Page 14 of Until the Storm Breaks (The Midnight Men #1)

CALVIN

The rain is mild as we’re locking up The Black Lantern.

Just a whisper at first, mist that drifts through the darkness.

By the time Maren’s checked the door twice and pocketed her keys, it’s falling steady and soft, the kind of warm Pacific Northwest summer rain that doesn’t announce itself, just settles in like it’s always been there.

We walk slowly despite the rain, neither of us in a hurry.

The gravel road crunches under our feet, and I can hear the distant sound of waves from the Sound.

I glance over at her, and God, she’s something else.

All night I watched her work. The way she laughs with her whole body.

That effortless wit, the way she can turn any moment into something brighter.

She made me laugh more tonight than I have in years.

I’ve been fighting this pull all week, but now in the dark with the rain falling around us, my defenses are shot.

“That was actually fun,” I say, surprising myself with the admission. “I forgot how much I liked bartending. The rhythm of it.”

“You were good. Really good.” She glances at me sideways. “The bachelorettes were ready to eat you alive but you handled them perfectly.”

“Years of practice deflecting undergraduate crushes.”

“Don’t forget Betty and her friends. Pretty sure you have a new fan club among the over-sixty crowd.” She nudges me with her elbow, and the casual touch sends heat through my wet shirt. “I think you had a real shot with her. She was ready to take you home.”

I groan, rubbing my face. “She asked if I was single three times.”

“Only three? She’s losing her touch.”

“Well, thank you for not throwing me to them. And for letting me help tonight.”

“I should be thanking you,” she says.

“No, I needed that.” I look up at the rain, let it hit my face. “Hard to obsess about the estate and the roof repairs and everything with Mom when you’re trying to remember how to make a Bee’s Knees.”

“I get that.” Her words come out soft, almost lost in the rain. “Sometimes the bar’s the only place where my brain shuts up.”

I give her a half-smile, understanding exactly what she means. “Yeah. Exactly that. The blessed silence of being too busy to think.”

I flex my fingers, feeling the stiffness setting in from squeezing bottles and shaking tins. “Though my hands are going to remember this tomorrow. I forgot how physical bartending is. It’s different from typing all day.”

“Wait until you feel it in your back. And your feet. God, your feet tomorrow are going to hate you.”

“Already starting to.” But I’m smiling as I say it. “Worth it though.”

“I’m just impressed you remembered where things are kept.”

“Mom was particular about her storage system and yours is pretty damn similar.”

“I guess she trained us both well.” She pushes wet hair out of her face. “Though I noticed you suddenly forgot where you’re staying in town when Betty asked.”

“Strategic amnesia. Luckily I think she was too drunk to notice.”

She laughs, bright and genuine in the rain. That sound makes me want to be cleverer than I am, funnier, whatever it takes to hear it again.

We walk without talking for a bit, but it’s not awkward. The silence almost feels like it’s its own form of conversation. The path from town to the cabins is familiar even in the dark, lined with Douglas firs that turn the rain into a gentle percussion.

Maren hums a melody under her breath, so quiet I almost miss it.

The melody tugs at my memory but I can’t place it, and I don’t ask.

There’s a niceness about not knowing, about just listening to the sound of her voice mixing with the rain.

She stops humming, clearing her throat softly—that little sound she makes when she’s thinking—and I file it away with all the other small things I’ve noticed about her.

“I saw you reading the other night,” she says. “Through the window. Your light was on until at least midnight.”

“You were watching me?” I ask, amused. Maybe a little pleased by the idea of her noticing me too.

“Your light was on when I got home. Hard to miss.” She glances at me sideways, and even in the dark I can see her smile. “You had this look on your face. Like whatever you were reading was saving your life or ruining it.”

“Maybe both.” I shrug. “Poetry. Not for work, just for me.”

“Who?” She seems genuinely interested.

I hesitate. It’s one thing to read poetry, another to admit which poems you need at midnight. “Elias Shaw.”

She stops walking. Actually stops, right there in the middle of the path, rain falling around us. “You’re kidding.”

“What?”

“Elias Shaw’s the only poet I’ve ever dog-eared.” Her voice carries something I can’t quite identify. Recognition, maybe. “He was one of the authors I found after my parents died. His stuff about carrying death like a weight—”

“Like it’s something you pack and unpack in every new room,” I finish.

