A/N: Rated T for language. There is an Abernathy, Texas, and it is located about twenty minutes north of Lubbock. After that, any similarities with real people, places, and events in the town are purely coincidental.

No one in this part of Texas dressed like that, especially not during the hottest days of summer. With a big hat, geometric print pants bright enough to be seen from space, and too-high heels the exact shame shade of pink as her lipstick, she looked like a bona fide lunatic in comparison to the drab storefronts and bright blue, cloudless sky. And with the way she'd been wandering up and down Main Street for the last five minutes, Haymitch was inclined to think he was right. He decided to take the polite route on the off chance she actually had some money to spend. "Can I help you, ma'am?"

She turned and beamed at him. Damn, that woman did a lot of whitening. "Yes, please! I'm looking for number two Main Street?"

There were exactly nine buildings on this street. How had she managed to miss one of them? "Head across the street. It's one down and on the left. It's the one with the big porch and the green door."

"Oh, silly me, of course that's it! Looks just like it did on the website. Thank you!" So this was the goddamn fool that Ripper had sweet-talked into buying that dump. He hadn't believed the woman when she said she had managed to sell it for good money without even having the buyer visit. Looked like he owed Ripper an apology. To his disappointment, the woman didn't go off to her new house like he hoped she would. Instead, she opened the screen door to his bar, letting herself inside. "You're Mr. Abernathy?" she asked.

Lord, it had been a long time since anyone called him that. "Haymitch," he corrected her.

"Pleased to meet you. I'm Effie Trinket. I just bought the house across the street." She held her hand out for him to shake, and he took it.

That was it. He couldn't pretend to be a decent human being anymore. "That's a nice pair of pants you got there."

Another one of those smiles. Did her mouth start to hurt after a while? His did just thinking about it. "Thank you, they're vintage."

"Ever given anyone a seizure with 'em?"

She laughed, but it was obvious it strained her to do so. "Have you lived here very long? The town is lovely. I'm very excited to get settled in."

"Sweetheart, nobody moves in or out around these parts. You're born here, you die here, and that's about all there is to it."

"Well, I did."

"You're the first and the last."

Abernathy, Texas. Population thirty-seven. Closest town was Lubbock, fifteen miles away. If you followed the speed limit, it took twenty minutes to get to the nearest grocery store. Took about the same for a doctor, a cinema, and any half-decent restaurants. Haymitch usually managed all of them in about ten, maybe fifteen if the weather was bad. No reason to follow the speed limits if there wasn't anything to hit. His great-grandfather had founded this town in 1871, and as Josiah Abernathy's sole living descendent, Haymitch felt almost required to stay. Why anyone else did was beyond him.

Even more baffling was the Effie Trinket's – by the way, what the hell kind of a name was that – plan to open a bed and breakfast. Now, Haymitch understood the concept of a bed and breakfast just fine. They were where rich folks stayed when they took vacations in charming places to pretend like they were somehow living like the locals. Issue was, there weren't any rich folks coming to Abernathy. It had nothing for them. Hell, it didn't have everything the locals needed. What would anyone do on a vacation here?

Effie must have been wondering the same thing. She came in with a purpose that evening, with none of the hellos and big, cheery smiles he'd become accustomed to over the last week or so. "Do you ever serve food here?" she asked practically the second her rear hit the bar stool.

"Nope." Not quite true, he'd occasionally give the regulars a few bites of whatever he'd made for his own dinner if he thought they needed to sober up before heading home, but it was close enough.

His one-word answer was apparently too difficult for her to remember, so she wrote it down in her notebook. Like everything else she owned, it was needlessly decorated, this time with a neon flower print and a silky pink ribbon. Pink was a reoccurring offender. Haymitch would bet that each and every one of her garish outfits had at least a bit of the offensive color. He'd be perfectly happy if he never saw anything pink from this moment forward.

