Chapter 6: Monsoon

The dust wall hit at 4:10 on Wednesday afternoon.

I watched it come from the kitchen window, a brown wall rolling across the valley.

It swallowed the mountains, then the golf course, then the house across the street.

The palo verde in the corner of the yard thrashed once and lay flat.

Every patio chair I owned went over.

I texted him four words, my thumb steady, my heart not.

Come now. Wear jeans.

He answered before I'd put the phone down.

Terms say Tuesday.

I looked at the screen. Then I typed: Do you want to see what happens to the terms?

The dots appeared, vanished, appeared.

On my way.

He parked at the curb in a Honda with a cracked taillight, not his company truck.

He ran up the drive through brown wind with one arm over his face.

He was in jeans and a gray T-shirt.

I opened the door and the storm came in with him, grit and leaves and the smell of hot creosote.

"Is this a bad idea?" he shouted.

"The worst."

I took his wrist and pulled him through the house and out the back.

The first fat drops hit us on the patio, warm and heavy.

Then the sky opened.

It came down in sheets.

It hammered the pool and hissed on the pavers and ran off the roof in ropes.

In seconds we were both soaked to the skin.

I laughed out loud.

Nico stood in the middle of the yard with water streaming off his curls.

His shirt was plastered to him, and he stared at me with his mouth open.

"You're insane," he said.

"So I'm told," I said.

"Joelle..."

"The shower. Come on."

I dragged him around the cabana and behind the reed screen to the stone bench.

The rain head over us was off, but it didn't matter.

The storm had filled the little enclosure with a roar and a gray light, and the stone was already streaming.

I turned to him and pulled the T-shirt up and over his head, and he let me.

He peeled off my dress.

It was the only thing I had on, and it landed on the flagstones with a slap.

He stood there, blinking rain out of his eyelashes, looking at all of me.

"You're beautiful," he said.

"Don't talk. Sit."

He sat on the stone bench with his jeans stuck to his legs.

I undid his belt with cold wet fingers and then the button and the zip.

He lifted, I pulled, and the jeans came down his thighs with a wet suck.

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