Jay watched the storm from the window at the end of the hall on the third floor. He didn’t like what he saw. Without any artificial light, and without even the moon, it was hard as hell to make anything out. But still, he could see enough. The water was rising. The ocean was clear up to the first floor below. From occasional glimmers on the surface, he guessed that there was only twenty or so feet between where his feet were and the water level.

He grimaced and scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck. Whether she was comfortable with it or not, Mari might be getting a roommate at some point that evening.

Jay turned and looked back down the hall, through the ceiling toward where Mari slept. He knew she’d fallen asleep because he’d heard her rustling around with her sleeping bag, and then ultimately her breathing had fallen even.

“No!” Mari’s scream punctured the night, stabbing it through the heart.

Jay froze. A nightmare?

“The water!” she screamed in feral pain. “The water!”

Jay sprinted toward the stairwell leading up to the fourth floor. He thought he’d been certain that the water level was still far below their floors, but could there be another way it was getting in? Could her room be somehow filling?

He didn’t wait to ponder his question. He just slammed through the doorway and took the stairs four at a time, sprinting into the fourth floor hallway. He saw, with a sinking heart that  she’d closed the door to her supply closet. He paused out front of it. “Mari?”

“Help!” she screamed. “God, please, help me!”

That was all Jay needed to hear before he reared back and kicked the shit out of the door, the old, rusted handle screeching and jamming at the first impact, and folding away at the second.

The door flung open and revealed Mari, twisted on top of her sleeping bag. Her hair was ink spread over her face and her body was in a tight rictus of fear. “Help,” she gasped into the night.

Jay quickly surveyed the room, his heart threatening to beat out of his chest. No water. She was dreaming.

Fuck.

And she was about to wake up and realize that he’d broken the lock on her door.

Jay stepped back out of the supply closet and moved to go back downstairs when she moaned and rolled over again, he saw a glistening light against her cheeks. Tears. He found he couldn’t leave her there to be tortured by whatever she was dreaming about.

Trying to adopt the least threatening position he could possibly think of, Jay sat down on his butt, leaned back all the way on his elbows and stretched one foot into the supply closet, kicking at her feet.

“Mari,” he said, trying for a soothing and reassuring tone. “Mari!”

He swiped her feet with his and she suddenly sat up, gasping and staring around in blind, fuzzy confusion. “Mamá?”

Her small question broke Jay’s heart into a million pieces. “Mari,” he spoke quietly. “It’s Jay. You’re in the hotel. You were having a nightmare.”

She blinked again, peering through the darkness at him. “Jay?” she asked, still obviously confused.

He tapped her foot once more with his own, and was deeply relieved when she didn’t flinch, when she took it as the friendly gesture that he meant it.

“What happened?” she asked, blinking at him.

“You had a nightmare,” he repeated. “But you were screaming about water. I thought water had gotten in. So I came upstairs. You screamed for help. I broke the lock.”

He pointed to the door and Mari followed his finger, glancing up at the broken door. “Oh.” She drew her feet up toward her chest.

“I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. “I never would have come up here except that I thought you needed help.”

“Oh,” she said again, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes. She shook her head and pushed her hair out of her face with rough hands. “God! It’s so fucking hot in here.”

She wasn’t telling him to leave yet so Jay slid himself backwards, his back on the wall across the hallway from the door of the supply closet. “I know. I couldn’t sleep. It was way too hot. I was shocked that you could go to sleep up here.”

She chuckled humorlessly into her hands. “Falling asleep has never been my problem. I can sleep on a street curb if it comes to it.”

“Me too, usually.” He surveyed her in the dark, mostly able to only see her vague outline. She still sat up, her elbows leaning on her knees. She was obviously still shaking off the dream. He figured that if he tried to make things light hearted right now, the best that would happen is that she’d feel better. The worst is that she’d tell him to go back downstairs. It was a risk he was willing to take. “Where’s the weirdest place you’ve ever fallen asleep?”

Mari paused, he couldn’t tell if it was because she was considering the answer to his question or just ignoring him. “My own birthday party. It was a surprise party. They were all waiting for me to come back into the living room, but I was so tired after school that I just tossed my bag on the front porch and caught a few zs.”

Jay laughed and took a chance on stretching his legs out in front of him. He was long enough that it meant his feet stretched into her space but she didn’t protest.

“You?” she asked. “Weirdest place you’ve ever fallen asleep?”

Jay scrubbed a hand over his stubble. “Well, I’ve fallen asleep in a public restroom before. Slumped over the sink.”

Mari chuckled. “Been there. Only it was one of those really fancy bathrooms where they have the benches with cushions and the lady that hands you a towel after you wash your hands.”

