Chapter Two
The door of the workshop stuck for a second before Hayes shouldered it open, and then Avery was inside, and the storm cut off behind him like someone had thrown a blanket over the world.
The smell hit him first. Motor oil, thick and old, soaked into the concrete floor in dark patches that didn't wash out no matter how many times someone had tried.
Gasoline under that. Damp wood, damp canvas, the particular mildew smell of a building that had never quite dried out since it was built.
Two boat hulls sat up on metal stands in the middle of the floor, hollow and huge, throwing shadows across the ceiling from a single bare bulb swinging slightly from the draft of the closing door.
Avery stood dripping on the concrete. His shirt — three hundred dollars, tailored, the kind of shirt his mother had once held up at a family dinner as an example of him finally understanding presentation — clung to him in a way that made him feel naked.
His loafers had given up being shoes and were now just wet leather bags around his feet.
Water ran off the ends of his hair and down the back of his neck, and he was shivering, actually shivering, his teeth threatening to knock together if he didn't clamp his jaw shut.
Hayes set the suitcase down by a workbench covered in tools Avery didn't have names for and crossed to a wall-mounted phone, old enough to have a coiled cord, and picked up the receiver.
He held it to his ear. Frowned. Set it back down.
"Line's dead."
"Dead — what do you mean dead, like — the storm did that?"
"Storm did that." He said it without looking over, already moving toward a shelf, pulling down a rag that might once have been a towel and tossing it in Avery's direction.
It landed against his chest, damp itself, smelling like the rest of the building.
Avery held it anyway. Pressed it uselessly against his hair.
"Okay. Okay, so — is there, like, a landline somewhere else? A neighbor, or the inn down the road, I saw a sign for an inn a few miles back —"
"Inn's full." Hayes was pulling a tarp off something near the back wall, checking it, not really paying attention to Avery at all, and something about the flatness of his voice made it clear this wasn't a guess.
"Every tourist who got caught out today's already there.
And the bridge into town's gone same as the road you came in on.
Even if there was a room, you're not getting to it. "
Avery's stomach did the drop again, smaller this time, just a familiar ache settling in under his ribs. "Right."
"You're staying here."
He said it the way he'd say the radiator hose blew.
A fact. Not a question, not an offer, not something that required Avery's agreement, and Avery opened his mouth to argue on principle — because surely there was another option, surely a grown man didn't just get informed of his own sleeping arrangements by a stranger in a boat shop — and then closed it again, because the wind outside picked that exact moment to slam something against the side of the building hard enough to rattle the window in its frame, and he didn't actually have an argument.
"Upstairs," Hayes said, and walked toward a narrow staircase tucked in the back corner, not waiting to see if Avery followed.
He followed.
The stairs were steep, wooden, no railing on one side, and Avery had to grip the wall to keep from sliding in his ruined shoes.
Hayes took them two at a time like they weren't even there.
At the top he pushed open a door and flipped a switch, and light spilled out into the stairwell, and Avery climbed the last few steps into the loft and stopped just inside the doorway.
It was small.
That was the first thing. Not small like a nice hotel room felt small when you were used to space — small like a single unit, one open room with a kitchenette against one wall, a laminate table with two mismatched chairs, a door that had to be the bathroom, and past all of that —
A bed.
One bed. Double, not queen, pushed against the far wall under a window that was currently getting hammered by rain, a quilt on it that looked hand-stitched and old, and no couch.
No second bed. No air mattress leaning against a wall waiting to be inflated.
Avery's eyes did a full circuit of the room twice, looking for an option that wasn't there, and found nothing.
He didn't say anything. He was aware, distantly, that saying something right now would come out as a noise and not words.
Hayes had already crossed to a dresser and was pulling things out of it without any apparent awareness that he'd just detonated something in the middle of the room. "You're gonna want to get out of that," he said, not looking over. "You'll get sick standing around wet."
"I— right. Yes."
He came back with a stack of folded fabric and held it out.
Gray t-shirt, worn soft at the collar. Sweatpants, drawstring, faded at the knees like they'd been through a hundred washes.
Avery took them and the size difference registered the second his fingers closed around the fabric — the shirt alone looked like it could fit two of him.
"Bathroom's there." Hayes tipped his chin at the door. "Towels under the sink."
Avery went. Closed the door. Stood in a bathroom the size of an airplane lavatory and peeled his shirt off his skin with the specific, unpleasant suction of wet fabric releasing all at once, and looked at himself in the mirror over the sink — pale, wrecked, hair plastered flat, looking nothing like the man who was supposed to be photographed by his aunt at six o'clock sharp holding a sparkler and smiling for the group text.
