I've been awake since 0515. Old habit, hardwired deep. The hurricane still churns outside, but it's shifting—the wind less percussive, the rain more steady than violent. Helena's moving northeast, weakening. By tomorrow, the roads should clear.
The pillow wall collapsed sometime around 0300. I noticed because her hand drifted across the neutral zone and landed on my forearm, and the contact jolted me awake with a precision no alarm clock has ever managed. She didn't wake up. Just curled her fingers against my skin, sighed, and settled deeper into sleep.
I didn't move her hand. I should have. I didn't.
Now I'm propped on one elbow, watching her sleep, and I'm aware of how this looks. The word creepy comes to mind. But it's not that. It's protective—the same instinct that makes me check exits and count heads and position myself between thethreat and the principal. Except Kassidy isn't a principal. She's a woman who fell asleep mid-sentence about narrative structure and who, in the gray morning light, looks younger than twenty-nine. Softer. Without the armor of sarcasm and self-deprecation, her face is open in a way that makes my chest hurt.
Her hair is everywhere. A dark tangle across the pillow, across her face, one curl stuck to her lip. Without thinking, I reach out and tuck it behind her ear.
She stirs. I pull back. Her eyes flutter open—unfocused, confused—and for a beat she looks at me with no defenses at all. Just warmth. Then reality boots up, and she blinks.
"Morning."
"Morning. Hurricane's dying down."
She sits up, scrubbing a hand over her face, and her hair achieves a new dimension of chaos. "What time is it?"
"0630."
"Is that... six-thirty?"
"Affirmative."
"I don't speak military, Tucker. Just say six-thirty."
"Six-thirty."
She squints at the window. "Still raining."
"Yeah. Roads are closed at least through today. Maybe tomorrow."
This information lands on her face in stages—first frustration, then resignation, then something that might be carefully concealed relief. She's not as upset about being stuck as she wants me to think.
The morning unfolds in careful choreography—two people sidestep awkwardness, pretending they didn't just share a bed for eight hours. She takes the bathroom first, and I hear her swear at her hair through the door. I change in the main room, pulling on jeans and a fresh shirt, folding the sweatpants with military precision and tucking them into my bag.
When she emerges, she's wearing an oversized sweater over leggings, face scrubbed clean, hair surrendered to a messy knot on top of her head. She looks like a college student on a Sunday morning, and the sight of her—casual, unperformed—hits me somewhere low and certain.
"Breakfast," she says, with the decisiveness of a general issuing orders.
The inn's restaurant is closed. Power outage killed the kitchen at 0300, and the generator is prioritizing heat and emergency systems. The lobby has a vending machine, a coffee maker that's running on a prayer, and a basket of slightly stale muffins someone produced from the back office.
"This is breakfast?" Kassidy stares at the muffin in her hand like it's personally offended her.
"Breakfast of champions."
"Breakfast of people trapped in a hurricane with no contingency plan."
"You didn't outline this?"
"I didn't outline any of this." She tears the muffin in half with more force than necessary. "My outline for this week was: arrive, write, attend workshops, write more, go home with a finished manuscript. Nowhere in the outline was flee hurricane with security guard, share bed, eat sad muffin."
"Sometimes the best stories happen off-outline."
She gives me a look—sharp, assessing—and then takes a bite of the muffin. "That's either profound or motivational poster material."
"Can't it be both?"
We commandeer the small conference room adjoining the lobby—empty except for a folding table and two chairs. Kassidy spreads out the vending machine haul like a buffet: granola bars, peanut butter crackers, two bags of chips, a candy bar, and two cups of coffee that taste like they were brewed in a car engine.
