Chapter 4 Storm Shelter
Nora
The monkey screams once and bolts.
"Copérnico, wait!" I say, already moving after him.
"Copérnico," Santi repeats, like he's testing the word.
I shoot him a defensive look. "What? It suits him."
"He's a howler monkey, Nora."
"He's the only one of us who seems to know where he's going."
"North-northeast," Santi says behind, voice steady in a way that makes the hair at the back of my neck lift. "He's moving roughly parallel to the main drainage. That's good. I think"
"Good." I duck under a low branch. Wet leaves slap against my face, cold and rain-soaked. "That's… a word for it."
He doesn’t answer. The rain, which was a suggestion ten minutes ago, decides it's fully on board with the apocalypse. It thickens from mist to needles, dropping through the canopy in heavy curtains wherever there's a gap.
Vision narrows to the monkey's tail flicking, the line of his back, the flashes of movement in the green.
Everything else becomes texture and sound: the grab of roots under boots, the slurp of mud, the drum of rain on leaves overhead.
The air feels like a hot, wet cloth pressed over my mouth and nose, thick enough that each inhale comes with effort.
"Left," Santi says behind me, voice even. "Root."
I go left. The root I would have hit is already shining wet and treacherous where my foot would have landed.
Copérnico vanishes into a tangle ahead, then reappears higher, swinging hard between two lianas. Thunder rolls overhead, close enough to vibrate through my ribs. The canopy dulls the flash's brightness, but the sky between leaves turns momentarily white.
"He's slowing," Santi says.
"The storm?" I pant.
"Maybe."
Santi's hand closes around my elbow, and angles us off the monkey's line entirely, toward a darker shape rising out of the undergrowth to our right.
"That's not where he's going," I say.
"I don't care where he's going. I care where we're going."
Then the shape resolves: rock. A bulge of it, forming a low overhang, maybe six feet deep and just high enough that a tall man can stand at the front and not knock his head. The earth underneath looks marginally less saturated than the swamp we’ve been wading through.
"Shelter," he says unnecessarily.
Santi ducks under first, one hand still anchored on my arm, and pulls me in after him.
The space is small. Smaller than small. We are both inside it, and there is nowhere in here that isn't also where the other person is.
"Okay," I say, breath coming hard.
"Sit." His hand finds the small of my back, presses once, gentle but absolute. "Before you fall down from an adrenaline crash, and I have to explain a head injury to Ryan's incident log."
I sit, my butt hard against packed earth. The rock ceiling is close enough that if I straighten my spine too fast, I'll find out exactly how close.
Outside, the downpour intensifies, slamming against the leaves in sheets, turning the open ground in front of the rock into slippery, churned mud. Water runs in small rivulets from the slope above, but most of it channels to the sides. The back of the overhang stays relatively dry.
Relatively. Every thread on me is still soaked. My shirt is transparent against my skin, shorts plastered to my thighs, braid a dead weight dragging water down my spine in a thin, cold line that makes me shiver even though the air itself is warm.
Santi crouches in front of me, close, taking up most of what little room exists.
His shirt clings the same way mine does, dark fabric gone nearly black with water, outlining a chest and shoulders I never noticed beneath well-cut blazers.
There is nothing well-cut about this. There is nothing to pretend about.
I make myself look at his face instead, although it takes a real effort.
"So," I say. "Status check. We're… somewhere southeast of the last marked trail. Minimal visibility. No guide."
He nods once. Dark hair pasted to his forehead, a drop of water tracking down the sharp line of his nose. "And," he adds, "possibly within range of people who didn't want Mateo finishing what he started."
That lands like a stone dropped in my gut. "Tell me again."
"Last night, I..." His gaze flickers across my face.
"Couldn't sleep. I went for a walk and bumped into Mateo on the dock.
He was coming back from the northern path—the one that runs past the boundary, toward the restricted zone.
Neither of us had a good explanation for where we'd been, so we agreed not to ask. "
"He showed me photos," he tells me. "Of three different groups, six different dates—Cumbre Verde clients on unmaintained trails, the restricted tepuy boundary markers visible right behind them. Mateo has been building the case for a while."
"The sacred sites," I say, my brain rushing to catch up. "I read about boundary violations in the impact reports online when I was preparing for the trip."
