The Storm #2
And maybe you’re right. My inexperience, my na?veté, were definitely part of it.
Landon was only twenty-six that year but still a grown man in my eyes, and yet not like those other men downstairs.
Those men felt like … well, dads, honestly, regardless of whether they actually had kids.
They felt like capital-M Men in a way that freaked me out at that age.
But Landon seemed somewhere in between them and the boys my age, not coarse and loud and hairy like those guys, not gangly and sweaty and embarrassing like the boys I went to school with.
His hair was a little too long, and instead of a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts, he was wearing jeans and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt.
He had the prettiest eyes, too. Nearly black, so dark you couldn’t see his pupils.
“Like a shark,” Lo said later, but that’s not what I saw. Not then.
“I was filling up the bathtubs—that’s what you’re supposed to do in this kind of thing, right?” he went on, and my face felt scorched as I realized I’d been standing there, just staring at him, not saying anything.
“N-no. I mean, yes, yes, that’s what you’re supposed to do, that’s actually what I was coming in here to do, but you’re not … well, you’re not not supposed to be in here.”
“Not not supposed to be in here,” he repeated, scratching his jaw and studying the ceiling. “Okay, so I do believe that means I’m allowed in here, then?”
I couldn’t tell if he was teasing me or making fun of me—there’s a difference, and by fifteen, I was very aware of that, especially where boys were concerned—but then he smiled at me and reached out, gently thumping my arm.
“Sorry if I scared you. Honestly, I was just trying to make myself useful doing something that wasn’t hard labor.”
He winked, and I somehow blushed even hotter, and then he laughed and said, “But if you’re here to take over, I guess I’ll have to go be manly with power tools or prove I can lift more sandbags than Dave.”
Then he tilted his head, squinting at me. “Unless you need an assistant?”
“I do,” I blurted out because in that moment, I would’ve done just about anything to keep talking to Landon Fitzroy.
I didn’t know that’s who he was until we were out in the hall and he formally introduced himself, but the name didn’t mean anything to me back then anyway.
Remember, I was fifteen and living in a small town.
I barely paid attention to anything that wasn’t school or my friends or the inn, so I definitely wasn’t well-versed in Alabama politics.
Didn’t know Landon’s father was the state treasurer with an eye on the governor’s office.
Didn’t know Landon had been a big deal in football at the University of Alabama, or that he was finishing up law school in the spring.
And I certainly didn’t know he was engaged.
Here was what I knew about Landon after that hour we spent filling bathtubs and sinks:
He loved music, the louder the better, and had seen the Doors play in Miami when he was just fifteen—had snuck out, hitchhiked, scared his poor mama half to death.
He’d hated school but liked history, enough that he’d gotten his degree in it at Alabama.
He’d come to St. Medard’s Bay as a kid with his grandparents a few times and loved it, thought it was the most perfect place on God’s green earth because it never changed. Every time he came back, it was like everything had been “preserved in amber” waiting for him.
He wanted to buy a boat, his own boat. His family had one, but it was too big, too grand, “like trying to take the fucking QE Two—pardon my French—out in a backyard pool.”
He wanted to sail around the world, wanted to spend as much of his life on the water as he could for as long as he could.
The whole time we talked, he never once treated me like a kid. But he also wasn’t creepy, either, you know? I was sheltered, but I’d been around older boys, and I knew when they were looking at me in a way they shouldn’t. When they were assessing how they could take advantage.
That wasn’t Landon. It was more like I was his buddy, just an interesting person he’d decided to pass the time with, and I loved that, loved how often he said my name as we talked, loved how he laughed when I told him that living in St. Medard’s Bay sometimes felt like being frozen in time, too, but not in a good way.
Later, I realized he never really asked me much about myself, that I wasn’t so much “a companion” as I was “an audience.”
Another quality that he and Lo had in common.
By the time I went back downstairs to see if Mom needed anything else, I was in the throes of a crush so powerful it was almost painful, but I wasn’t in love with Landon Fitzroy.
That happened the next afternoon, when Velma made landfall.
So much of that storm is still a blur. It wasn’t as bad as Audrey, thank God. For one, we knew how seriously to take preparations this time, so all of us—me, my parents, Landon and his fishing buddies—were huddled in the kitchen in the back of the inn when the wind started to howl.
There were no windows in there, plus there was a back staircase up to the second floor in case we needed to get higher, so it was the safest place to be.
That didn’t stop me from giving a small, panicked cry when the flickering lights finally went out, plunging all of us into pitch-black darkness.
“Fuck,” Daddy muttered, the first and only time I ever heard him swear, and I could hear him fumbling around for the big flashlight he’d brought but hadn’t wanted to turn on until he absolutely needed it because it went through batteries so fast.
Outside, the wind sounded like it had the night of Audrey, like something human and angry, and panic was a trapped bird in my chest as I squeezed my eyes shut despite the total darkness we were already in.
The air around me moved slightly, and two scents filled my nose—the Irish Spring soap we put in every guest room, and something else, something sweet and floral.
Violet candy, I later learned. A weird, old-fashioned sweet that Landon’s grandmother had loved, and she’d passed on that love to him, so he was forever pulling out that bright purple foil tube and popping one, sometimes two into his mouth.
It meant that when you kissed him, he tasted like flowers, but I wouldn’t know that for years yet.
In November of 1980, sitting in that dark kitchen while Velma pounded her fury against the walls of my home, I knew only that his hand was warm and sure when it lay against my upraised palm, and that his voice in my ear was gentle as he said, “You’re gonna be okay.”
I could hear the smile in his voice as he added, “You’re with me, and trust me, I’m not going out like this. So no one with me is, either.”
Daddy’s flashlight blazed on then, but when it landed on us, Landon had already pulled back his hand and subtly moved back a few inches.
Upstairs, I heard something crack, but Landon didn’t even flinch. He just sat back with his arms wrapped around his upraised knees and let the storm rage all around him.
Like I said, it was years after that night before we ever kissed, before I knew what his touch felt like elsewhere on my body.
And when Lo asked me later—tears on her face, blood on her hands—when it had started, and how, I told her about the letters we wrote back and forth, the secret looks.
The time he reached for my hand as we passed each other in the lobby at the Rosalie.
I told her about the night—the one night—on his boat, the one with his wife’s name on the side, the one that he’d finally docked in St. Medard’s Bay Harbor, just like he’d always wanted.
How he looked at me under the stars, took a deep breath, and said, “Please tell me you’ve been thinking about this for as long as I have,” before kissing me with violets and sugar on his tongue.
And that’s the truth, but like many things in life—so, so many things—it’s not the whole truth.
What started between me and Landon began on that kitchen floor, his hand in mine, a storm all around us, and Landon offering his destiny like some kind of protective cloak he could drape over anyone he cared about.
“I’m not going out like this,” he’d said.
And he was right. But what was waiting for him instead—his real destiny, the path he started down the first time his grandparents drove him into St. Medard’s Bay on a sunny Fourth of July the year before I was born—was much, much worse.