At 4 AM, I think about those brown eyes. The crinkles at the edges. His laugh when he saw me in his bar's clothes and how it didn't sound like any laugh I've been on the receiving end of before. How he put his extra chips on my plate when he thought I wasn't looking.
How he noticed me flinch and stepped back without saying a word. Didn't comment. Didn't get angry. Didn't ask why. Just gave me space like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Nobody does that. Nobody just steps back. Not a man as big as him.
At 5 AM, the sky is starting to lighten behind the rain clouds and the door hasn't opened. He hasn't come and I've been gripping this knife for six hours. My hand hurts and my eyes hurt from lack of sleep.
He didn't come.
I don't know what to think about that. In my experience, men who bring you home always want something. The nice ones just take longer to ask for it, and the not-nice ones don't ask at all. But he didn't come. He walked past my door, used the bathroom, and went back to bed. That's it. That's all he did.
I sit up and put the knife on the nightstand. My hand has a cramp in it so deep I have to flex my fingers open one at a time. I stare at the chair wedged under the doorknob. I feel a little better. Not completely, but it's better than I felt when I climbed into his truck.
I get up and pull the chair away from the door as quietly as I can and set it back in the corner. I slide the knife back in my pocket. I stand in the room for a minute, listening to the absolute silence from the other side of the wall where a manthe size of a small building is apparently sleeping like the dead, just like he said he would.
Maybe he told me who he was. I just didn't believe him.
I open the door and step into the hallway. The apartment is dark and quiet. I sneak downstairs. The bar is a mess from the previous night. Glasses left out, chairs not pushed in, the hasty shutdown of a business that closed fast. I stand in the middle of it and look around, thinking about what I'm good at.
The list is short. The list has always been short, and the things on it aren't things I'm proud of, but there's one thing I can do that doesn't require being big or strong or brave or any of the things I'm not.
I can clean.
I find a broom and a dustpan in a supply closet behind the bar. Wrapping my hands around the handle, I start sweeping. The bristles swish across the hardwood floor in long, even strokes. The rhythm of it is mindless and it gives my hands something to hold that isn't a knife.
It's not much to offer. But it's what I've got.
And if he's going to let me stay here through this storm, I need to earn it.
Because if there's one thing I've learned in my life, it's that nothing is free.
Chapter 3: Tex
I wake up to the sound of sweeping.
It takes me a minute to place the sound. My brain is still stuck in that thick, syrupy place between sleep and awake where nothing makes sense and everything sounds like it's underwater. But there it is. The slow, rhythmic swish of a broom across hardwood, steady as a heartbeat, coming from somewhere below me.
I roll over and check my phone. A little after five. The storm alerts are stacked up on my lock screen, each one worse than the last. Peter has been upgraded overnight. Category 4, sustained winds of 145 miles per hour, possible Category 5 before landfall. Storm surge projections of twelve to sixteen feet in coastal Bay County. Landfall expected tomorrow, late evening to midnight.
I stare at the ceiling for a second and let that settle. Sixteen feet of storm surge. My bar sits maybe eight feet above sea level. Those aren't numbers I love.
But right now, someone is sweeping my bar, and there's only one person it could be.
I pull on jeans and boots and head downstairs without bothering with a shirt because it's July in Florida. The AC is already struggling against the humidity and it's not even dawn yet. The stairwell is dark except for the green glow of the exit signs, and I follow the sound of the broom down to the first floor.
He's in the middle of the bar. The overhead lights are off but he's found the switch for the neon signs, and the whole room is washed in this soft red and blue glow that makes it look like a scene from a movie.
He's moving between the tables with the broom, sweeping in long, careful strokes, collecting bottle caps and peanut shells into neat little piles. He's wearing the gift shop clothes, the black sweatpants and the Property of Big Tex's Roadhouse t-shirt, and his blonde hair is sticking up on one side like he slept on it wrong.
Except I don't think he slept at all. There are shadows under his eyes so dark they look like bruises, and his face has that hollow, drawn-tight look that comes from a long night of not sleeping.
"Hey, Stormy! What are you doing?" I ask.
He jumps. The broom handle clangs against a table leg and he spins toward me with his whole body tense, eyes wide.
There's raw fear on his face.
Then he sees it's me, and he pulls it back, tucks it away behind that blank, careful mask he wears. But I saw it.