“Did she hand you a towel after you fell asleep?”

Mari laughed. “Nah. She poked me in the side and told me to tip her or get the hell out of there. I think she thought I was part of the staff.”

She scooted herself further away from him but Jay saw that it was just to lean her back against the opposite wall, the way he was doing. “Sorry about the, uh, nightmare. I know that can be freaky. Especially from a stranger.”

Jay shrugged. “It’s understandable. Especially considering the situation we’re in right now.”

“Hmm.” Mari made a noncommittal noise as she swiped her water bottle off the ground, took a sip. She grimaced. “God. Even the water is hot.”

Jay cocked his head to one side. “I could filter some of the rain water for us, I bet that’s cooler.”

Across the room, he was pretty sure he could see Mari’s eyebrows rising up in disbelief. “You brought a water filter?”

“At my mother’s insistence. It’s the only way she sleeps when I’m off doing shit like this.”

Mari was quiet. Jay cleared his throat. “You want me to grab my water filter? See if we can’t get some slightly cooler water?”             

“Sure.” She rose when he did. “I’m up already, so I might as well go with you.”

Jay kept a healthy distance between them as they tromped through the dark together. He held the door of the stairwell open for her and didn’t miss her raised eyebrows as she ducked underneath his arm. The stairwell was pitch black and their shoulders brushed as he miscalculated a step.

“Sorry,” he muttered, wanting her to know that he wasn’t trying to take advantage.

She said nothing, but he heard her breathing speed up.

He led them out onto the third floor, and the dim light at the end of the hallway was a welcome relief to the pitch black. They were just walking down the hallway toward his supply closet when a huge bang shook the entire hotel.

Mari screamed and jumped out of her skin as the branches of a tree smashed through the window at the end of the hallway. Jay raised a wry eyebrow and turned to look at the way she’d flung him in between her and the perceived danger.

“Nice to know you have my back, Mari,” he said, with a little smile in his voice as she shrank between his back and the wall. The flats of her soft hands against his back.

“Oh. Sorry.” She cleared her throat. “Knee jerk reaction.”

“I’m not complaining.” And he wasn’t. Not when she was actually shrinking into him instead of away from him. He would take a hundred more moments like that if it meant her trust in him was growing. He grabbed his water filter out of his backpack and padded down the hallway toward the broken window. The whole thing was shattered and a stiff wind came through the hallway.

Mari stepped quietly next to him and helped him hold the tureen out the window. It took less than a few minutes to fill up the filter with rain water. They hauled it back in, having gathered about a gallon of water, and dragged it back down the hall toward his supply closet. Jay crouched over it and tinkered around, setting up the filtration system so that the rainwater would filter through the cleaning system and come out into the clean bottle on the other side.

The two of them sat side by side on the space blanket he’d laid out before and watched the water filter. Mari’s eyes kept shooting back to the storm outside. There was barely rain. It was just a solid sheet of water, being blown almost sideways by the wind.

“I hate to say that the wind feels kind of good,” she admitted, tilting her head back and letting the air wash over her.

“Yeah,” Jay agreed, trying hard not to look at the thin column of her throat. It was too dark to tell, but he was pretty sure she was just in a tank top and some underwear. He knew he made her nervous enough without throwing attraction into the mix.

A half an hour later, they passed the cool water back and forth to each other, taking long, grateful swigs. Eventually, soothed by the cool water and the air rushing over top of them, they both found their eyes growing heavy. Jay wondered if she was going to go back upstairs. But it was the last thought he had before falling into shallow, but persistent sleep.

***

She woke to the gritty light of day. The storm howled from down the hall and Mari could see thick ropes of water lashing in from the broken window. Mari knew that Jay laid beside her on the space blanket, but she almost didn’t dare to look over there yet.

She knew that looking at him was going to seal the deal for her. She’d only gotten a good look at his face once, yesterday, through the grate. And something about the way he’d looked just made her want to trust him. He had a kind face.

And then he’d been so sweet last night. Waking her up from her nightmare, giving her so much space, and then going to all that trouble just to give her a cool drink of water. Yeah. She knew that this skeptical, suspicious thing she was clinging to was about to dissolve into thin air.

She sighed and sat up, glancing her eyes over him quickly. It didn’t matter, the jolt to her system at the sight of him was shocking and complete. He lay there, eyes closed with one hand behind his head.

He was shirtless. His skin was tanned and smooth, smattered with hair. He had a tattoo running up one side of his ribs and down under the line of the navy swim trunks he wore. His legs were crossed at the ankle, the picture of repose.

