. I open it and the wind pushes in, but it's a shadow of what it was. The rain is still heavy but it's falling down now instead of sideways.
"We'll wait for first light," I say. "Should be about thirty minutes. Then we'll see what Peter left behind."
Stormy stands near the doorway, arms crossed, watching the sky lighten from black to gray to that pale, thin gold that comes right before sunrise. He's quiet, but it's a different quiet than yesterday. Less tight.
The sun comes up right before six. I watch it happen in real time, and will remember it for the rest of my life.
It breaks over the horizon in a line of orange and pink so vivid it looks fake, like someone cranked the saturation up to a level that doesn't exist in nature.
The sky goes from gray to gold to blazing blue in the span of minutes, and the clouds that are left, the trailing edge of Peter's tantrum, catch the light and turn colors I don't have names for.
It's the most beautiful sunrise I've ever seen.
And it's shining on absolute devastation.
The coastline is destroyed. I step onto the balcony and grip the railing and look out at a world I don't recognize. The parking lot is buried under two feet of sand and debris. The beach road, or where the beach road used to be, is covered in wreckage.
I can see roofing material, pieces of fencing, what looks like the remains of someone's deck, a refrigerator lying on its side in the middle of the road.
Power lines are down everywhere, draped across the road like black spaghetti, some of them still attached to broken poles that lean at crazy angles.
The buildings along the strip are gutted.
The condo building two doors down lost its entire gulf-facing wall.
I can see into the rooms, like a dollhouse with the front ripped off.
Furniture, curtains, a TV still mounted to an interior wall.
Some of the furniture is lying on the sand. The beachfront swimming pool is gone.
The beach itself doesn't exist. The sand has been redistributed across three blocks of the surrounding area, buried under wood and seaweed and things that don't belong on land.
There's a boat, a small fishing boat, sitting in the middle of the road a hundred yards from the water. Debris is everywhere.
"Oh my God," Stormy says beside me. I didn't hear him come out onto the balcony. He's standing next to me, hands on the railing, staring at the same thing I'm staring at. "Is it always this bad?"
"I don't know. I've only been through one before and Michael was bad too."
We stand there for a minute. The sun keeps rising, cheerful and oblivious, pouring golden light over the destruction like it's proud of the view.
"Let's go check out the first floor," I say.
We go downstairs. The water has receded, mostly.
There's still standing water in the lowest spots, maybe six inches in the corners, and the rest is a film of muddy saltwater over everything.
The smell is bad. Not rotten yet, but that heavy, organic, brackish smell of water mixed with sand and whatever it dragged in from outside.
The bar is wrecked.