Unfortunately, that didn't seem likely, not with Effie on some sort of mission to bother him at every opportunity. "Do you know of any good restaurants within, say, a fifteen minute drive? I would like to be able to recommend a few to future guests."

"There's a Mexican place in Lubbock that most people thinks all right. Casa Joven or something, I think."

Effie wasn't going to let him off the hook that easily. "Have you ever tried it?"

"Not in a few years."

"What did you think of the food?"

He shrugged. "It was all right. Not as good as my mother used to make."

That got jotted down in the notebook as well. "I'll definitely have to check that place out!" She tried to flip over to the next page in her notebook, but the page stuck to the bar. Effie frowned and tried to pry it off. She was rewarded with a long rip right down the middle of the page. "Could you please wipe that off? It's sticky."

"Already did."

"Well, it's obviously not clean. Why don't you try it again?"

Haymitch crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the bar. "You a paying customer? Because if you aren't paying, you sure as hell don't get to come in here and tell me how to run my bar."

"As though you would listen to anyone, even if they were paying. What do you say when the health inspector comes? Do you ask him if he's a paying customer when he writes up your grubby little bar for health code violations?"

"You bet."

She let the door slam behind her. Looked like he wasn't going to have to see any more pink today after all. Good. He grabbed the rag from behind the bar and got to work on the counter. Haymitch didn't care that it was a little sticky, since everything he served came in a glass or a bottle, but he wasn't going to put up with having a strip of Effie's planner stuck to his bar. It only took him a few seconds to scrub every trace of it away, and for good riddance, he gave the rest of the counter a quick wipe as well, just because he already had the rag handy.

The next day, he found a bouquet of daisies sitting outside the bar. Haymitch studied them for a moment before he grabbed the card. It had to be a mistake. No one sent flowers to fifty-year-old men with beer bellies. The card should at least tell him who they meant to deliver them to.

Haymitch –

I am very sorry for my behavior last night. My comments about your bar were cruel and unnecessary, and I hope we can put it behind us and still be friends.

-Effie

Stupid reason or not, no one had ever bought him flowers before, and he had to admit that there was some novelty to the experience. He took them inside, clipped the ends off, and stuck them in a mug with some water. Not a vase, but it worked in a pinch.

He liked a morning stroll as much as the next man. It made for a good stretch, got him outside, and it kept him from losing what little tan his mother's Mexican heritage gave him. On days like today, when his hangover wasn't half bad and he didn't have to reach for the bottle within minutes of rolling out of bed, they were especially nice.

The sights were pretty much always the same. His bar, the barbershop, the pretty old Victorians that lined First Street. Every once in a while, someone would get a new coat of paint or put some nice new piece of furniture out on the porch, but otherwise, everything looked about the same as it had since they paved Main and First when he was a boy.

The house Effie had bought had always been his favorite. A little piece of luxury in the middle of nowhere, it had a big wrap-around porch, and a few of the second floor windows were stained glass. Back when Abernathy had been able to support a church, it had been the minister's house. It was made for class and good Christians, and naturally, it had ended up with a good old-fashioned drunk like Ripper. Not that he would be any better, he was just as guilty as Ripper, but he lived in his little apartment above his bar. Nobody was wasting any fine house on him. Even though it sat right on the corner of Main and First, the very center of town, Ripper hadn't painted the poor thing in years. It had gotten so bad that a few months ago he'd peeled a chunk of paint off with his fingers to show his friend just how badly she needed to cough up the money for paint. Effie had fixed that before she'd even moved in, and just a week or two ago, she had replaced the shattered third story window that Ripper had said she'd been meaning to get around to for the last twenty years. From what he'd heard, she was completely redoing the inside too, keeping the nice old fixtures – claw foot tubs, crown moldings, the like – and getting it up to the standards of a twenty-first century four-star hotel. Good for her. Didn't mean it wasn't the stupidest business plan he'd ever heard.

"What are you doing?"

"Planting a garden!" She was out of breath, and even though she wore an enormous floppy sunhat, a hint of sunburn tinged her nose and cheeks pink.

