We keep moving and end up on the second-floor landing, backs against the interior wall, because there's nowhere else to go. The first floor is underwater. The third floor is too close to the roof, which is taking the brunt of the wind. The second floor, in the center of the building, is the sturdiest spot.
Tex sits with his legs stretched out and the lantern between us. I sit next to him. Closer than I would normally allow. My shoulder is maybe six inches from his arm, and I can feel the heat coming off his body. A steady warmth that has nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the fact that he's solid and present and here.
I should move away. Six inches is too close. Six inches is within reach. Everything I've learned tells me to put distance between myself and a man this big in a dark room with no working locks and nowhere to run.
I don't move.
The wind howls. Something else hits the building and I flinch, and my shoulder bumps his arm for a half second before I pull it back.
"Sorry," I say.
"Nothing to be sorry about." He doesn't move toward me. Doesn't move away. Just stays exactly where he is, steady as the foundation under us. "We're in the thick of it now. Landfall should be within the next hour or so, and then the eyewall passes and the backside hits and then it's over. Few more hours left to go. We'll make it."
"Have you ever been scared?" I ask. I don't know where the question comes from. I don't ask questions. But it's dark and the world is ending outside. He was laughing on that balcony and I need to understand how.
"Of hurricanes?"
"Of anything."
He's quiet for a second. "Yeah," he says. "I've been scared. I was scared a little during Michael of losing the bar. Not for myself. I was scared when my daddy got sick because I couldn't save him. Been scared plenty of times." He pauses. "Being scared isn't the problem. Being scared and alone is the problem. That's the part that'll eat you alive."
I think about every room I've been scared in. Every locked door, every unlocked door. Every night I spent with a knife under a pillow, waiting for the thing that was coming.
I was always alone.
"Anyway," he says, and his voice lifts back into its usual register, filling the dark like the lantern fills the room. "I'm not scared tonight. I'm pissed off. Peter interrupted what was shaping up to be a very profitable week at the bar. I had a biker group coming in from Pensacola. Forty riders, all of them big spenders. Now they're probably holed up in some hotel bar in Alabama, drinking overpriced beer, while I'm sitting in the dark with wet socks listening to my building get beat up. Peter owes me money that I won't be able to collect."
I don't laugh. But the tension loosens inside me. I lean my head back against the wall and close my eyes and listen to him talk.
He tells me about Michael. Not the scary parts. The after parts. How the whole community came together the next morning. How strangers showed up with chainsaws and water and food. How his dad, who was still alive then, stood in the destroyed bar with water up to his knees and said, "Well. Guess we're remodeling." How they rebuilt together, father and son, board by board.
He tells me about Sheila showing up the day after Michael with a mop and a bottle of bourbon and saying, "One's for the floor and one's for us, and I'll let you guess which is which."
His deep voice is a rope in the dark. I hold onto it the way I hold onto the knife.
Midnight comes and goes. The eyewall passes over us and for twenty minutes the wind drops and the rain stops and there's this eerie, absolute silence that's almost worse than the noise.
Tex goes to the balcony again and I follow him. We stand in the door and look out at a sky full of stars surrounded on all sides by a wall of clouds so massive it looks like the inside of a stadium.
"We're in the eye of the storm," Tex says quietly. "It's not over yet. It'll pick back up in a few minutes when the backside hits. Enjoy the quiet while it lasts."
The stars are impossibly bright. The air is warm and still. The water below us is black and everywhere.
The backside hits us suddenly, and the wind comes roaring back from the opposite direction, slamming into thebuilding with a force that staggers both of us in the doorway. Tex and I both grab the door frame. Our hands are six inches apart on the same piece of wood. I can see his fingers, huge and scarred and wrapped tight around the frame, and mine, small and white-knuckled. The contrast is so stark it looks like two different species holding onto the same life raft.
We push the door shut together, go back to the landing and sit against the wall again. The backside is louder somehow, angrier, and I'm running on nothing. No sleep for two nights here and countless nights before I arrived. No reserves. The adrenaline that's been keeping me upright is draining out of me. My head is heavy and my eyes are burning. The wall behind me is the only thing keeping me vertical.
Tex is still talking. Now about a fishing tournament. His voice is slower now, thicker. Even he's running out of gas. But he keeps going. He keeps filling the dark with words because I think he knows, somehow, that the words are the only thing keeping me from going under.
My head tips sideways. I catch it, jerk it back up. It tips again.
I'm six inches from his shoulder. Maybe five now. The heat of him is right there, solid and constant. I'm so tired that my body is making decisions my brain hasn't approved.
My head tips again. I don't catch it this time.
I don't touch his shoulder. I don't get that close. But I come close enough that I can feel the warmth of him through the air between us. I stay there, my head tilted toward him, my eyes closing in spite of everything I know about staying alert and staying alive.
Maybe not all big men are dangerous.
