Chapter 40 Stormy
Getting up the stairs is harder than it should be.
Not because of the stairs. The stairs are the same stairs I've climbed every night for two months. Same wood, same creak on the seventh step, same turn at the landing. The stairs haven't changed.
I've changed.
My legs are doing the thing that happens when adrenaline leaves your body. Your muscles release the tension and discover that the tension was the only thing keeping them functional.
Tex is right behind me. I can feel him there, close enough that if my legs give out on me, he'll catch me before I hit the step.
He's been doing this all night. Positioning himself in the places where I might fall.
He's a human safety net. A human insurance policy that has been standing between me and the ground all night.
We reach the third floor. Our room. The gun is still on the nightstand where he left it this morning. The bed is still unmade and everything is exactly the same as it was twelve hours ago except that twelve hours ago Ron Jackson was living in a way he isn't anymore.
Sure, he's alive and breathing. But he's also in a hospital bed with shattered bones, a fucked-up face, and a scar on his cheek that will never heal clean.
The old Ron Jackson who walked into my bar tonight—the one with the smile, the confidence, who believed with absolute certainty that he could walk into any room and take what he wanted—that Ron Jackson is dead.
I killed him tonight.
Now I'm standing in the middle of the bedroom, and I don't know what to do with my hands. The fight is over. Adrenaline is crashing. My brain is running at a speed that my body can't match.
What am I supposed to do with my hands?
They're swollen and throb with every heartbeat. They did something extraordinary, and now they're just hanging at my sides being regular hands again. That doesn't make sense. They feel weird as if they don't belong to my body.
"Hey," Tex says. He's standing right in front of me now. I didn't see him move. He's always doing that. Appearing in front of me as if he teleported. His hands find my shoulders. "Look at me, baby." His face is calm. "You're okay."
"I know."
"Stormy, you're shaking all over."
"It's the adrenaline. It'll pass."
"I know it will, but I'm going to stand here with you until it does."
He stands there with his big hands on my shoulders.
Not squeezing, not rubbing, just present.
The weight of his palms against my body holds me steady.
The shaking moves through me in waves, each one smaller than the last, the intervals between them getting longer.
Tex holds me upright and doesn't say a word.
He's learned that sometimes silence is the best thing he can give me.
The shaking slows, then stops.
"There you go," he says. "You're okay. We both need a shower. Come on."
He leads me to the bathroom and turns on the water. He waits for it to get warm because he's never let me step into a cold shower. He always takes care of me and I love him for that. He pulls the pink shirt over my head and drops it on the floor. The blood-spattered cotton lands on the floor.
"The shirt is ruined," I tell him.
"Don't worry about it, baby," he says.
"Do you think the blood will come out of the pants?" I ask. "You gave them to me and I love them."
"I'm sure we can clean them up. Stop worrying about all that.
Put your hand on my shoulder and lean on me.
" He pushes the sweatpants down and I step out of them.
After removing the knives from the pockets, he sets them on the counter.
Then he strips himself, and we're both standing in the bathroom in the steam.
There's nothing sexual about showering together this time.
Only two people with an evil man's blood on them that needs to be cleansed.
We step in. The water hits my shoulders and runs down my chest. It's warm and I close my eyes and let it take the night off my skin.
Tex washes me gently. He starts with my hair, his big hands working shampoo through the strands, his fingers against my scalp. The sensation is so gentle that my throat tightens. Then my shoulders. My back. My chest.
He washes himself quickly then helps me out.
After drying me off with a towel, he picks me up and sets me on the bathroom counter.
I love that he's so big and strong. The marble is cold under my thighs, but his face is level with mine for once because the counter puts me at his height.
I can look straight into his eyes without tilting my head back.
He takes my right hand. The one that wore the brass knuckles. The one that broke Ron's teeth and his ribs and his face. He holds it under the light and examines it, turning the hand over, pressing gently on each knuckle, watching my face for pain.