He looked over the yard, which had been a perfectly nice patch of dirt until she came and made a mess out of it. "Looks nice."

"I'm not done, of course."

"Really? I thought it was a big improvement." Oh, wow. The piles of dirt went back further than he'd thought, ending only a foot or two from the property line. She had torn up pretty much the entire yard. How big of a garden did one woman need? "You did all this yourself?"

She shook her head. "No, I don't think I could have managed all this by myself. I got Peeta and Gale to come out yesterday afternoon and help me dig up the areas for some of the plantings. They're good workers."

"They sure left it looking better than when they started."

Effie ignored him. "I think I'm going to have them come back and help me plant things, when it's time for that. I would really like to have this ready to open by March, and I'm not sure I can do that without them."

"Sorry to break it to you, sweetheart, but I don't think anyone's going to care too much about how big the flowers are at a bed and breakfast."

She cleaned her hands off on her apron. Underneath, she was wearing a floral pink dress that might serve her pretty well as camouflage in a few months. Haymitch had assumed she would switch to sensible shoes to garden in, but she had just of high as heels as ever. Effie might be nuts to try to garden in stilettos, but Haymitch bet she had ankles that even ballerinas would be jealous of. "I wasn't talking about the bed and breakfast. That should be ready in December, maybe January at the absolute latest."

He had never known any construction project to get done on time, but he didn't need to mention that. "So what are you opening up in March?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, I must not have told you. There's going to be a pick your own flowers portion as well, and that's what we're putting in now. It'll have to be a seasonal thing, of course, but in the spring and summer, it should be absolutely gorgeous."

"Why would someone pay to pick flowers?" For that matter, why would anyone want to vacation in Abernathy, Texas? Effie was either brilliant or crazy.

"It's all the rage in Martha's Vineyard."

Yep, crazy. He should have known.

She came in with an enormous bucket. With every step she took, a few drops of liquid sloshed out. "Hey, no bringing your own drinks."

Ignoring him, she hoisted the five-gallon bucket up onto the bar. "Sorry, this is the only container I had big enough to hold it."

God, this stuff smelled awful. Ammonia always gave him a headache. "And what is this?" He felt like he already knew the answer, but there was no shame in wanting to be proven right.

"It's a cleaner for your bar. I think your disinfectant is the reason it's so sticky. You do a good job of keeping it sanitary." He could hear a compliment in there, so he nodded for her to continue. No way she was getting anywhere by being nasty to him again. "I found this recipe for a non-sticky cleaner online."

"And you want me to use this here in my bar."

Effie nodded, and the flower on top of her hat nodded with her.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I know my bar's clean enough to be safe as is, and there's no reason to fix what ain't broken. Anyway, that shit would give me a headache if I had to sit in here and sniff it all day."

"I'm asking you to clean with it, not huff it." Well, there was an idea. Could be more fun than sitting and listening to her. "And I assure you that this stuff is strong enough to kill any germs that wanted to live here. I could print out the instructions I used for you. You'd see it's got enough cleaners in it to knock out about anything."

"Doesn't mean I'm using it."

"Fine, then," she huffed. "I'll leave it here, and you can decide what to do with it. Just give me back my bucket sometime. I need it for my garden."

"It's going to be ready right on schedule!" There was more excitement in that sentence than his bar had seen in years, maybe ever, and he didn't even know its cause.

"What is?"

"The bed and breakfast. It'll be open next week. I just finished listing it online."

And now came the part where she realized absolutely no one wanted to come. Poor kid. Abernathy had long had a special knack for breaking hearts. "That's great," he replied. "It deserves a drink." He'd get her a few more when it went under. Least he could do.

"And next week, you'll start seeing my guests here! It'll be great for the community to have so many new people coming through."

He grabbed one of the Mike's Hard Lemonades that he had started keeping in the cooler for her. "Here you go. On the house."

Effie took the bottle. "Thank you for the offer, but I really can't let you do that."

