Page 18 of Let’s Give ‘Em Pumpkin to Talk About

Ten

“W ell this wasn’t what I…” Josh caught up to Sadie, whose delicate pallor was a sickly green, not unlike the sky. “Hey, are you okay?”

Sadie replied with a tight voice. “No?”

They couldn’t exactly pull away from the group, as the stairway was clogged with people descending. “Afraid of tornadoes?” he asked.

“Who the fuck isn’t afraid of tornadoes?” Sadie whispered, struggling with her words.

“We’re going to be okay. Most buildings in Blossom County don’t have true basements. We’re in about the best place we could be.”

“That’s actually slightly helpful,” she said, and he chuckled at the praise, so faint it needed a telescope to be visible. For her, in this moment, it was practically a love declaration.

In a bid to not compound the problem, Josh swallowed his own nerves. Shadowfax was at a barn he wasn’t as familiar with, and he got restless during storms. He was oddly thankful that he could focus on calming Sadie as a distraction from thinking about his beloved steed.

Hushed voices permeated the tense air in the staircase, and people moved at a leisurely pace relative to the urgency of the situation. The atmosphere was more annoyed than alarmed.

Tornadoes were still new phenomena to Josh.

He had more experience with wildfires and earthquakes.

He’d been personally spared the swift and capricious destruction of lives and dwellings that could accompany those disasters, but they felt familiar nonetheless.

To him, tornadoes were still a curiosity, the stuff of movies.

He had a vague desire to see a funnel cloud—from a healthy distance, of course—and witness its raw power.

He could, however, easily squelch that desire.

He was also squelching the desire to put a hand on Sadie’s back in a gesture of comfort. She was a bristly creature, dangerous to touch and possibly venomous. Whether she cared to show him the sensitive side underneath the quills was up for debate.

The library staff member at the bottom of the stairwell directed people to the right, through the double doors of the windowless cable-access television studio.

When they got to the bottom, he quickly asked the staff person, “Is it okay if we head to the bathroom?” and in a low whisper, “I’m afraid she might be sick. ”

“Please,” the staff member said, pointing down the hallway to the left.

It was the less ideal location for hunkering down, as small windows high up along the walls created opportunities for shattered glass and errant debris.

But it would do. Josh pulled Sadie in the direction opposite the gathering crowd, looked back to see no one was watching, and slipped her through one of the doors in the empty hallway.

“I’m not going to be sick,” Sadie insisted with the confused indignation she often reserved for him.

“And we’re not in the bathroom. I was trying to get you away from the crowd so you could breathe.”

Sadie took in the racks of electronics surrounding them. “Where the fuck are we?”

“This is the server room. I’m buddies with the IT guy. This is a great place to be for a tornado. No windows. Obviously they don’t want the general public in here messing with things.”

Sadie huffed. “We are the general public.”

“And we’re not going to touch anything. I figured it would be better for you if you were going to have a panic attack. You can do it here instead of having a big audience.”

“I wasn’t going to have a panic attack,” she said.

Josh raised his eyebrows. He was no expert, but the shallow, gasping breaths she was taking belied her words. “We can go back to the rest of the group if you want.”

“No,” she said quickly. “There are small children around, and I can’t be responsible for expanding their vocabulary of curse words.”

Josh pressed his lips together, trying to contain his smile. Her breathing was already a bit less labored. He pulled out his phone to track the storm on a weather app. Then the lights flickered out. Audible shrieks from down the hallway rattled his ears and Sadie let out a small yelp.

“Rats,” he said. “There’s no cell service underground and now the Wi-Fi is out.”

“Why would you tell me that? Also, doesn’t this at least deserve a shit ?” Sadie asked.

Rats was what came out naturally. He’d tried cursing to fit in at his old game studio and ended up sounding like an alien trying human language on for size. At least it distracted her from her panic.

Sadie turned on her phone’s flashlight and set it on the floor as a makeshift lantern.

The upward-cast light made everything creepy.

Josh took deep breaths from his belly to keep his own oxygen flowing.

Shadowfax was in great hands at the barn, and there wasn’t anything he could do at this moment anyway.

“Are you okay?” Sadie asked.

“Worried about Shadowfax,” he said.

“Pony,” she said, drawing out the last syllable. “Poor horse has no idea what’s going on.”

Neither do we , Josh thought, while the power was out and they were in some Faraday cage devoid of cell service.

