I lock the doors. Check them twice, out of habit, even though the thing I've been locking them against is in an ambulance heading to a hospital.
Stormy watches me. He doesn't say anything. He just watches. His hair is still pushed back from his face. He looks exhausted and beautiful.
I come back to the bar and stand across from him. "You ready to go upstairs?"
He looks at me. And the smile he gives me isn't the big one from the fight, the wild triumphant one. It's quieter than that. Smaller. It's the smile of a man who is very tired and very safe and doesn't need to perform anything for anyone. It might be the most beautiful thing I've ever seen on his face.
"Yeah," he says. "I'm ready."
Chapter 40: Stormy
Getting up the stairs is harder than it should be.
Not because of the stairs. The stairs are the same stairs I've climbed every night for two months. Same wood, same creak on the seventh step, same turn at the landing. The stairs haven't changed.
I've changed.
My legs are doing the thing that happens when adrenaline leaves your body. Your muscles release the tension and discover that the tension was the only thing keeping them functional.
Tex is right behind me. I can feel him there, close enough that if my legs give out on me, he'll catch me before I hit the step. He's been doing this all night. Positioning himself in the places where I might fall. He's a human safety net. A human insurance policy that has been standing between me and the ground all night.
We reach the third floor. Our room. The gun is still on the nightstand where he left it this morning. The bed is still unmade and everything is exactly the same as it was twelve hours ago except that twelve hours ago Ron Jackson was living in a way he isn't anymore.
Sure, he's alive and breathing. But he's also in a hospital bed with shattered bones, a fucked-up face, and a scar on his cheek that will never heal clean.
The old Ron Jackson who walked into my bar tonight—the one with the smile, the confidence, who believed with absolute certainty that he could walk into any room and take what he wanted—that Ron Jackson is dead.
I killed him tonight.
Now I'm standing in the middle of the bedroom, and I don't know what to do with my hands. The fight is over. Adrenaline is crashing. My brain is running at a speed that my body can't match.
What am I supposed to do with my hands?
They're swollen and throb with every heartbeat. They did something extraordinary, and now they're just hanging at my sides being regular hands again. That doesn't make sense. They feel weird as if they don't belong to my body.
"Hey," Tex says. He's standing right in front of me now. I didn't see him move. He's always doing that. Appearing in front of me as if he teleported. His hands find my shoulders. "Look at me, baby." His face is calm. "You're okay."
"I know."
"Stormy, you're shaking all over."
"It's the adrenaline. It'll pass."
"I know it will, but I'm going to stand here with you until it does."
He stands there with his big hands on my shoulders. Not squeezing, not rubbing, just present. The weight of his palms against my body holds me steady. The shaking moves through me in waves, each one smaller than the last, the intervals between them getting longer. Tex holds me upright and doesn't say a word. He's learned that sometimes silence is the best thing he can give me.
The shaking slows, then stops.
"There you go," he says. "You're okay. We both need a shower. Come on."
He leads me to the bathroom and turns on the water. He waits for it to get warm because he's never let me step into a cold shower. He always takes care of me and I love him forthat. He pulls the pink shirt over my head and drops it on the floor. The blood-spattered cotton lands on the floor.
"The shirt is ruined," I tell him.
"Don't worry about it, baby," he says.
"Do you think the blood will come out of the pants?" I ask. "You gave them to me and I love them."