And again, it was his face that arrested her. With his eyes closed, and those Sinatra blues hidden away, he looked much less like a model, she realized. In fact, his nose was just a bit overlarge, his eyebrows too severe, his smile lines around his eyes just a little too deep. But it was a very attractive face. And covered, Mari noted, by a significant amount more of a beard than yesterday.

The storm outside screamed and shook the hotel and Mari realized that they must be getting close to the moment of landfall. Her stomach flipped. She needed this to be over.

“Jay,” she said, nudging his hip with her foot. “Jay, wake up.”

“Hmmmm?” he groaned, turning toward her voice but keeping his eyes closed. “What is it?”

“The storm. Jay, I think it’s close to landfall.”

“Hmmmph.” His eyes remained closed as he flipped onto his stomach, pillowing his cheek on his forearm. “Go back to sleep, baby,” he grumbled, making Mari raise an eyebrow. Who exactly did he think he was talking to?

Apparently, a girlfriend of some kind, she realized when Jay’s arm snaked out and looped her waist. He dragged her across the space blanket toward him, nestling her into his side.

Mari immediately started to struggle and pull away from him. Touching him was an uncomfortable, charged energy that she didn’t think she liked. There was attraction there, sure, but there was also his strangeness. His huge body dwarfing hers. She couldn’t help but feel desperately stranded with him. The thought both thrilled and terrified her.

He stiffened against her, registering her struggling and raised his head. His Sinatra blues blinked at her blearily. Until they cleared all at once and he abruptly unhanded her.

“Oh, god! Mari!” Jay rolled away from her, sitting up and putting his back against the wall. “I’m so sorry.”

She couldn’t help but smile a little at his dismay. “It’s alright. You thought I was someone else.”

Jay cleared his throat and scraped a hand over his hair. “Right.”

He figured she didn’t need to know that he’d been dreaming of her. That in his dream they’d been back in Ocean City together, in his bedroom. She’d woken up to some sound and he’d pulled her back into him. She’d been his girlfriend in the dream. Jay shook his head. It had been a very potent dream.

And then to wake up to her in his arms. But looking at him like he’d lost his damn mind? Damn. Crazy way to start the day.

Jay let his eyes trail back over to her. Just as he’d suspected the night before, she wore black bikini bottoms and a tight white tank top. That looked to be just about it. Shit. He had to look somewhere else fast or this was gonna get real uncomfortable for both of them.

Jay leaned over to his backpack and dug through until he found a tube of toothpaste. He smoothed a bit onto the tip of his finger and tossed it over to Mari. “It’s chemical free. So you can swallow it.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Is that a vegan thing?”

He shrugged, grinning and finger brushing.

They wiped their hands off in the towel he kept in his bag and took swigs of water from the filtered water bottle.

Jay slid his tennis shoes back on and went to look out the broken window. The wind was strong enough that he had to steady himself against the wall of the hotel. He got just close enough to peek out through the skimpy, weak light of the sun through the storm. His stomach flipped. The water had risen another fifteen feet at least. And it looked like it was still coming. It was time to move up.

Padding back to the supply closet, he saw Mari jamming his things into his bag. She stood up to her full height and tossed him his packed bag. “Time for us to go upstairs, Cool Hand Luke.”

He caught the bag, tilted his head to one side at the nickname. She brushed past him, her sandals flicking over the old musty carpet of the hallway. “What?” she asked. “You’ve got kind of a young Paul Newman thing going on.”

He gaped at her as he followed behind. She thought he was attractive? Hell yes. Involuntarily, his eyes trailed down her back, lingered on her ass. It was a really good ass. Muscular and strong, with a good amount of cushion. Enough to really sink your teeth into.

She turned back at the stairwell and definitely caught his eyes on her ass. She smirked and pulled the door open. “Except you’ve got Sinatra eyes.”

Not quite sure what to say to that, and almost positive she’d seen him checking her out, Jay opted to keep himself quiet and unassuming as they made their way up to her floor.

“Oh good,” she said. “The window didn’t break up here.”

“Thanks for letting me up, Mari. I think the water is rising pretty fast.”

She cleared her throat and walked into her supply closet. “Yeah. Well. You can pay me back by continuing to not be a weirdo.”

He chuckled. “Fair enough.”

Jay tossed his bag into the supply closet and frowned at the sky, which had just darkened a little. He could hear that the wind had picked up and the building creaked and groaned around them. He wished he had something to board that window up with. “I think this is landfall.”

“Yeah?” Mari asked, looking up from where she’d sat down on the sleeping bag. She tossed him a Clif Bar. “That’s not so bad then.”