“We need to distract each other,” he said. “The Yahtzee game on my phone should work without Wi-Fi. But I don’t know if I can take your trash talking.”

Sadie’s brows sloped inward. “Oh God, I’m sorry. This is why I don’t socialize much. I’m much too mean for both the Los Angeles crystal-healing types and the Midwestern show-up-at-your-house-with-a-casserole types.”

Sadie’s hexes were all in good fun; he was feeling extra fragile.

“That’s not it. You’re better than me at my favorite game, so it’s a little salt in the wound.”

“I don’t think we played enough games to know that definitively,” she said. “But we could do something else. Lean in to the fear and tell the scariest stories we know.”

A crack of thunder sounded so loud that it might have been right over their heads. More yelps came from outside the door of the server room.

“Nice timing,” Sadie said, her irises fully visible in her wide eyes.

“We’re going to be okay,” he replied softly, as much to himself as to Sadie.

She sat cross-legged in front of her phone, blending into the dark with her black wardrobe.

Josh did a couple of toe touches, followed by some high knee-kicks.

“I could play the janky version of Pinchy Boi I still have on my phone. But I feel like I have adrenaline I need to shake out.”

Sadie stood up to join him. She retrieved her phone, futzed with it, and set it back on the floor as strains of ’80s synth music wrapped around them. Then she started dancing.

“Dancing sounds better than Yahtzee or Pinchy Boi ,” he said.

“Exactly,” Sadie agreed.

They had to keep their movements small to avoid collision with any of the server racks, but they threw themselves into dancing as best they could. It was oddly…freeing.

“Tell me the last time you really danced,” Sadie said.

Josh searched his memories. “At a wedding.”

Sadie continued to dance, spinning in place as the music swelled, then swaying her hips with her back to him. It felt like an invitation. To move in, to put his hands on her waist, to move his hips in time with hers.

“Wedding dancing is always a little tame. Too many kids around, or elders prone to being scandalized.” Sadie spun back around, shimmying her shoulders and keeping her feet in place.

“I guess this was technically an after-party,” he said. “The kids and elders had been packed off, and it was the DJ and the bartenders and the wedding party until I think only the bride and groom remained by the end of it.”

“Shoes off, jackets off, hair ruined?”

“All of that. Photographer gone, too. That helped. I don’t want to see photos of myself dancing.”

Sadie’s eyes skated down his body and up again.

Thinking that had to be a good sign, he stepped closer to her.

She didn’t step back. Her arm grazed his as she danced.

That feather of a touch was all it took; he felt himself growing hard.

The thunder was rolling almost constantly now.

The air was so close in the room, with the AC out and their body heat warming the confined space.

“You are a good dancer, though. I bet you’re a hit at weddings,” she said. Her eyes flicked upward toward the sound of the thunder and her shoulders practically edged up to her ears.

“It’s you who’s the hit at weddings. Everyone thinks you’re a grump who won’t dance, but then you’re out there busting a move all night.”

Sadie’s mouth dropped. “Who told you?”

“I might have looked at your tagged photos on Instagram. When I tagged you in a photo at the paint ball.”

“Hot-pink necktie,” she said.

The cryptic reference did not land for him. “Where?”

“You were wearing one at that wedding. The professional photographers had left but there were still some people snapping photos.”

And posting them to Instagram, and tagging Josh, was the rest of that sentiment. She twirled away from him again, apparently having admitted too much.

“Have you been looking at my tagged photos? Do you like my face, Sadie Fox?” he asked.

She did not turn around. Instead she was sidestepping to the music.

“I don’t hate it,” she said, barely above the music and the thunder. One crack shook the building to its foundations. “We’re going to die.”

Josh’s heart was thudding against his ribs. “So you don’t hate my face. I’ll take that,” he said. She spun around again, her short bangs plastered to her forehead in the heat of the room. She looked a little fearful. Of the storm, of him, he wasn’t sure.

“I’m afraid, too,” he said.

“Of me?”

“Much more than the storm.”

“I could destroy you,” she said.

“You might,” he said, smiling sheepishly.

The thunder tapered, like it was moving off into the distance, passing through and over them and leaving destruction in its wake. Sadie was a tornado, here for a season and gone again, a pure force of nature. And he was utterly defenseless against her.

“Do you kiss as well as you dance?” she asked.

“Better.”

“Hmm, let’s see.”