We don’t speak.We don’t need to.
His hands shift—slightly firmer now, more certain. My fingers find the nape of his neck, where damp hair curls against warm skin. He smells like rain and cedar and Owen.
We sway. Close enough that I can feel the shape of his breath. Long enough for my heart to sync to the rhythm of his.
Eventually—inevitably—the world intrudes. Early morning. Wet framing. TV deadlines.
We step back at the same time, but his hand lingers at my waist. Just a second longer.
He clears his throat. “We should?—”
“Yeah.” My voice is soft. “Early start.”
We pack up without speaking, working by flashlight. The rain has eased to a hush. The silence between us feels less like tension and more like something carefully held.
On the porch, just before we part—me to the camper, him to his truck—I catch a moment. Owen reaches up, absently touching his cheek. The spot where my hair brushed against him.
The gesture is small. Unconscious. But it lands with the weight of everything we didn’t say.
Not all conversations happen in words.
Some live in the space between a touch and a heartbeat. Between flailing and dancing. Between his hands finding my waist… and my heart remembering what it feels like to be held.
“The thingabout storms is that they always tell you they’re coming,” Owen says, methodically checking the seals around the newly installed windows. “You just have to know how to read the signs.”
I trail him around the tiny house, watching as he inspects weatherstripping and tests the tightness of each frame. Outside, the sky has taken on that greenish-gray tone that signals incoming weather—not quite threatening yet, but definitely ominous.
“Like the barometric pressure drop that makes your sinuses feel like they’re hosting a rave?” I ask, handing him the caulk gun when he reaches for it without looking. We’ve developed this shorthand—anticipating each other’s needs, moving in rhythm around the site.
“That’s one sign,” he says, applying a clean bead of caulk to a small gap. “Also cloud formations. Wind shifts. Animal behavior.”
“Finn’s been extra clingy this morning,” I point out. The dog is currently camped out at my feet like a furry shadow. “Weather-predicting superpower?”
“Pressure sensitivity,” Owen replies, moving on. “Most animals can feel it before we do.”
We’re two days into repairing the water damage we discovered earlier this week, and with another storm on the way, weatherproofing has become the priority. The TV crew arrives injust over two weeks, and every setback now feels like a seismic event.
“So what exactly are we doing here?” I ask. “Besides the obvious ‘keep the rain outside’ objective.”
He pauses, considering how to break it down. “Weatherproofing is about creating a protective envelope,” he says, gesturing around the window. “It’s a system of barriers and drainage planes. They work together to manage moisture.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“It’s not, really,” he continues, pointing as he explains. “You’ve got your primary defense—the siding, the windows—but that’s not enough. You need backup layers. Flashing, building paper, proper drainage paths. Think of it like layers of armor.”
I watch him work—precise, focused, efficient. There’s something grounding in the way he handles the technical side of things, like the world makes sense as long as he’s holding a level.
“The key,” he adds, inspecting the next window, “is knowing that no system is perfect. Water finds a way. Good weatherproofing isn’t about sealing everything off—it’s about protecting what matters while still letting the structure breathe.”
The way he says it lodges somewhere beneath my ribs.
“So it’s not about being impenetrable,” I say, slowly. “It’s about being... selectively permeable?”
He glances at me, surprised by the phrasing. “Exactly. Seal everything too tight, and you get condensation. Mold. Too open, and, well...” He gestures to the wall we just rebuilt.
“Balance,” I say. “Keeping the bad stuff out while letting the right stuff in.”
He nods. “That’s weatherproofing. Protecting what matters.”