He put the dry clothes on.
The shirt swallowed him. The collar hung loose enough to slip off one shoulder if he moved wrong, and the hem fell to mid-thigh, and when he rolled the waistband of the sweatpants over twice just to keep them on his hips, he still had to hold the extra fabric bunched in one fist to keep from tripping on it.
Everything smelled like cedar. Clean, plain laundry soap, and under that something warmer, like skin, like a person who'd worn this exact shirt enough times that it had started to carry him in the fibers.
Avery stood there a second longer than he needed to, breathing that in, and told himself it was because the bathroom was small and he had nowhere else to stand.
When he came out, Hayes was crouched at the little kitchenette, doing something to a drawer, and glanced up once — one single pass, taking in the sight of Avery drowning in his clothes — and something moved behind his eyes that wasn't quite a laugh.
He didn't say anything about it. Just looked back down at the drawer.
Avery crossed his arms over his chest, mostly to keep the shirt from sliding, and opened his mouth to ask something — he didn't know what, a question just to fill the space, anything —
The lights went out.
Not flickered. Not dimmed. Gone, all at once, the bulb over the kitchen and the lamp by the bed and the low hum of a refrigerator he hadn't even registered as sound until it stopped, and the room dropped into a dark so complete that for a second Avery couldn't tell which way he was facing.
The rain got louder. That was the strange part — without the refrigerator, without the lights, there was nothing left to compete with it, and the sound of it hammering the tin roof filled the whole loft like something physical, pressing down.
"Power's out," Hayes said, from somewhere to Avery's left, perfectly calm, like this happened every other week. Which, Avery realized with a fresh wave of despair, it probably did.
"Do you have — is there a generator, or —"
"Not for the loft." A pause, the sound of him standing, a floorboard shifting under weight. "Storm knocked the grid out. Whole valley, probably. Won't be back tonight."
Avery stood very still in the dark, arms still crossed, sweatpants slipping an inch on his hips, and became aware — all at once, the way you become aware of a sound that's been there the whole time — of the heat.
Without air conditioning, without even a fan turning, the loft had been holding the day's heat since morning, and now with the door and windows shut against the storm it had nowhere to go.
It sat on his skin. Thick, wet air that didn't move, that clung to the inside of his throat when he breathed it in, and already he could feel sweat starting under the borrowed shirt despite having been soaked through and shivering ten minutes ago.
"It's so hot in here," he said, and heard how stupid it sounded the second it left his mouth.
"Windows are shut for the wind." Hayes's voice again, closer now. Not close, but closer, somewhere near the foot of the bed. "Opens up some when it passes."
"Right. Okay." Avery's hands found each other in front of him and twisted together. "So — what's the — I mean, where should I —"
"Bed." No hesitation in it. "Only one in the place."
"Right, no, I saw that, I just — I can take the floor, honestly, it's fine, I've slept in worse places, well, not really, but I can —"
"Floor's concrete downstairs and hardwood up here. You'll wake up in pieces." A shift of weight, the quilt moving, the specific creak of an old mattress taking on more weight than it was used to. "Take a side. I'll take the other."
Avery didn't move for a second. Couldn't see his hand in front of his face, could only hear the rain and Hayes's breathing somewhere close enough to almost be his own, and the sheer domestic strangeness of it — a stranger's bed, a stranger's clothes, a stranger's voice in the pitch dark telling him this was just how it was going to be — sat in his chest like something he hadn't chewed properly.
"I'm not — I don't usually —"
"I'm not gonna touch you." Flat again. Not unkind, just stated, the same tone he'd used for the radiator and the phone line and the inn being full. "Middle of the bed's the line. I stay on my side."
There wasn't another option. Avery knew that.
He crossed the dark with one hand out in front of him until his knee hit the mattress frame, and lowered himself onto the very edge of it, as far to his side as the frame would allow, lying stiff on top of the quilt because pulling it back felt like more intimacy than he could handle right now.
The mattress dipped again as Hayes settled onto the opposite side. Neither of them said anything else.
Avery lay on his back with his eyes open in the dark, staring at a ceiling he couldn't see, sweat gathering along his hairline, the borrowed shirt sticking to his sternum.
The rain kept coming, endless, deafening against the tin above them.
And a few feet away, close enough that he could feel it without touching it, was the specific, undeniable heat of another body — solid, still, breathing slow and even like sleep was something that just happened to him on command — while Avery lay wide awake counting the inches between them and losing count every time.