Her eyes go wide. In the darkness, with the rain between us, they look like deep water I could dive into. “You know ‘Morning Inventory’?”

“By heart.”

We stand there staring at each other, rain soaking through our clothes, and something shifts. My pulse kicks up, blood rushing in my ears louder than the rain.

“Which one were you reading?” she asks. “The other night, I mean.”

“‘Letter to My Former Self.’” I’m embarrassed by how raw my voice sounds. “The part about forgiveness being a house you build room by room.”

She nods. “That’s the one that got me through the first year. After.”

She doesn’t say after what, doesn’t need to. I know what happened to her parents.

“I used to read it every morning,” she continues. “Like a prayer. Like instructions for surviving.”

We start walking again, but slower now, like we’re both trying to make this last. Our shoulders brush, and neither of us moves away.

“Shaw put words to things I couldn’t name,” I tell her. “Like it was okay to not have answers. To just... exist in the questions.”

She’s quiet for a moment, considering. “You write like that. Like you’re just trying to understand something true.”

“You read my book.” It’s not really a question. Her voice tells me she’s not talking about excerpts.

“I read your book,” she confirms. “All of it. Cover to cover. Several times, actually.”

“I always feel like I should apologize when people say that.” I push wet hair back. “It’s not exactly uplifting.”

“No, but it’s honest.”

I feel exposed suddenly, like she’s seen me naked.

“Along with Shaw, it was what I needed,” she continues.”The grief essay particularly. And the one about storms. They made me feel less insane when everything else felt like lying.”

“When did you read it?” I need to know. Need to understand how long she’s been carrying my words around.

“First time? When I was twenty. Susan lent me her copy.” She smiles at the memory. “She was so proud. Kept telling everyone her son wrote a book, like you’d invented the concept of writing itself.”

“She would do that.” I have to swallow against the sudden tightness in my throat.

“Last time was a few months ago. Bad night. The kind where the walls feel too close and too far away at the same time. I pulled it off the shelf and read it straight through until sunrise.”

She’s taking me apart with this confession. The thought of her reading my raw attempts at understanding loss, alone in her cabin struggling with her own grief, opens something in me I’ve kept closed.

“I thought I was writing to make sense of loss,” I admit.

“Turns out, I was just writing not to disappear. Never expected the articles, the readings. People wanting me to explain what I meant when half the time I was just trying to survive the page.” I let out a breath.

“I even threw my copy in the Sound on my first day back into town. Like some dramatic movie scene.”

She doesn’t look shocked. Just thoughtful. “Why?”

She waits, giving me room to answer or not.

The rain fills the silence, patient. Maybe that freedom is what makes me speak.

Or maybe it’s just her. Something about Maren bypasses my usual defenses, like she has a key I didn’t know I’d given out.

“I think because it stopped being mine. Became something else entirely. A product. Locked me into a version of myself I don’t recognize anymore.

” I run a hand through my wet hair, feel the rain immediately replace what I’ve pushed away.

“The guy who wrote those essays was twenty-five and half-drunk on grief and rage. I’m not him anymore. But nobody wants to hear that.”

She steps closer. Close enough that I can feel her warmth despite the rain. “It helped me.”

“When I read it,” she continues, her voice low, “I was looking for someone else who knew what it felt like. To wake up and remake the world every morning because the people who helped build it are gone.”

I stay quiet, not wanting to interrupt. I want whatever she’s willing to share, want to know all her broken pieces.

“The grief essay,” she says, and I can tell she’s choosing her words carefully. “You wrote ‘Some storms pass. Others take up residence in your chest and call it shelter.’ I used to think that meant I was doomed to carry this forever, like a permanent houseguest.”

She pauses, and I wait, rain running down both our faces.

“But I realized,” she continues, “it’s not about storms taking shelter in you.

The storm becomes part of your weather system.

This is just the climate you live in now, not something foreign that lives in you.

And some days it rains, some days it doesn’t, but you learn to work with it.

You even find the sun sometimes. You plant things that grow in this weather. ”

She reframes my metaphor into something livable instead of something to endure. I haven’t been able to see it that way, too stuck in my own interpretation, but she cuts through the bullshit I’ve been drowning in.