Stormy

Chapter 14 Stormy

I wake up to the sound of breathing.

Deep and steady, rising and falling in a rhythm that my body has synced to, my own chest expanding and contracting in time with the one near me.

I don't open my eyes right away. I lie there and feel things. The bed under me, softer than the guest room mattress. The warmth on my left side, close but not touching. The smell of soap I've been noticing for weeks from a distance and am now breathing in from inches away.

We've come apart in sleep. His chest was under my ear when I fell asleep.

His heartbeat was the last thing I heard.

But sleep shifts bodies the way currents shift water, and sometime in the hour we've been out, I rolled to my side and he rolled to his back and a gap opened between us.

Six inches, maybe. A gap that my body crossed once already today — in the water, in the shower, on the stairs — but always out of survival.

Always because I was drowning and he was the life raft.

I'm not drowning now.

I open my eyes to look at him. Tex is asleep.

He's on his back, one arm thrown above his head, the other resting on his stomach.

The towel around his waist has shifted but is still covering him.

His chest rises and falls in those deep, slow swells.

His face is completely open. The lines around his mouth are smooth.

His lips are slightly parted under the beard.

His eyelashes are dark against his cheeks and they're longer than I would have guessed, which is a strange thing to notice about a man this large but I notice it anyway.

He's exhausted. He swam into the water, fought a rip current, carried me through waves and up a beach, then up three flights of stairs.

He held me in a shower and dried me with a towel.

He put me in his bed and let me hold onto him until the shaking stopped and didn't move once while I sobbed on his chest.

He didn't leave me.

We've been asleep for a while. An hour, maybe more. The room is quiet and the only sounds are his breathing and the distant hum of the air conditioning.

I almost died today.

The terrifying thought moves through me like a wave, not the panic of it, not the choking terror that I felt in the water, but the simple, enormous fact of it.

I was in the water and I was dying. Nobody knew and the water was pulling me under and I thought it was over.

I really believed the last thing I would ever see was green water and gold light.

And the last thing I would ever feel was regret.

Then Tex came swimming toward me looking like a mystical creature rising out of water.

I couldn't believe he came for me. But I shouldn't have been surprised. Tex is bigger than life. Tex yells at hurricanes.

He came for me because he's Big Tex, and Tex doesn't leave his people in the water.

I look at his face the way I've wanted to look at it for weeks. Without the part of my brain that's always asking what does he want from me and when do I have to pay. I can see him with clarity now. With the sharp, aching focus that comes from me knowing how close I came to never seeing him again.

The scar above his left eyebrow, thin and white, that I've never been close enough to see before.

The way his dark hair falls across his forehead when it's not pushed back.

The gray in his beard at the corners of his jaw, just a few strands, that make him look like a man in his early thirties who has lived hard and loved big and carries things for other people without ever putting them down.

I almost didn't get to have this. The thought scares me all over again.

I almost let the fear eat the rest of my life the way it ate everything before. I almost drowned with a box full of things I never said. The waste of that, the sheer stupid waste, hits me so hard it takes my breath away.

I'm done being afraid of this. Tex and I have something. I know it, I feel it, and I never want it to end.

I make a choice and close the six inches between us.

Not the way I closed it in the water. This is different. This is me, awake, breathing, clear-headed, choosing to move toward him.

I move slowly. Not because I'm scared this time, but because I want to feel every fraction of distance that I'm choosing to erase.

I slide my body across the sheets until my side is against his side, and then I lift my head and place it on his chest. My ear presses against his skin, and I can hear his heartbeat.

Slow. Steady. The most solid, perfect sound in the world.

I put my arm across his body. My forearm rests on his stomach and my hand curls over his ribs and I'm holding him. Not the way I held him in the water. That was survival. Not the way I held him falling asleep. That was need.

This is me choosing him with a clear head and dry lungs and both feet on solid ground. This is me wanting him.

I'm done treating every good thing like a trap and every kind person as a threat. I almost died today and the only thing I wanted, the only thing that mattered when the water was over my head and the light was fading, was Tex.

This enormous, loud, gentle, stubborn man who talked me through a hurricane and gave me a knife and named me after a storm and swam into a rip current to save my life.

His breathing changes. The slow, deep rhythm stutters, catches, and I feel his body tense under me.

A fraction of a second, a full-body awareness of the weight on his chest, the arm across his stomach, and the head over his heart.

Then it registers. I feel the moment he understands what's happening, who it is, what it means.

He goes still.

That careful stillness I've felt before when I've touched him. The kind where he barely breathes, where every muscle locks in place, where he turns himself to stone so he won't disrupt whatever fragile thing has landed on him.

His heart rate picks up under my ear. I can hear it accelerating, the steady thump quickening by ten beats, then twenty. The heart of a man who has feelings so big he can't contain them and is trying anyway.

I lift my head to look at him.

He's awake. His brown eyes are open and they're looking at me and there's so much in them that I couldn't process it all in a single lifetime. Hope and fear and tenderness and caution and something raw and deep that he's been keeping behind the jokes and the nonstop talking for weeks.

He doesn't speak. He doesn't move. He's waiting. The way he always waits. Giving me the space to decide what this is, to set the pace, to choose.

I reach up and touch his beard. I've wanted to know what it feels like since the first week.

Since I stood in the bar kitchen and watched him cook bacon and talk to eggs.

