Page 155 of The Storm Boys Series Collection

“We’ve lost the pressure sensor,” I said.

But Doreen didn’t care. The console panel was forgotten, the work, the cyclone, everything else forgotten as she quickly sat beside Suri and scooped her up, Bruce included.

“Jeremiah,” Tully yelled, ducking his head at the noise. He patted the floor next to him. “Come and sit here.”

More torn metal screeched above us, and I looked at the console just in time to see another screen blink out. “The satellite’s gone,” I said.

Not that they could hear me.

The building was shaking so much now, rattling and groaning. I looked up at the ceiling, expecting it to peel back or rip away at any second... yet somehow it held.

Tully’s hand on my arm startled me. He pulled me over to the corner with them, his hand in a death grip on mine. And I realised then—a little too late, like I usually did—that it wasn’t for my comfort, but his.

He needed me.

So I put my arm around him and held his hands with my other. “It’s okay,” I yelled so he could hear. “We’ll be okay.”

I wanted to check his laptop, to see the view from his balcony, but thought better of it.

There was a good chance the camera would be out, and he didn’t need to worry about if that meant his house was gone with it.

“I should have taken the job in the Antarctic,” I yelled, holding Tully a little tighter. “They don’t have cyclones there, and how bad could a snowstorm be?”

He looked up at me, and when he saw that I was joking, he almost smiled. “I’m from the tropics,” he yelled back. “We can’t move to anywhere it snows.”

I laughed and kissed the side of his head, holding him tighter. I love that he included thewepart to that.

That we’d be aweto factor in all our decisions.

Was it probably far too early in our relationship for that kind of thinking?

Maybe.

In the middle of a cyclone in a building that felt as if it was seconds from crumbling around us, did I give one fuck about what anyone else thought?

No.

This man who loved me, who sat huddled in my arms, trembling and shying from every sudden noise, every bang, every creak and groan of bricks and mortar and steel. At the sound of hell being unleashed outside.

In the face of uncertainty, priorities are made clear.

If this was our last day on Earth, I wanted it to be with him. And if it wasn’t our last, I wanted many more with him.

So I held him a little tighter, cradled him closer.

I knew, theoretically, what to expect from enduring a cyclone. I’d read data reports and heard accounts of people who had lived through them. I’d seen the footage of the aftermath, and I knew the power of nature it took to amass that kind of destruction.

What I had grossly underestimated was the noise. Or perhaps one had to experience it firsthand to really grasp what the sound of a cyclone was like. It sounded like a plane was landing in the room. Or a train. Or both.

But the strangest thing for me was time.

Time felt wrong.

Every second was a minute, every minute was an hour.

I could see the radar from where I sat. I could see it still moving in real time, but everything else was in slow motion in almost three-hundred-kilometre-an-hour winds.

It made everything feel surreal.

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