Chapter 9 Tex
Stormy doesn't come down for breakfast.
I've been up since before sunrise. Coffee on the gas stove, eggs on the flat top, bacon laid out in rows because I've learned that Stormy eats more bacon than he'll ever admit to.
And if I don't put enough on the plate, he'll clean it and look at the empty spot where more bacon should've been.
I've started cooking six strips for him instead of four.
He hasn't said anything about it. I haven't either.
I'd cook a whole pack for him if he wanted me to.
It's after seven and his stool is empty.
This has never happened. Not once in the ten days since I picked him up off the side of the road.
Stormy is always up and moving. In the early days, he was sweeping by five.
Now, he comes down the moment he hears my feet hit the stairs, slides onto his stool, wraps his hands around the coffee I've already poured, and we start the day.
It's our routine. The one that works for both of us. And he's not here.
I give him another thirty minutes. Maybe he's tired. We've been working hard, twelve-hour days in the heat, and the kid was running on fumes for a week before his body started catching up on sleep. Maybe he's finally hitting the wall. That would be normal and perfectly fine. I understand.
I go to the bottom of the stairs and listen. Nothing. No footsteps, no water running, no sound of movement. Now I'm getting worried. What if he left? The thought stops me cold. Surely he wouldn't do that, right?
He might. Damn. I go upstairs to check.
The hallway is quiet. His door is closed.
I stand outside and listen. I hear nothing, and the nothing is what worries me.
Stormy is quiet, but he's not silent. There's always some small sound.
A creak of bedsprings, a shuffle of feet, the soft click of the switchblade he opens and closes when he's thinking. Nothing.
I knock. Three soft raps on the door. "Stormy? You up?" Not too loud. I don't want to startle him if he's still sleeping.
Nothing.
"Stormy?" Louder now. "Breakfast is ready. You okay in there, buddy?"
Still nothing.
My heart rate picks up. Not a lot, but enough. Because this kid doesn't ignore knocks. He's too hyperaware, too tuned in to every sound in this building. If he's not answering, he's either gone or he can't answer.
I try the doorknob. It turns. The push-button lock is useless, as always. I push the door open. It moves a half inch and stops.
Something is blocking it from the inside.
I push again, gentle, and I hear it. Wood scraping against wood.
The sound of a chair leg dragging across the floor.
I push a little harder, slow and careful, and the door opens another two inches, enough for me to see the leg of the chair.
The small wooden guest chair from the corner of the room, wedged under the doorknob at an angle.
I stop pushing and stand there with my hand on the door. The floor feels a little unsteady under my feet. Not because I don't understand what's going on, but because I do.
He's been putting the chair against the door every night. Every single night he's been sleeping in this room, he's been barricading himself in. That's not a one-time thing. That chair has been moved to the door and back to the corner every day. I just never saw it.
He needed a working lock and a door that held. And when it didn't, he improvised. A chair between himself and whatever he believed was something to fear on the other side.
Me.
Big, scary me is what's on the other side of this door.
I push the door a tiny bit more, just enough to see the bed.
He's asleep. Not the light, tense sleep I've imagined him having, the kind where one sound sends him bolt upright with his hand on the knife.
He's deeply, completely asleep, the kind of unconscious that comes from a body that's been borrowing against itself for so long that the debt finally comes due all at once.
He's on his stomach, face turned toward the wall, one arm under the pillow and one hanging off the edge of the bed.
He's shirtless.
Stormy has never taken his shirt off. Not once.
Not in ninety-five-degree heat, not during twelve hours of manual labor, not while hauling drywall and wrestling pool tables and sweating through his clothes until they were see-through.
He pushes his sleeves up. That's as far as he goes. I noticed. I didn't ask.
Now I know why.
The bruises are everywhere.
His ribs. His back. His sides. His shoulders.
Fading, most of them. That ugly, yellowing green-purple color that bruises turn when they're two or three weeks old, when the body is breaking them down and pulling them back in.