I wondered whether the beard was soft or rough, whether it would feel the way it looked, warm and full and wild.

I touch it now. My fingers brush the hair along his jaw, light at first, barely making contact, and then I press my palm flat against his cheek and let my fingers sink in.

It's softer than I expected. Thick and warm.

The hair curls slightly around my fingers, and underneath it his jaw is strong and solid.

I can feel the muscle flex as he clenches his teeth, holding himself still, holding everything so still.

His eyes haven't left mine. He's watching me touch his face with an expression that looks like a man watching something he's been waiting for, and he's afraid to breathe because a single breath might end it.

I trace my thumb along his cheekbone. I feel the crinkle lines at the corner of his eye, the ones that appear when he smiles, and I run my finger along them gently, learning the shape of his happiness with my fingertips.

I lean down and kiss him.

Soft. Tentative. My lips against his, barely there, a question more than a statement. I don't know what I'm doing.

I've been kissed before, but never like this, never because I chose it. Never because I wanted it, and the difference between this and everything that came before is so vast it's like comparing the ocean to a bathtub.

For one second, he doesn't respond. One second of absolute stillness where I think I've made a terrible mistake, where the old fear fires and tells me to pull back, to apologize, to run.

Then he kisses me back so gently.

His lips are warm and soft under the beard. He kisses me like I'm something he doesn't want to break. Precious and damaged and worth every ounce of care he has.

His hand comes up, slow, and touches the back of my head, his fingers sliding into my hair, and the weight of his hand is there but it's not pressing down. It's not holding me in place. It's just resting. Just being there. Letting me know he's here without trapping me.

The kiss deepens. Not into hunger, not into urgency. Into certainty. Into the feeling of two people who have been circling each other for weeks finally stopping, finally standing still, finally saying yes.

I want this.

His mouth moves against mine. I can feel his heartbeat under my palm where my hand is still on his chest, fast and hard. My own heart is matching it beat for beat.

We break apart. Not far. An inch. His hand is still in my hair and his breath is warm on my lips. His brown eyes are right there, so close I can see the gold flecks in them that I've never been close enough to notice before.

"Stormy," he whispers.

"I don't want to be afraid anymore." My voice is thick and raw. It doesn't sound like me. It sounds like someone braver. "I thought I lost you. When I was in the water. I thought I lost you before I ever really had you. I was so sad."

His eyes fill with tears. His throat moves and for the first time since I've known him, Tex doesn't have words. The man who fills every silence, and narrates his own life like a one-man show, can't speak.

His hand moves from my hair to my face. His palm cups my cheek, huge and rough with calluses, and his thumb traces the line of my cheekbone the way I traced his. Learning me the same way I learned him. His touch is so light it barely exists, but I feel it everywhere.

"I'll always be here," he says. His voice cracks on the word here, splits right down the middle. "We can take all the time you need."

I don't say anything. He doesn't either.

We don't need words to express what is between us.

We lie there with his hand on my face, and my hand on his chest, and the silence isn't empty.

It's full. It's the fullest silence I've ever been in, heavy with everything we just said and everything we didn't need to say.

I just want to lie here and breathe the same air as him and feel his heartbeat under my hand slowing down from fast to steady.

We stay like that for a long time. His thumb moves in slow circles on my cheek and our eyes close and we're just two people in a bed, breathing together.

"Boys?" Sheila's voice comes up the stairwell, distant but clear.

The voice of a woman who has been patient long enough and is now shifting into operational mode.

"I hate to interrupt, but the parking lot isn't going to set itself up.

I am one woman with two hands and a bad hip that I am absolutely going to start using as an excuse if you don't come help me. Tex? Everything okay up there?"

Neither of us moves.

"That's Sheila for you," Tex says. "She's worried sick and is going to come up here if we don't answer."

"I know."

"She won't knock. She'll bust through the door and she'll see us and she'll have opinions. Loud opinions. Opinions that will be expressed at length and in detail and will probably include the phrase 'it's about damn time.'"

I lift my head and smile at him.

"Ah, there it is," he says softly. "I've been waiting forever for that smile, Stormy."

"Boys!" Louder now. Closer. The sound of sensible shoes on the staircase.

"Coming, Mama Sheila! Be right there!" Tex calls, and his voice is back, the big warm voice that fills rooms and the empty spaces in my chest. "For the record, I want it noted that I waited six weeks.

Six weeks of not kissing you, Stormy. Six weeks of watching you walk around my bar in my t-shirt and I didn't do a single thing about it.

I deserve a medal. Or at least a plaque.

A small plaque behind the bar awarding me for patience.

You stay here and rest. You've been through hell today. I'll go help Sheila."

I sit up and look at him lying in the bed, this giant man with the soft eyes and the mouth I just kissed.

"I'm okay now," I say. "I can go back to work."

He frowns. "No, I think it's best if you rest today. You almost drowned and you swallowed a lot of saltwater."

I roll my eyes at him. "I'll stick close by so you and Sheila can keep an eye on me. Come on, we've got a bar to run. I'm fine, really. I can't stay here in bed. Let's go."

"You're as stubborn as me sometimes," Tex says.

We rush to get dressed and go downstairs together. On the stairs, his hand finds the small of my back. Not guiding. Just there. I don't flinch. I lean into it.

His hand stays the whole way down.

The careful distance between us, the distance I've been measuring and maintaining since the day he found me in a storm, is gone now.

It's like it was never there at all.