I adjust the cushion and lean back against the wall. What I really want to do is light a dozen more candles and get a small bonfire going but that wouldn’t be very considerate of my host and products I’m confident she’s trying to sell.

“How long do you think we’ll be down here?” she asks after a long silence.

It’s hard to miss the nervous edge in her voice. She’s trying to hide it but it’s far too obvious. She’s watching the candle like a mouse watches a cat.

She’s not doing too hot right now. To be honest, neither am I.

“I don’t know?” I try to keep my voice from chattering from the cold. That’s me, trying to be all manly and stoic, when I’m really just damn glad that I’m not alone riding this one out.

“The last I heard, it stretched from here to Alabama with another round coming in over the Atlantic. Something about a double hurricane system.”

“So we’re caught in the middle. Awesome.” I sigh and try not to shiver too obviously.

She makes a noise. “I should have grabbed my cell phone charger.” There is blame in her voice, like she’s punishing herself for leaving it behind.

“Not sure how that helps with the power being out.” I breathe out slowly. “At least we’ve got the candle.”

“Until we don’t.” She shifts, leaning back on the wall next to me. I try not to notice the warmth radiating from her body. “So, Caleb. What were you doing out in a five-in-the-morning storm?”

I glance over at her. “Working off my insomnia.”

Her faint smile fades, her eyes filling with an insidious fear I recognize all too well. “And how were you doing that, that you got caught in the storm?”

“I was building a table at my boss’s Maker warehouse. When he closed it down at midnight, I decided to hang out downtown rather than head home. And since I’m a dumbass who didn’t check the weather, here I am.”

Ignoring the fear underlying her questions is the polite thing to do. It’s something Bruce taught me. Something I’m working on. Learning to read other people’s emotions through what they don’t say. Sometimes, saying nothing is the right thing. No one likes to have their panic and fear used against them.

“If you weren’t doing this right now, how would you have spent this morning?” I’m curious. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a yoga studio before.”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who wasn’t sure if they’d been to a yoga studio before.” She cups her head in her hand, bracing her elbow on her knee. “I’d be teaching a morning Iyengar yoga level two class.”

“So…like twisting people into pretzels and shit?”

Her lips twitch at the corners. “Your knowledge of yoga is just good enough to be entirely wrong.” But there is no malice in her voice. She frowns at me and gives me what I can only assume is a wicked side eye. “The asana practice involves moving meditation. It’s only one of the eight limbs of yoga.”

“Eight limbs? Who knew? I thought it was all yoga pants and vegan hippies.”

I’m teasing her, trying to take her mind off the fear I see skirting in the shadows around her eyes. I might be dead ass tired but I’m also keenly aware that I’m a strange man that she doesn’t know and she’s well within her rights to be wary. If I can put her at ease…well, that maybe makes me a little bit less of an asshole.

And these days, every little bit counts.

“Not even close.” She rubs her index finger down the center of her forehead. She is stillness in that movement. It’s fascinating. “I could talk all morning about the problems with yoga in the West but that would probably put you at risk of running back into the storm.”

It’s my turn to tip my head and look at her. “Why do you say that?”

“Most folks eye roll pretty hard when problematic culture is identified.”

I nod slowly. I’m afraid to ask what she’s talking about, afraid to ruin the hesitant peace between us by asking the wrong question.

She shifts and I can’t miss how she pulls her legs away from the flame. “You don’t like the dark but you don’t like candles either?”

“It’s a long war story with lots of personal trauma,” she says in the dry way that only a veteran can. The biting edge of black humor that only someone who has stared into the abyss of war can understand.

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

That makes her smile. Just barely; it cracks the edges of her lips. She threads her fingers into her hair and rests an elbow against her bent knee. “Sure. I mean, if you can’t confess your darkest personal trauma to a complete stranger while hiding from a force majeure, who can you tell?”

I glance away, toward the tiny candle. It’s amazing how the small source of light illuminates so much. “So. What does a five a.m. yoga class involve?”

“Five thirty. Slow movements, building tapas—energy—for the day. Rituals that facilitate awakening.”

I mirror her posture, resting my forehead against my palm. “Why so early?”

“Lots of demand for the specific type of yoga I offer, I guess.”

“Wait; there are different types of yoga?”

She stretches one leg out in front of her—away from the flame—and bends forward, until her cheek hovers just above her knee. “Yes. There are lots of different styles. Asana is just one piece. Some are more ancient than others. It’s a philosophy, a way of life.”

“I’m thoroughly confused,” I confess. “What’s asana?”

“Sorry. It’s the movement portion of yoga. The poses.”

Her breathing is deep and rhythmic as she straightens and bends over the other leg.

“The breathing limb of yoga is pranayama.”

“And is there something specific that you’re doing now?” I find the sound of her breathing, like the sound of the wind in a conch shell, enthralling.

Finally, she offers a faint smile. “This particular pose is called ‘attempting not to panic-asana’,” she says with a lightness that does not match her words.

“Panic seems like a pretty distinct emotion.” I’m afraid to ask more but I’m also curious now. Here’s a woman who is running her own yoga studio, who clearly deployed to the Middle East, slinging around the word “panic” as if she’s talking about something completely different, like…how much she loves a particular kind of chocolate.

I sit with her in the faint light of the candle, listening to her just breathe. Feeling the stillness.

Embraced in a cocoon of darkness and light, safe from the storm raging outside.

---

Just breathe.

The squat fat candle is bravely pushing back the darkness around us. A single flame, gallantly holding back the wave of crushing fear that lurks at the edge of the shadows.

Those candles have never sold particularly well. It’s hard to market a candle like this one—ungainly, with one wick—when people seem convinced that only expensive, heavily scented glass candles are the only ones of value.

