Things We Carry Through the Storm

The paramedic station hummed with fluorescent light and exhaustion. Maya pressed her **palm** against the cold window, watching rain blur the parking lot into gray abstraction. Three years she'd been doing this job, and still the nights clawed at her sometimes.

"You're staring again."

She turned to find Tomas leaning against the doorframe, two mugs in hand. His **dog**, Buster — a rescue shepard who sometimes visited the station on therapy days — was nowhere to be seen tonight. Just Tomas, the shadows under his eyes darker than usual.

"Storm's coming," she said, accepting the coffee he offered. Their fingers brushed, and something electric passed between them that had nothing to do with weather. "They said **lightning** could hit the transmission tower again."

"Like last month." His voice dropped lower. "When we sat in the truck for three hours because neither of us wanted to go home."

Maya's throat tightened. That night — hands touching in the dark, conversations that skirted the edge of everything they couldn't say. Tomas was technically her supervisor. Technically married, though separated eight months and waiting on papers.

Technically off-limits in every way that mattered.

"I bought a house," she said instead. "Closed yesterday."

He set his mug down carefully. "Oh."

"It's got this screened porch overlooking a bayou. There's a **cat** that lives in the reeds behind it, this scraggly orange thing that showed up on moving day like it owned the place." She almost smiled. "I named him Phoenix, which is ridiculous. He's just a cat."

"Does he let you touch him?"

"No. But he sits on the railing while I drink coffee, and we sort of regard each other. This wary détente." She looked up at Tomas. "It's easier, somehow. Than people."

His pager buzzed. They both flinched — the reflex of first responders conditioned to respond, to move, to fix. But it was just a test signal from dispatch.

"Maya." He stepped closer, and the air between them grew heavy with everything they'd been carefully not saying for months. "I signed the papers. Yesterday morning."

The breath left her lungs. Outside, thunder rolled closer.

"The house has a guest room," she heard herself say. "And Phoenix might hate you, but there's coffee. And the porch overlooks the **water**, and it's quiet there."

Tomas's hand found hers, his palm warm against her skin. Outside, lightning fractured the sky, illuminating everything for one perfect, suspended moment.

"I don't need quiet," he said softly. "I need you to stop looking at rain through windows alone."

Maya turned fully toward him, away from the glass, away from the storm. "Then stay."

The morning shift would find them hours later, still talking on the porch in the gray dawn, an orange cat watching warily from the railing as something cautiously, brilliantly began.