I let go of his lapel. Pick it up. "I have to take this."
"Yeah," he says. He leans back.
The spell is broken, but my hands are still shaking.
four
Willa
Anotherstormhitswithoutmuch warning.
We spend the day and a half before the storm running properties — his crews on the roofs, me coordinating from the ground, tracking completion across a shared spreadsheet, and running communication between Atlas and the other tradespeople in town who've mobilised without being asked. By the time the system rolls in Thursday night, I know the name of every property owner, every vulnerable section, every repair that might not hold.
The hotel has been turned into a community shelter for anyone who might be travelling through when the storm arrives hard from the northwest.
I’m curled up listening to the storm, thinking about his kiss with the woodstove going in the library wing, settled in for the night. It's past midnight when Atlas finds me.
I look up, surprised to see him.
“Atlas?” I breathe.
He gets right to business. "Danny's house," he says. "East tarp failed. He's there with his kids, his wife's in Kamloops."
"Then let's go," I say.
"It's going to be bad up there."
The sick feeling I get around heights has already arrived. I'm fully aware of it. "I know," I say. "Let's go."
The drive is four minutes in sheeting rain. From the street I can see the tarp lifting at the corner, beating against the soffit, the underlying section open to the storm. Danny's on the porch with a baby on his hip and the look of a man who's been fighting the urge to go up alone and losing.
"I've got it," Atlas tells him. "Get inside."
He's up the ladder before I've finished pulling on the work gloves he handed me from his truck. The wind is mean — the kind that gets under your jacket and tries to take your footing. I look at the ladder. Seven metres of it, moving slightly in the gusts.
"Willa." His voice from above, cutting through the rain. Not urgent. Just my name, specific and grounded. "Batten strips from the truck. Red bundle."
I get them. I come back to the base of the ladder and look up and he's a dark shape against the wet sky, completely steady, like the wind is happening to everything else and not to him.
"I need you up here," he says. "Second pair of hands on the tarp edge."
I start climbing.
I don't look down. I count rungs and count my own breathing and the rain is coming sideways and soaking through my jacket and by the time I reach the eave I'm thoroughly wet and my hands are shaking and none of that is going to stop me.
His hand comes down and catches my forearm. His grip is exact, fingers wrapping the inside of my wrist where he can feelmy pulse, and for a second the fear and something else entirely are the same feeling and I can't tell them apart.
"Step onto the roof at the batten line," he says. Low, close, his mouth near my ear over the sound of the storm. "Weight downslope. Lean into the wind, don't fight it sideways."
I step onto the roof.
He keeps his hand on my arm until I've got my footing. Then he positions me at the tarp edge, puts my hands on the material, and I feel the wind trying to rip it away and I hold on.
"Keep the tension," he says. "I'll nail it off."
I hold. The wind fights me and I fight back. Atlas moves along the edge with the efficiency of someone built for exactly this — every shot of the nailer precise, no wasted motion, his body low and balanced against the pitch. He's in his element in a way I have never been in my element, not once, and I am watching him from a wet rooftop in a storm at midnight.
"You're doing fine," he says.
