CHAPTER ONE #4
She wasn't alone in this house. Somehow, for the first time in longer than she wanted to examine, that didn't feel like a problem to be managed. It felt like the beginning of something she hadn't budgeted the time for, and had absolutely no intention of missing.
?
The storm didn't let up. It howled through the small hours, slamming the old farmhouse like it wanted in, and Piper barely slept.
She lay curled beneath the quilt, one hand tucked under her cheek, counting the seconds between lightning and thunder out of an old habit she'd never managed to break. One, two, three —
CRACK.
The flash lit the room white. A heartbeat later, thunder boomed hard enough to jolt her upright, flashlight already in her hand, heart going in a rhythm that had nothing reasonable behind it.
This was fine. She'd covered hurricanes. She'd once stood mid-shot in a flooding street, water to her shins, mic steady, and hadn't so much as blinked. She wasn't afraid of storms. She'd built a career convincing herself of exactly that.
This one felt different. Wilder. More personal — maybe because of the isolation, maybe because there was no producer in her ear and no crew a phone call away, maybe because some part of her brain kept circling back to a different storm, years ago, a phone buzzing on a nightstand she hadn't reached for fast enough, a voicemail she still hadn't deleted.
She shoved the thought down before it could finish arriving. Not tonight.
She kicked off the quilt and went looking for a distraction instead, and found one thirty feet away, asleep, or nearly, on a couch that was too short for him.
The hallway didn't need the flashlight; lightning did the work for her, soft pulses of blue-white through the windows every few seconds while the house groaned around her, old bones shifting under the weight of wind and water. She stopped outside the den.
Beau lay on the couch, one arm slung behind his head, the fire burned down to embers that threw soft shadows across his face.
He wasn't fully asleep — his chest rose and fell too evenly for that — and his eyes opened the second she stepped closer, like some part of him had been listening for her the whole time.
"Can't sleep?" His voice was gravel-rough with almost-sleep.
She leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, going for casual and missing by a wide margin. "You snore. Like a bear having an argument."
"Good thing I'm not in the same room, then."
Thunder rolled again, closer, and she flinched before she could stop herself.
He sat up, all the sleep gone out of him at once. "Come sit."
"I'm fine."
"You're pacing my hallway at one in the morning like you're waiting for the sky to pick a fight with you specifically."
She didn't argue that one, because it was uncomfortably accurate. She crossed the room and sat at the far end of the couch — not far enough, not by half. The cushions weren't big, and the heat of him reached her across the space between them like its own kind of weather system.
"You lived through a lot of these?" she asked.
"More than I wanted to."
"You never evacuate?"
"To where? Storm hits wherever it wants. Might as well be somewhere I understand it well enough to fight back."
"You sound like you've made peace with chaos."
"Haven't. Just know you can't outrun it. You can only get good at rebuilding faster than it takes things."
She turned toward him. "Is that what happened with the tornado?"
His mouth tightened, and for a second she thought he'd close the door on it entirely. "Lost most of the house. Lost a couple of neighbors too. Lost —" He stopped himself, jaw working. "That's a different conversation for a different night."
"Fair enough." She let it sit, because pushing felt, suddenly, like exactly the thing he'd accused her of that afternoon — deciding he was a story before she'd earned the right to hear one.
He glanced sideways at her, something almost grateful in it. "You're not going to push?"
"Not tonight." She meant it. "I know what it costs to be asked before you're ready."
Something shifted in his face — surprise, maybe, that she understood that at all.
"What makes you uncomfortable?" he asked instead, turning the question back around like a man testing whether the ground would hold his weight. "Since we're trading."
She opened her mouth to deflect with something easy. What came out instead surprised her as much as it seemed to surprise him.
"Silence," she said. "Specifically the kind where somebody needed you and you weren't fast enough to answer."
He went very still, watching her with an attention that felt like the first honest thing anyone had offered her in months.
"That's not an answer," he said quietly. "That's a wound."
"Takes one to know one," she said, echoing him, and the corner of his mouth curved despite everything, sad and real at once.
"Fair trade," he murmured. "I'll tell you mine sometime. Not tonight."
"Not tonight," she agreed.
They sat there a long while after that, the storm working itself into a fresh fury outside, and she found she didn't mind the silence the way she usually did.
It wasn't empty. It was just his — and for the first time in longer than she could remember, she didn't feel the old compulsion to fill it with a question.