Haymitch shook his head. "You really can't stop me either, sweetheart. You just put a shit ton of work and God knows how much money into that house of yours. Let yourself celebrate a little. It'll do you some good to loosen up a bit."

People who looked like that didn't come to Abernathy's. He dealt in calloused hands and beer bellies, not attractive young couples who wore brand-spanking new plaid shirts that almost matched and jeans fit too tight to be of any use on the ranches. The two were drunk enough on love that he wasn't sure what they had come here for. "How you two doin' tonight?" he asked.

"We're just great, thanks." She was going to pull a muscle in her face if she kept smiling like that, but both seemed polite enough. He should at least be able to get a nice tip out of putting up with them for the next couple hours.

"What can I get for you tonight?"

She looked up at the specials sign that Effie had nudged him into posting above the bar. He never bothered to change it. That had been part of the deal with Effie. If he put up the sign, even if he just put a few drinks on it at their regular price, she wouldn't nag him about it anymore. So far, it had worked, making his customers feel like they were getting a good deal and getting them to spend a couple extra bucks each. Add in that it kept Effie quiet, and Haymitch felt like he'd gotten one hell of a deal on that cheap chalkboard. He wasn't dumb enough to think she would ever run out of things to give him shit about, but for the moment, he had a happy neighbor. Spending his entire life in a town the size of Abernathy had taught him just how valuable happy neighbors were.

"I'll stick to whiskey, please," the man said, tearing Haymitch from his thoughts.

"All right. How about you, sweetheart?" Haymitch watched the boyfriend's reaction to the endearment. He'd noticed it, definitely, but he didn't react with any of the possessiveness Haymitch saw far too often. Good. Maybe this woman, whoever she was, had managed to find herself one of the good ones. If she was going to spend the entire night practically sitting on some guy's lap, she might as well choose a nice one to cuddle up to.

"Those two yours?" he asked Effie when he next saw her. Haymitch could practically time when she would be in. Just a few minutes after three every day, sooner if it was over ninety degrees, she would stop by for her Mike's Hard Lemonade. Same time, same order, all of it so uniform he'd started getting it ready at two fifty-five so she didn't have to wait. Today was just like all the others. He slid the drink across the bar to her the second she came in. He had to admire the way it slid nice and smooth over the wood. No way that would have worked a couple months ago. That cleaner she'd whipped up really did do wonders.

"Who?" she asked.

"A couple came by here last night. Big guy, kind of redheaded, and his Hispanic girlfriend, both dressed like they just stepped out of Town and Country."

"Oh, Finnick and Annie! Aren't they just the sweetest? They just got engaged." Heaven help him, how much did she know about everyone's business?

"So they aren't married is what you're telling me."

Effie frowned at him. As she had the bottle up to her lips, it wasn't as effective as she probably hoped. It did turn a frown kind of cute, not that he would ever admit that out loud. "That is what being engaged generally means, yes."

When he saw an opportunity, he took it. "You're bringing sin upon this town. The devil himself will be staying at your little bed and breakfast before we know it."

"Like you care about people sinning. You own a bar, for goodness' sake." She slammed down her drink with enough force that he worried it was going to break.

He cracked a smile. "You know, Miss Effie, if you're going to behave like that, I'm going to have to ask you to leave. I'm trying to run myself a respectable business here."

She rolled her eyes at him, a sight he had gotten used to these last few months. It was sad how fast this goddamn New Yorker had grown on him. "You're completely impossible. You know that?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, sweetheart. I just can't have bad behavior messing up this here town."

"Of course you don't." She took another drink, finishing off her bottle. He reached into the cooler he kept behind the bar for another one. Haymitch knew a two-drink afternoon when he saw one. Effie shook her head. "No thanks."

"Come on. They spent fifty bucks between the two of 'em, and there's no way they would've ended up here if it wasn't for your bed and breakfast. Least I can do is give you a couple drinks."