The wind screamed and the building trembled again. They both grimaced. “Let’s not jinx it.”

Jay sat down a few feet away from her, his back against the wall. They sat in silence as the wind picked up. As the rain and water tore at the building around them. As the entire hotel creaked on its hinges. Jay heard glass breaking downstairs. The sounds of water rushing.

She sat stiffly next to him and when he couldn’t take it anymore, when the storm had raged for hours already, he reached out to her.

Mari, her hands clenched into bone white fists, stared at his outstretched hand. She knew what he was offering, asking for. Comfort. And nothing more.

It was why she could disregard his hand, brush past it and move straight into his arms.

He stiffened in surprise, but it didn’t last long. Almost instantly he was wrapping his arms around her as she burrowed her head into his chest.

They stayed like that for hours.

***

“Do you think that’s the eye of the storm?” Mari asked damn near six hours later. The wind had quieted significantly, though the rain still beat on the roof and the building still creaked and shuddered.

Jay lifted his head, shifted himself as she spoke for the first time in what felt like days. “I don’t think so. I think that’s the other side of it.”

“Really?” she lifted her head from his chest and untangled herself from him, stretching and standing.

His back was screaming and his legs were asleep, but he wouldn’t have unhanded her for all the comfort in the world. He’d needed to hold her as much as she’d needed to be held and he was grateful they’d gotten out of their own ways enough to be able to do it for one another.

He rose and stretched, cracking his back. The light coming from the end of the hall was brighter than it had been in 24 hours.

“Wanna go check it out?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

Not thinking too hard on it, Jay grabbed Mari’s hand and tugged her back down the hall toward the stairwell.

He jogged through and paused when he heard the unmistakable sound of water lapping somewhere below.

“It’s flooded,” she whispered.

Jay tugged her up through the fifth floor and up to the very last door in the stairwell. It was marked emergency exit. He pushed the door open and grabbed a fallen branch to jam in it to keep it from locking behind them.

Still holding her hand, Jay led Mari out onto the flat roof of the resort. The rain still whipped around them, but the sun peeked through here and there. There were branches and debris littering every inch of the roof and the jungle around them still shook and trembled with the residual storm. But the wind wasn’t nearly what it had been, and the two of them walked out to the center of the roof.

Mari put her free hand over her mouth as they turned south and caught sight of the storm as it headed away from them, toward Grand Bahama. It was over the ocean again and she’d never seen anything like it before.

“It looks like a nuclear bomb,” Jay muttered and she couldn’t agree with him more.

The storm was a dark, exploding pillar of cycloning water and wind. It must have been hundreds of miles wide. Thank god it was over fifty miles away from them at the time.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered, her hand clasped in his. “In a horrifying sort of way.”

They watched the storm for a while. So long that they were both completely soaked. So long that neither of them noticed the way they’d started to lean in to one another.

***

They sat back in the supply closet on the fourth floor. It was stuffy, but Jay had gone down to check out the third floor and saw that it was flooded. Only by a few feet, but still. He was happy to be up on the stuffy fourth floor.

“I figure we’ve got at least three more days here before they can send anyone for us,” Jay said, breaking a Clif Bar in two and handing Mari half.

“How do you figure that?” she asked.

“Well, it’ll take at least half a day for the storm to make it all the way to Grand Bahama. Which is where the rescue chopper will come from. And then they’ll have to weather it for half a day or so. And then they’ll have to spend a day or two getting everything right on their end before they can think about rescuing people from the outlying islands.”

“Three days,” Mari muttered, letting her head thump back onto the wall behind. “What the hell are we gonna do with three days?”

“Well, once the water recedes, we can surf,” he suggested.

Mari grinned. “There is that,” she agreed, both of them ignoring the fact that they’d lost their boards in their hurry to get to cover yesterday. “You must be an expert surfer if you were managing the waves on the north shore.”

Jay shrugged. “I’ve been doing it for a long time.”

“You a pro?” she asked. She knew that a lot of the more hardcore surfers made their livings through sponsorships. They had funding to enter competitions and talk up sports drinks or whatever.

“No,” Jay answered. “I’ve been approached about it a lot. And I was considering this deal from 5-Hour Energy. But no. I think if this,” he gestured around at the weather, their situation, “has taught me anything, it’s that you gotta respect Mother Nature.”

“And you don’t think getting paid to surf is respectful?”

“Ah, I don’t know. I’m sure there are people who can do it well, you know? I just… I don’t think the competitions are for me. I like the solitude. The Zen nature of it. I don’t want fans or sponsorships or announcements.”

“You don’t want people critiquing your form and analyzing each run?” she asked with a small smirk.

“Hell no.”

