His hand tightens on my arm. Just a fraction. Just enough that I can feel his fingers press into my skin, and the tremble is gone. His hand is steady now.
"I do," he says. Quiet. Barely a whisper. "I do feel safe with you."
I let out a breath. I can take a full breath now for the first time since I pushed open his bedroom door and saw the bruises.
We stand on the balcony. His hand stays on my arm. The parking lot below us is coming back to life, the noise rising again, the music and the laughter returning the way they do when a tense moment passes and people decide it's okay to have fun again. I can hear Sheila's voice cutting through the crowd, getting things back on track.
"I should get back to work," Stormy says.
"Take a few more minutes if you need them."
"I don't need them." He lifts his hand off my arm, and the place where it was feels cold. Even in the night heat. "I'm good, really."
He turns to go back inside. At the door, he stops. He doesn't turn around.
"Tex?"
"Yeah?"
"The guy. The biker. He was just drunk. He didn't mean anything."
"I know."
"You scared the living hell out of him."
"I sure hope so."
A pause. And then, so quiet I almost miss it over the music and the crowd, "But you didn't scare me."
The door closes behind him. I listen to his footsteps going down the stairs, lighter than when they came up.
You didn't scare me.
Thank God. I give myself another minute. I go back downstairs and take my place at the grill. Sheila catches my eye from behind the bar and raises one eyebrow. I nod once and she nods back. We're good. That's our entire conversation about what just happened.
Stormy is back on the floor. He's moving through the tables with a tray in his hand and his shoulders straight. When he passes the biker's table, the biker doesn't look up and Stormy doesn't look down. The distance between them is exactly the width of someone who just learned that the biggest man in the parking lot is on his side.
The night goes on. The music plays. I cook burgers and watch Stormy work. I think about his hand on my arm, those thin, trembling fingers choosing to touch me. He chose to close the distance that he's measured and maintained since the day I found him in a storm.
He chose to touch me. And then he said I didn't scare him.
That means something. I know it does.
I flip a burger and I smile into the smoke. I don't know what's coming and I don't know what we are. I don't know how any of this ends but I know one thing.
We're finally getting somewhere.
Chapter 12: Stormy
August in Florida is not weather. It's punishment.
The air is so thick with humidity that breathing feels like drinking. The heat starts at six in the morning, and by noon it's a hundred degrees in the shade. Except there is no shade because the sun is directly overhead and personally angry at everything below it.
The parking lot asphalt radiates heat back up at you from below, while the sun hammers you from above, and by mid-afternoon you're being cooked from both directions like a burger on Tex's grill.
I've been here six weeks now. Six weeks since a man in a truck made a U-turn that changed everything. The bar is still a wreck inside. The floors are half-replaced, the drywall is going up slowly, and the electrical is a nightmare that's costing more than Tex will say out loud. Though I've seen the invoices because I handle the filing now.
The outside operation is thriving, though. Every weekend the parking lot fills with bikes. Big Bertha smokes and Sheila pours. I run plates and Tex grills, and it feels like ours.
