Page 84 of Chasing the Other Woman

“I’m right.” My voice shakes. I hate that it shakes. “And if you have all that left to say to me, then you can stay alive and tell me tomorrow.”

His eyes search mine, wet and scared and so full of raw feeling that I can barely stand to look at him. “All right,” he says.

The door buckles inward with a scream of metal. Brooks throws himself over me. I scream his name into the dark.

For a moment, there's only pressure, noise, and concrete trembling beneath my hands. Brooks’s body is locked over mine, my cheek pressed against the wet floor.

Then, slowly, the sound changes. Not silence. Just the roar pulling away by degrees, turning ragged at the edges. The shelter still shakes, but less. The door still rattles, but holds.

Neither of us moves. I don’t know how long we lie there. Time stops being useful.

Finally, Brooks lifts his head. “Are you hurt?”

“Are you?”

A wild, broken laugh slips out of me. His breath catches, and then he laughs too, once, barely there.

“I asked first,” he says.

"I asked better."

My knee throbs. My shoulder aches. My hands won’t stop shaking. Brooks has a shallow cut near his temple and mud smeared across one cheek. His injured shoulder has to be screaming, but when I ask him, he lies badly enough that I almost believe we’re going to be okay.

We wait until the worst of the wind moves farther off. Then Brooks lifts the bar with both hands, jaw tight, and eases the door open.

The world outside is wrong. The farmhouse roof is torn open, trees are snapped and twisted, and the road is buried under debris. The truck, the truck we would've stayed inside if I had waited too long, sits crooked near the ditch with the passenger side crushed by a fallen utility pole.

I stare at it. Brooks stands beside me, silent.

Two years ago, a storm took our baby and left both of us bleeding in different ways. Brooks let that fear build walls around me. Around us. Tonight, I made the calls. Tonight, he listened. Tonight, when there was nothing left to calculate, he shielded me, but he never made me helpless.

My breath breaks.

Brooks turns toward me. “Sam.”

I step into him before I can think better of it. His arms come around me, careful at first. Waiting. Always waiting now. I fist my hands in the back of his wet shirt and hold on. He exhales against my hair, shaking so hard I feel it through my whole body.

We stand in the rain and the wreckage: alive, filthy, bruised, and still here. For the first time in two years, I let myself hold my husband without counting everything standing between us. Brooks holds me like he knows I can leave whenever I want, and he holds me anyway.

Twenty

BROOKS

The storm is leaving, but my body hasn’t caught up.

Rainwater runs from my hair into my eyes. My boots are sunk half an inch in mud. Somewhere beyond the torn-up field and the busted line of trees, thunder drags itself east, low and tired, as the sky finally runs out of wind.

Sam is still in my arms. Not because I grabbed her or held on too tight. Because she stepped into me.

Her fists are locked in the back of my soaked shirt, and mine are spread carefully over her, one hand between her shoulder blades, the other at her waist. I can feel her shaking. Or maybe that’s me. Maybe there isn’t a difference right now.

For a few seconds, neither one of us moves. The world around us is wreckage: the farmhouse roof peeled open, a splintered tree blocking the road, the truck sitting wrong near the ditch with the passenger side caved in where the utility pole came down. The sharp, acrid bite of snapped power lines and wet copper hangs heavy in the damp air. Sam’s cheek is against my chest, and every breath she takes hits me like proof.

“You’re bleeding,” she says, voice muffled by my shirt.

“So are you.”

“I’m muddy.”