“That’s exactly why I surfed the south side on my own. When you’re a girl, every time you come up for air, there’s some bro or another offering ‘free’ advice and trying to slip you their hotel key.”

Jay grimaced. “That would drive me insane.”

“Yeah.”

“Is surfing your main thing?” he asked her.

“Nah. I do all kinds of stuff on the water. Scuba, skin diving, kayaking. Only on vacation though, I surf a little bit in the mornings back home. When I can. But my job keeps me busy.”

“What do you do?”

Mari took a sip of her water and rose up, stretching her arms over her head and leaning down to touch her toes. Her hair fell in a waterfall down toward the floor and Jay allowed himself to look. She couldn’t see him looking. And she was just so dang good looking. She really was tiny. Maybe 5’2”. But even so, she had long legs and these proportionate little curves. He could see the shadowing of some of her muscles and for the second time he got the strong urge to press his teeth into her. Just enough to make her squirm and gasp for him.

He cleared his throat.

“I work for an animal conservation non-profit.”

That had Jay’s eyebrows popping up. “And you gave me shit for being vegan?”

She laughed. “I eat local, not vegan. I’m not down with the Man.”

“The Man being big meat and dairy production companies?”

“Bingo. And I obviously don’t do fur or leather or any shit like that. But my org mostly works with raising awareness about endangered species."

“Desk job?” Somehow he couldn’t quite picture the wild, toned woman stretching in front of him tamed and leashed inside a cubicle.

“Sometimes. But I also travel a fair amount for it. My whole office spent a month at that oil spill last year.”

“Cleaning oil off baby seals and stuff like that?”

“Pretty much.”

“So you’re a bleeding heart?”

She shrugged as she came up out of the stretch. “I guess. But I also just care about conservation.”

“Me too,” Jay admitted. “I just left my job at a publishing company because they rejected my proposal about ways to go green.”

She squatted into some sort of yoga pose and looked at him with those startling eyes. Her hair was messy from just having been upside down. “Was the proposal any good?”

Jay laughed. He liked that she hadn’t fawned all over him about doing the proposal in the first place. She wanted to know if he’d put his money where his mouth was. Not enough people in his life did that.

“Yeah. It was damn good. Reasonable, cost effective, good PR.” He sighed. “They just didn’t care.”

“So now you’re out a regular paycheck and some health insurance, huh?”

He grimaced. “Yup. I quit three weeks ago. In another week I’m heading back home to figure out what comes next for me.”

“So this is vacation for you too?”

“Yeah,” Jay nodded. “With a little bit of soul searching mixed in.”

She cocked her head to one side to show she was listening as she melted into another yoga pose of some kind.

“I have two best friends, Marcus and Eli. We’ve known each other since we were born, practically. And our families have kind of all melted into one another. My dad’s out of the picture and Eli’s mom passed away. So my mom and his dad kind of tag teamed the three of us.”

“And Marcus?” she asked.

“His parents are total shit. His dad is an abusive asshole and his mom kissed him goodbye the first second she could. He pretty much lived at either mine or Eli’s house from about ages 12 to 18.” Jay sighed. Hoping that his message about being safe had made it to them. He’d texted from the emergency phone but couldn’t tell if it had gone through. “Anyways, Eli is a football player and Marcus is in the FBI. They both have these jobs that they’re passionate about, good at, meant for. And I just kind of ended up in a vaguely creative field that I was always lukewarm over. The most passionate I felt was when I was drawing up the green proposal. And that’s what I ended leaving over. So, I don’t know.”

Mari shrugged, listening hard. “Maybe you’re an eco-warrior then.”

Jay studied her face. There was just something so interesting about it. There was none of the typical feminine fall backs. No flitting eye contact or over-friendly smiles. She didn’t blush or look embarrassed ever. She looked tough, and calm, and…ready at all times. He was into it. He was really into it.

He studied her light eyes. So at odds with her black hair and toasted skin.

“Are you Latina?” he asked.

Mari eyed him, maybe she was surprised that he asked. “Si. Mi mamá era de Colombia.” Yes. My mother was from Colombia.

“She used to be?” he asked, recognizing her use of the past tense.

Mari tilted her head to one side. He must have understood what she’d said. “Si. Ella murió.” Yes. She died.

“Lo siento, Mari.” He paused. “Cuando?”

Mari bit back her smile, altogether much too charmed by the Spanish words coming out of this blonde man’s mouth. His accent wasn’t great, but he spoke with a kind of ease and comfort, like he’d been doing it for a long time.

Mari cleared her throat. “A long time ago,” she answered in English, hoping he understood it as the end of the conversation.

He did.