At the moment, though, I’m grateful for the whole damn box of them, even if I would never burn them all at once. That’d be far too much fire in one place.

“Why?”

I glance over at him and it takes me a moment to realize I’ve spoken out loud about the fire. Shit.

“Why what?”

“Why are you afraid of the fire?”

I chew on the inside of my lip, debating how far I should take this conversation. Part of me thinks of him as a single-serving friend from Flight Club—that person you sit with on a plane and share your deepest fears and secrets with, only to never see them again.

But another part of me, the part of me that’s drawn to the warmth of his skin radiating against mine, the part of me that is seriously grateful for his kindness in getting the candle going without pushing for too many answers to unasked questions…that part of me is more leery.

For a guy who wandered in off the street looking like a half-drowned stray, my storm buddy is turning into quite an interesting puzzle.

“Bad memories of my mom’s cooking as a kid.” I make a feeble attempt at a joke. The candle flickers and struggles to stay lit.

“Oh.” There is so much disappointment in that single syllable, as if I’ve lost an opportunity that I’ll never have again.

I need to change the subject, away from my paralyzing, irrational panic to something more mundane. Instead, I decide to embrace it, to name the thing that makes me afraid. “I was trapped in a building in Syria. I’ve had some…issues with fire since then. So not being in the dark alone makes this whole thing a lot easier.”

“Is it the storm or the darkness?” Every time he speaks, his voice vibrates through the connection of our arms. His voice is deep and rough. Like the darkness in his eyes.

“Both? I think it’s the combination that makes it tougher than normal.”

Silence hangs between us, heavy, then filled with the sounds of the battle in the sky overhead. It sounds as if the lightning is striking the ground all around the studio, and even through the closed doors and layers of concrete, we can hear the wind howling like a mad thing, clawing at the earth as if it would drag us from safety.

“I used to sit with my mother and listen to the thunderstorms when I was a kid,” he says after a moment.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. When we lived at Fort Hood. Our house was out on Stillhouse Hollow, overlooking the water. We could watch the storms roll across the hill country through these huge glass windows. Storms always remind me of how she used to smell. Like no matter where I am, I can always smell the lotion she used to wear.” He clears his throat. “Crabtree and Evelyn Rosewater. Even in Iraq, I could still remember the way she smelled.”

“You’re talking in past tense.” I’m afraid to speak the words. To ask the question his words imply.

“She died when I was twelve.” I feel him tense, a physical manifestation of the pain of a lost boy in those simple words. “She was killed the first year we were in Iraq. One of the first women to die in our endlessly stupid war.”

His words slam into me, a solid punch in the chest, crushing my heart into a thousand shining pieces. I reach for him in the dark, finding his hand resting on his thigh. He doesn’t resist as I thread my fingers in his. “I’m sorry.”

“She’s why I joined the Army.” He lifts his hand, breaking the contact between us, scrubbing it over his face. “Sorry. I haven’t been sleeping well. Didn’t mean to dump that on you.”

I don’t remove my hand from where it rests on his thigh. “It’s okay.”

He makes a noise, his hand covering his eyes. “I never really talk about her. I think you’re the first person I’ve told in…forever.”

“A loss like that would tend to be hard to talk about.” The muscle in his leg is knotted and tense, his words strained. Like the words are dragging the physical pain back out from a place he does not want to go.

“I got lucky. The first person I told was one of my roommates at school. I never told anyone except him. He never fucked with me about it. Never called me a baby for tearing up.”

“What kind of a bastard would tease anyone for being sad about their mom dying?”

“Clearly, you don’t know cadets,” he says dryly.

I stiffen at his words. The possibility of him being a member of the Long Gray Line like me is…unsettling, at best.

I’ve tried my hardest to avoid fellow West Pointers as a rule. I do not have good memories of that place. No matter how much it set me up for success, the price I paid…I can’t say it was worth it. “West Point?”

“Yep. Class of 2012.”

“Small world. I’m class of 2010.” I angle my shoulders slightly toward him.

He shifts then, peering over at me. “No shit? Why haven’t you ever been over to The Pint? I thought Eli had rounded up all the local veterans and Old Grads.”

I want to avoid the subject of the veteran community in Durham. There are good folks here—my issues are mine, not theirs. “I’ve been too busy building my business. Yoga is a highly competitive marketplace and I’m trying to establish a foothold in an already crowded city.”

“Really? There’s that many people that want to get together with a bunch of people and chant?”

I’m used to people knowing very little about yoga or the philosophy and beliefs behind it. Misconceptions are not offensive to me unless they’re intentional or exploitative. Don’t get me started on the exploitation. So I don’t correct him, not right then. As much as yoga is fundamental to who I am, I’m not offended by his lack of knowledge or the flippant way he talks about it.

He doesn’t know any different and for some reason, I have an extraordinary amount of patience for my storm buddy. That doesn’t make his comments any less problematic. It just means I’m less likely to argue about it today.

“You should drop by The Pint sometime. Eli…well, never mind. I’m kind of on a self-imposed ban at the moment.”

I’m uncomfortably aware of my hand on his thigh, the solid strength beneath my touch. He lowers his then, and sets it on mine.

It’s an easy thing to flip mine beneath his so we’re palm to palm. An intimately human connection between two strangers.

Funny how that works. Stripped away of everything, all pretense, all the noise of modern life, we can sit here and be fully human, fully aware of everything we are to each other. Absorbing each other’s energy.

“Why are you self-imposing a ban?”

His fingers flex beneath mine. “I’m coming off a ten-year run of being a complete fucking asshole.”