What the fuck is wrong with me? Why didn't I let him squeeze my hand? I know he won't hurt me. I know that. Would it have killed me to let him touch my fingers?
I've fucked up everything and now it's too late.
I think about his arm under my fingers on the balcony, warm and solid, and how I touched him and the world didn't end.
I can't stop thinking about all the things I didn't do.
I didn't tell him my name. I didn't tell him where I came from or what happened to me or why I flinch at hands. I didn't trust him with the truth even though he earned it a million times over. I kept the chair against the door every night to protect myself against him.Tex.The safest person in the world. Even long after I knew in my heart it was stupid and would hurt him if he knew.
Because he was never pushing through my door.
Never.
I was scared. I kept my history locked in a box that I was going to open someday when I was ready. And now that someday is never because I'm drowning in the fucking Gulf of Mexico that he loves so much, and he doesn't even know I'm out here.
Why didn't I let him hug me? I wanted him too. So much. He hugs everyone. He touches everyone except me. Sheila, Mickey, random bikers, neighbors, people he knows at Walmart. The list never ends. I watched him lift Sheila off the ground. I wondered what it would feel like and I could have found out. He would have done it.
I know that now, out here with the water dragging me out and the truth stripped bare. He would have wrapped those big arms around me and held me. I would have felt so safe. He was waiting for me to ask. I never did because I was scared, and scared is the only language I've ever spoken. Now I'm out of time to learn a new one.
I could've trusted him. I know that. Deep down, I know I could've trusted him with everything. He was the first person I ever should have. My name, my story, all of it. He would have held that close too. He would have held all of it the way he held the photo of his dad, careful, like it mattered more than anything.
I almost had a good life.
It was right there in the palm of my hand, in a wrecked bar on a beach with a man who gave me a new name and a job. Tex never asked for anything. Not one damn thing. I was too scared to close my fingers around the life I had and now it's gone.
And that kills me.
A wave rolls over me. I come up coughing. Weaker now. My arms feel like they belong to someone else. My legs are so heavy. They're not working anymore. I always heard you could tread water for days. That is absolute bullshit and a total lie. I won't make it another hour out here.
God, I hope Tex doesn't have to see my body when they find me. They'll probably make him identify me because there's no one else. And he doesn't even know my real name.
The thought makes me fight to hang on a little longer. Not for myself. For him. Because he already lost his parents. He already lost his bar twice now and he's been putting everything back together piece by piece. If he loses me too, itmight break that big, generous heart to the point it can't be fixed.
I kick. I fight. I get my face above the water one more time, and I gasp. The sky is impossibly blue and the seagulls are screaming without a care in the world. The shore is so far away, but I scream his name with everything I have left one last time.
"Tex!"
The water takes it. The distance swallows it.
Nobody hears me.
I'm invisible the same way I've always been.
I go under. The water is warm and green and the light filters down through it in columns of gold.
Tex was right.
The water in the Gulf really is sparkling clear and beautiful.
It's the last thing I see.
Chapter 13: Tex
The insurance adjuster is, as predicted, a deeply tedious man.
He wears a short-sleeved dress shirt with a tie, which I maintain is a character flaw, and he has a way of reading documents that involves moving his lips and tracing each line with his finger like a child learning to read.
The meeting takes an hour and forty minutes, which is an hour and thirty-nine minutes longer than it needed to be. I sign forms. I provide receipts from the red folder, not the blue one, because Stormy organized my life and my life is better for it. I shake the man's hand, and I am back in my truck.