But they're big. Spread across his back and side like a map of pain, overlapping in places, darker in the centers where the impact was hardest. His ribs on the left side have a cluster so dense the colors blend together into one massive stain.
These aren't accident bruises. These aren't "I fell down the stairs" or "I ran into a door.
" I've been around long enough to know the difference.
These are the bruises that come from someone hitting another person with intent, with force, with the specific goal of causing pain.
Fists, maybe. The pattern on his back has a shape to it that looks like it could've come from a boot or a belt buckle.
Someone beat the hell out of this kid. Not once. Many times, over and over. The layering, the different stages of healing, the way some are more faded than others. This happened more than once. This happened over time. There are scars too. Burns, wounds. I don't know.
The switchblade handle is sticking out from under his pillow.
Right where his hand was. He fell asleep holding it, or reaching for it, and his hand slipped free when he went under.
His other hand is curled against his chest, two fingers pinching a fistful of fabric.
Gray cotton. It takes me a second to recognize it — my shirt.
The one I tossed on the stool yesterday.
The one I figured I'd lost in the laundry pile.
He's holding it against his face the way a kid holds a blanket, tight, like someone might take it.
I break out in a sweat, the way you do right before your knees give out and you hit the floor. Closing my eyes, I breathe through it.
My heart is destroyed, broken completely.
It doesn't break into sadness, though there's sadness.
It breaks into fury. A fury so deep and aimed straight at whoever did this.
Whoever put their hands on him. Whoever taught him that sleep is dangerous and kindness has a price and big men behind closed doors are to arm yourself against.
I want to find them and put my hands on them the way they put their hands on him. To show them what it feels like when the person hitting you is six-five and two-forty and has a shattered heart full of rage to deliver.
I want to break them the way they broke him.
I can't do any of that right now.
And even if I could, it wouldn't help. It wouldn't heal his ribs. It wouldn't undo whatever happened to him that made a chair against a doorknob feel necessary for survival.
All I can do is be me.
I need to be exactly what I've been. Steady. Patient. Kind. The man on the other side of the door who never opens it.
Quietly, carefully, I pull the door closed, easing the chair back into position as much as I can. Hopefully, he won't notice it was disturbed. I go back down the stairs and through the bar and out onto the first-floor deck.
The sunrise is happening. I lean on the railing and I take a deep breath, because I need to get my fury under control before he sees me. Before I sit across from him and try to act normal while we eat fried eggs and talk about the day's work.
I can't let him notice me acting differently.
If I go in there with fury on my face, he'll know.
If he sees anger, he'll think it's aimed at him.
If he sees that I know a fact about him I'm not supposed to know yet, the trust we've spent days building will collapse and he'll be gone before I can explain.
I grip the railing, stare at the water and make a decision.
Whatever Stormy is running from, it might catch up to him.
The bike is stolen. I've been pretty sure about that for a while now.
Now, there's no doubt in my mind. The way he watches the road.
The way he went stiff when Mickey showed up.
The way he wouldn't give me his name or a place.
He doesn't even have a phone. Who the hell doesn't have a phone?
Someone out there is looking for that bike, or for him.
And when they come looking, he's going to need more than a chair against a door and a switchblade under a pillow.
He's going to need someone between him and whatever comes. That someone is going to be me. I'm going to put me and everything I have between him and whoever did that to him.
I don't know how. I don't know what's coming. But I know what I saw on his back and I know what it means. I'm making a vow right now, standing on this deck with the sunrise, that nobody is going to hurt that kid again. Not while I'm breathing. Not while he's under my roof.
Not fucking ever, if I have anything to say about it.
If I have to turn this bar into a goddamn fortress for him, I will.
Nobody's touching Stormy again and that's final.
Now that it's settled in my mind, I feel better, and take one more deep breath. I let the fury settle down into the place where I'll keep it, deep and ready. I straighten up and fix my face. Then I go inside and make breakfast the same way I always do. Stormy needs routine and steadiness.