I don’t have to ask myself how much of that time would be spent thinking about Theo Valentine, because I already know the answer.
My phone chimes.
I was walking on the beach.
I saw all the lights go on in the house,
saw you running around,
saw the smoke when you opened the window.
My heart thudding, I sit up and read his text again. Then I compose my own.
Walking on the beach at midnight?
I wait breathlessly for his answer, my palms starting to sweat. Outside, a screaming flock of seagulls swoops past the windows, and a cloud passes over the sun. A sudden gust of wind rattles the panes.
I don’t sleep much. Bad dreams.
“Something else we have in common,” I say thoughtfully, studying his words. On impulse, I decide to confess it.
Me too. Maybe I should take up walking.
Usually, I just toss and turn.
When he answers, my cheeks heat with embarrassment. That dark, dangerous attraction flickers to life in my blood.
I could tell by looking at your bed.
“Why were you looking at my bed like that?” I murmur, fighting my fingers for control. They itch to coax more from him, to write something provocative that would make him confess why he stared at my twisted sheets and blankets with such intensity, but my brain tells me in no uncertain terms that this particular slippery slope has a pool filled with man-eating sharks at the bottom.
Ultimately, my brain wins.
I’ll bring the contract down in a few minutes.
I have to run some errands, so I’ll be out for
the rest of the day. Text me if you need anything.
If I thought that would put the cap on the conversation, I was wrong. Theo dashes off a response that leaves me right back where I started, unsettled and questioning everything, burning to know more.
What I need can’t be put into a text.
I close my eyes, filled with dread at the distinct possibility that the question of what exactly Theo Valentine needs will grow like a cancer in my mind until it consumes me.
14
Everything looks straightforward in Theo’s contract, so I sign it and leave it on the small table in the foyer on my way out the door. It’s a beautiful day, sunny but with big, puffy clouds floating in the sky like so many giant cotton balls. On a whim, I decide to head into Portland to hunt for furniture.
An hour and a half later, I’m standing on a street corner in the industrial part of the city, contemplating the pile of rubble that used to be Capstone Construction’s headquarters.
Craig was right: it looks like a bomb went off. Or maybe a hurricane blew through and then a bomb went off. The destruction is total. Charred husks of a few brick walls are the only things that remain standing of the large structure. The blackened skeleton of the roof drapes over large piles of metal that I assume were some kind of machinery, but everything has been melted or burned to such a degree, it’s impossible to identify what anything originally was.
One block over, the tall metal telecommunications spire atop a high-rise glints cheerfully in the morning sun.
What I know about lightning, I learned from the annual desert monsoons that came to Phoenix in July like clockwork, many of which featured violent lightning storms. I used to hate the deafening booms of thunder and the brilliant, jagged white bolts of light that split the black sky, but Cass loved it all, the wild majesty of it, the dangerous beauty.
Some artists are moved to depict the ugly and forgotten things in life, but Cass loved beauty in all its forms, the more unpredictable the better. He was an oil painter by trade, successful enough to support us while I finished my graduate degree, but he was also obsessed with photography. He loved to get out with a bunch of his storm-chaser buddies to hunt the perfect shot of a lightning strike, and many of those images decorated the walls of our home. Even the supercell thunderstorms of the Great Plains are no match for the drama found in the southwest desert storms.
So I’m no stranger to lightning. I know its unpredictability. I know its danger.
I also know its purpose.
Lightning wants to ground itself. It wants to terminate its powerful electrical discharge in a physical object, namely the earth. The reason lightning strikes tall objects like cell towers or a skyscraper more often than, say, a person lying down in a field, is because of what storm chasers call the degree of influence. Basically, the taller the object, the more it will attract lightning that’s going to discharge in that area anyway.
For example, a metal spire atop a high-rise building has a far greater degree of influence than the flat roof of a one-story building a block away.
Yet here I am in front of that one-story building, which is utterly destroyed while the nearby high-rise stands untouched.