His mouth tightens. "He asked me for forty-eight hours of silence, and he was going to do something about it."
"...And now he's gone." I feel suddenly cold, despite the heat of the jungle.
"Yes."
"Someone swiped him. Or multiple someones."
"We all had a bad feeling about the Cumbre Verde group from the moment we laid eyes on them."
Thunder rolls again, longer this time, and somewhere above us a branch gives way under the weight of all that water and comes down hard enough to shake droplets loose from the rock ceiling onto my shoulders.
"We were being watched today," I say with a shudder.
"Yes."
A vacation with colleagues. A team retreat with good catering and a charming guide. That's what we wanted. But in its place, we are now lost in the jungle, separated from our group, and hunting for our guide, who has been kidnapped.
I am shaking harder now.
"Here," Santi says.
He pulls out an emergency blanket from his pack, silver on one side, orange on the other. He opens it across, cutting off any chance I have to object, settling close enough that his knee presses against the outside of my thigh and stays there.
Despite everything, I find myself thinking of the way he looked at me across the table that first night. That... desire. I think about Erica's teasing of him. Heat slides down my spine, my entire nervous system going bright and skittish.
"We need to keep your core temperature up," he says matter-of-factly. "Hypothermia in the tropics isn't common, but it's real. And you're shivering."
The blanket traps heat fast in the small space, turning the air under it close and humid and entirely too aware of how little distance separates us.
A droplet falls from my hairline, tracking down past my temple, cheek, and jaw. It lands on the base of my throat, where the soaked V-neck of my shirt pulls low and clings.
His gaze tracks it.
He doesn’t even try to pretend he isn’t looking.
"So what's the plan?" I ask, my throat dry, "Once the rain breaks."
"We find the others. Or we find higher ground and wait for them to find us." He sounds none-too-steady himself. "Either way, we don't go looking for Cumbre Verde ourselves."
"Obviously."
His eyes finally come up to meet mine again, and my breath catches at what's in his gaze. It's hunger, plain and unguarded, like that night over the table, only... more. My pulse trips over itself. I look away first because I am not ready for what happens if I don't.
"I need to deal with this," I say, gesturing vaguely at my own soaked, dripping state, reaching for any excuse to keep my hands occupied. "My hair weighs about four pounds right now."
I push out from under the blanket edge, far enough to kneel up properly, and reach back for my braid.
My fingers find the tie, work it loose, and the whole heavy length of it falls forward over one shoulder, dark and rope-thick with water.
I start wringing it out the way I would at the end of any swim, twisting, squeezing, water sluicing down over my wrist and splattering onto the dirt between my knees.
Santi hasn't moved. He's watching me, and his expression has changed since the last time I looked—gone still in a way that doesn't read as calm at all. It's stillness like a held breath. Stillness like the second before something gives.
"Santi," I say, trying to sound amused, but my voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "You're looking at me like—"
"Like, I want to fuck you?" His eyes glitter.
I gasp, and my hands freeze on my braid. Heat coils low and heavy in my belly, between my legs.
He doesn't move toward me, but his knuckles are white from how tightly his fists are clenched. A muscle flutters in his jaw.
"You... what?" I can only gape at him. This doesn't happen in real life. This happens in the books I like to read; it happens in the book I'm trying to write. But... it doesn't happen to people like me.
Does it?
"I have sat across from you at conference tables, watching you.
Wanting you. I have listened to you speak about costs and finance reports, and wondered what it would be like to hear you tell me about your day, about your dreams. I have seen you hold your precious books and devour the words there, and I ached to know what those hands would feel like on my skin.
What it would feel like to have you look at me the way you look at those books.
I have watched you bite your lip while you scribble in your notebook, and wondered what those lips would taste like.
And I have watched you this week, wondering if I could be brave enough to tell you these things.
Wondering what would happen if I made a move.
Wondering endlessly what it would be like to hold you in my arms and make love to you, Nora, in the dirt of the jungle floor. "
The rain roars on, indifferent, while I sit there with a wet rope of hair still wound around my fist and every coherent thought burned clean out of my head.
"Well," I say, and my voice doesn't sound like mine at all. "What are you waiting for?"
***
Santi