"Nothing's broken," he says. "Swollen. Bruised. But not broken. Sheila's knuckles did their job."
"I can't believe Sheila keeps brass knuckles in her purse. Who does that?"
Tex lets out a chuckle. "I guarantee that's not the only weapon in that purse."
He gets the ointment from the medicine cabinet.
Carefully, he squeezes a line of it onto his finger and works it into each knuckle, each joint, the swollen places where the brass met bone and the bone held.
His hands are enormous around mine. The hands of a man who has handled broken things all his life and knows how to touch them without making them worse.
"Does this sting?" he asks.
"A little."
"Means it's working."
He does the left hand with the same attention. When he's finished, he holds my hands in his palms and he doesn't say anything. He just holds them the way you hold something that has done incredible work and needs to rest.
Then he picks me up again. One arm under my knees, one behind my back, and I'm off the counter and against his chest. I let him carry me because being carried by Tex is not the same as being handled.
Being carried by Tex is the opposite of every hand that's ever moved my body without asking.
This is a man who picks me up because he wants to carry me when I can't stand on my own.
He puts me down on the bed and climbs in beside me. I settle against his chest. My head on the place between his shoulder and his collarbone that was built specifically for me. The place that fits, the place that's mine.
Then I start talking, babbling really, and I can't stop.
The words come the way the shaking came—in waves, my brain processing the night by pushing it out through my mouth.
I'm the one who doesn't talk. I'm the one who holds everything inside.
But tonight, the words won't stay in. Tonight, they come pouring out and I let them come because this is how I'm healing. Tex knows it and he listens.
"When he grabbed my arm," I begin, "my body recognized him before my brain did. Like muscle memory. My arm already knew his hand because it's been grabbed by that hand a thousand times and the skin remembers even when my brain is trying to forget."
"I saw the grab from the door," Tex says quietly. "I saw the way your tray went flying."
"And when he yelled at me—take that fucking shirt off, we're going home—for one second, Tex. One heartbeat. The old training fired. My mouth almost automatically said, yes sir. I felt the words start to form. It was right there. Four years of training. Like a reflex."
"But you didn't say it, baby."
"No, instead I looked him right in the eye and said, I AM home, you're in my house now, bitch.
When those words came out of my mouth. I don't know how to describe it.
Like everything I've ever known was overwritten.
As if the machine I was before crashed and rebooted and the new version doesn't have a yes sir function. It's left the building."
"Baby, that's the greatest thing I've ever heard come out of anyone's mouth," Tex says. "I want that on a t-shirt. My yes sir function has left the building. You can wear it every day."
"Don't get t-shirts printed up," I tell him before he really goes and does it. "He drew back his hand and then you hit him and I didn't even see you coming. You were just BAM! The sound his jaw made when your fist connected—"
"Oh baby, that was a good hit. I'm not going to lie. I can't describe how good it felt, too."
"And then you got behind him and he couldn't move.
I couldn't believe it. The man who terrorized me for years was looking me right in the eyes and he couldn't move.
My man had him in a chokehold and he was helpless.
I never knew that was possible. In a million years, I never imagined there could be a scenario when he was the one who was helpless. "
"Anybody can be helpless, Stormy. You just need the right person holding them. You just called me your man. I like that."
I grin over at him. "And then you said, 'take what is yours to take'. At first, I didn't understand what you meant. I didn't know that was the plan. Did you always plan for it to go that way? To hold him for me? Was that always what tonight was about?"
"From the beginning. Every piece of tonight was about getting you in front of him with him unable to move. The shirt, the parking lot, Denny, all of it. I didn't set this up so I could beat him. Though I wanted to. I set it up so you could because the vengeance was yours to take."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"You needed to feel it in the moment. If I'd told you beforehand, you'd have been in your head. You'd have been planning and preparing. I needed you to feel the rage. The power. The realization that he's just a man and you're stronger than he ever was."
Tex planned all of this, phone calls, calling in favors, logistics, coordination, not to protect me. To free me by my own hands.