Skywalk Squall

The squall catches the skywalk the moment Sylvie Hobart steps onto it, and the whole glass bridge hums with a single clear note that vibrates through her bones. She stops halfway across the junction between the two timber buildings and wishes, not for the first time that afternoon, that she had worn the other coat. The one with the liner. The one that does not make her look like she lost a bet with a thrift store.

Twenty-nine years old and she is still dressing to spite people, she thinks. Mostly herself.

The wind has found a broken pane somewhere in the west wall. It comes through the gap in a thin, furious whistle, high and constant, the sound a kettle makes right before it screams. Below the glass floor panels the ravine drops away, all rock and dark pines, and the little clothespin factory at the bottom looks like something out of a postcard nobody would buy. Someone down there has had an accident with a shipment, apparently. Wooden molds, hundreds of them, the unfinished halves of spring clothespins, are scattered across the loading yard and a good stretch of the gravel road. From up here they look like spilled crackers.

She is staring down at them, doing the arithmetic of how long this storm will last and whether she can just wait it out in her car, when she sees the reflection first. A tall shape in the glass wall to her left. She turns, and her stomach does something complicated and unwelcome.

Perry Tomlinson.

Thirty-four now, four years older than her and always will be, leaning against the glass like he was a model for a catalog that went out of business years ago. Gray is starting at his temples. His jaw is the same. His hands are wrapped around a wooden clothespin mold, one of the little unfinished halves, and he is turning it over the way he used to turn over anything he could fidget with, which was, in her memory, everything including her patience.

Of all the covered bridges in all the towns in all of Idaho, she thinks, and hates herself a little for the joke even inside her own head.

"Sylvie," he says. Not surprised. Which is worse, somehow, than surprised.

"Perry." Her voice comes out flat and hard and she is glad of it.

He holds up the mold. "They've been raining down here all morning. Apparently the whole yard let go." He turns it in his fingers. "You remember when you threw the mug at me. This is basically the same thing, only wood. More environmentally friendly."

The mug. Four years ago, when she was twenty-five and he was thirty and she had just told him about the drafting certification she wanted to chase and he had laughed, actually laughed, and said something like, sure, sweetheart, and what do you think you'll earn. She had thrown the mug. It had been a good mug. She still misses it sometimes, which is a stupid thing to admit to yourself, so she doesn't.

"You're not funny," she says.

"I'm a little funny." He extends the mold toward her, an offering, his face doing that thing where the humor is real but underneath it there is something older and more careful. "Peace offering. From the weather, or the factory, or me. Dealer's choice."

She snatches it out of his hand faster than dignity allows, and she knows it, and he knows it, and the corner of his mouth twitches, and she wants to hit him with it. It is a light thing, half-formed pine, still smelling of sawdust and the machine that shaped it. She could probably break it over her knee. She considers it seriously.

"Say what you came here to say," she says instead. "Or don't. I can stand here and freeze in silence, I've done it at enough of our friends' dinners."

The wind answers before he can. It shoves through the broken pane with a fresh burst, a real gust this time, and the whistle climbs into a shriek and something rattles somewhere in the eastern building's framing. The temperature in the junction drops what feels like five degrees in one breath. Sylvie shivers, hard, involuntary, her shoulders jumping before she can stop them, and she clamps her jaw so her teeth don't join in.

Perry doesn't say anything clever. He shrugs out of his jacket, the heavy canvas one she remembers from a hundred cold mornings, and before she can decide whether she wants it he has draped it over her shoulders from behind, settling it there with both hands, brief and certain.

"I didn't ask for that," she says.

"No," he agrees. "You looked cold."

"That's not the point."

"I know." He steps back around in front of her, giving her space, hands open at his sides like he is showing her they are empty. "Point is yours to make. It always was. The entire problem was that, right? I kept deciding things for you."

She opens her mouth to argue and finds, irritatingly, nothing there. The jacket is warm and smells like him, cedar and machine oil, and it is doing something traitorous to the back of her neck where the wool collar used to bite.

She presses the clothespin mold into his chest instead, flat of her palm behind it, pushing so he has to feel the little stamped ridges of it against his sternum. His eyebrows go up.

"So make me stay," she says. It comes out more like a dare than she planned, breathless at the edges, and she hates the breathless part. "You always wanted to be the one in charge. So. Here's the junction, here's the storm, here's me. Make me stay, Perry, or admit you never actually could."

The whistle of the wind fills the silence that follows. He looks down at the mold against his chest, then at her, and when he speaks his voice has dropped its humor entirely, gone quiet and even, the voice he used to use on the rare nights when everything between them went good and slow.

"Listen to me first," he says. "Because I'm not playing a game with the important parts. If you say yes to anything that happens after this, it's yes because you want it, not because I dared you and you'd rather freeze than lose to me. You can stop anything, any time, any reason. You say the word and it's done and I don't ask twice and I don't sulk."

"That's the safeword," he goes on, before she can speak. "We need one. Pick anything. Something you'd never say in the middle of anything else."

She thinks about it. The wind shrieks again and the glass hums.

"Defrag," she says, because it is the most boring word she owns, the word she watches crawl across a screen at work all day, and something in her face must show it because one of his eyebrows climbs.

"Defrag," he repeats, solemn as a judge. "Agreed."

His hand comes up slowly, giving her the whole length of the walk to stop it, and rests over hers where her palm still pins the mold to his chest.

"Your move either way," he says quietly. "You pushed first."

Sylvie stands there with her hand flat against his chest and the mold between them and the wind screaming through the broken pane, and she takes inventory of herself the way she takes inventory of anything, slowly and with suspicion. Her pulse is up. Her knees hold views she is not going to listen to. Four years of being the one who walked away, and here she is daring a man to hold her wrist like it is still twenty-five and thirty and the whole mess has not happened yet.

But that is the point, she decides. That is exactly the point. She is not twenty-five anymore. She is twenty-nine, she pays her own rent, she got the certification he laughed at, and if she chooses this, it is because she chooses it, with her eyes open, in daylight, in a storm. Not because he pushed. Because she pushed first and he is asking her to keep pushing or stop.

"Okay," she says. "For the duration of the squall. That's the limit. When the wind stops, this stops, and we go back to being people who don't speak at our friends' dinners."

"For the duration of the squall," he agrees, and something in his shoulders lets go, some held tension she had forgotten he used to carry. "That I can work with."

He takes her wrist then, and it is nothing like the old way, nothing like the grab she had braced for in the back of her mind. His fingers close around it gently, a question shaped like a grip, and he watches her face while he does it, giving her the length of a breath to pull back. She does not pull back. He turns her, palm light at her back, and guides her down the junction toward the alcove on the east side, the one sheltered from the broken pane, where the timber frame cuts the wind to a low moan instead of a shriek. It is maybe ten steps. It feels longer. The floorboards flex under their feet the way the whole skywalk has flexed since she arrived, and she counts them because counting is what she does.

The alcove holds a bench built into the wall, old and solid, and a window that is whole, glass fogged at the corners. He sits her down on it and then lowers himself to one knee in front of her, which startles her, honestly. Perry Tomlinson on his knees on a splintered bench skirt in a storm, looking up at her like she is the one with the say-so.

"Belt," he says, working it out of the loops. "Hands behind your back. Yes or no?"

"Yes." It comes out steadier than she expected.

"Comfortable first. Tell me if the angle's wrong."

He threads the belt through its buckle and takes her hands, drawing them behind her at the small of her back, checking