Effie smiled at him, all bright and beaming and wonderful. "Fifty dollars? And they're just the first customers! I told you this would be a boon for local businesses!" There were only four businesses in Abernathy counting her own, and Haymitch wouldn't exactly call an extra fifty dollars a boon, but heck, if she wanted to say it, he wasn't going to argue.

Effie bit down on an ice cube. He hated it when she did that. "I'm slowly realizing that I don't know a lot of things about living down here."

"Doesn't seem like it should be too different from living wherever it is you came from." He sure couldn't come up with anything. Had to put your pants on one leg at a time wherever you were, right? Even those goddamn New Yorkers couldn't fuck that one up too badly.

"It's New York. I must've told you that at least ten times."

"You're assuming I listen to you." It was a lie. He hung on to every word she said, but he wasn't about to admit that out loud.

She shook her head. "You're impossible."

Haymitch winked. "Looks like you're catching on, sweetheart."

"No, really, there are things here that I've never had to think about in New York. Say, what to wear to a rodeo. I hear everyone in town goes to it every summer, but I don't have the first idea what to wear, or really what'll happen beyond a few people trying to ride a bull."

He stared at her. "Do I really look like the guy to go to for fashion advice?"

Effie sighed. She did have that dramatic sigh down pat. "Fine. Well, how about tornadoes, then? What do I do if one hits around here?"

He pretended to consider that for a moment. "Let me see your shoes."

"Haymitch, I'm serious."

"So am I. Come on, show me 'em."

Hesitatingly, she handed over her shoes. "Don't mess them up. Those were expensive, and if you get them dirty, you're buying me a new pair."

The shoes were every bit as ridiculous as she was. White with little pink and purple flowers on the outside, pink on the inside, and with a heel that had to be a good four, maybe five inches tall, they could probably be classified as a deadly weapon in some states. He had no idea how she walked in those things. Still, they worked for his purposes. "You see, there's no way you can stop yourself from getting hit by a tornado," he prefaced his explanation.

"Obviously."

"Now, come on, you didn't let me finish. Now, this tornado, it might drop you off somewhere far away, somewhere you aren't familiar with." She was shaking her head, and he couldn't help the smile spreading across his features. "When you want to get home, you just click your heels together like this –" He demonstrated. "Repeat 'there's no place like home' a few times, and you'll be just fine."

"I can't believe I ask you anything."

"That makes two of us," he replied as he gave her back her shoes.

"I'm not buying flowers for my bar." They sat in the back booth just like they always did on Thursday nights. It had been a ritual of theirs ever since she'd turned twenty-one – and for a few months before that, not that he'd admit it if the authorities ever asked – but Haymitch was wondering if maybe it had gone on too long.

Katniss frowned at him. What had he done to deserve this for a goddaughter? "Why not? It might make it stink less in here, and it'll help Effie's business at the same time. You know she hasn't had as many guests as she was hoping for."

"I don't get all the business I want either. Looks to me like she's finally starting to fit in."

"And Effie comes in how many times a week? I've seen her in here loads of times. She always gets a hard lemonade, so it's not like she needs you to mix drinks for her. Think she couldn't get a six pack at Wal-Mart and save herself some money?"

He gave her free beer, and she came in here to pick on him. Why did he keep falling for this shit? "How about you don't try to tell me how to run my bar, and I won't try and tell you how to run your love life?" That should send her running.

She crossed her arms and leaned back in the booth they shared. Her gray eyes had taken on that same color they had right before she put a dinner knife straight through his dining room table. True, that had been years ago, and she had since apologized, but still, she had the temperament to pull something like that again. He'd better be careful. "Oh, I'd love to hear what you've got to say about my love life. It's so obvious you're the expert in that particular area."

His bluff had been called. Time to lay down his cards. "I don't care what you and Peeta do."

"Good. That'll save us time, because I care a lot that you think it's okay to let your only friend go out of business."

"She's not my friend. I can't stand her." Even to his own ears, it sounded stupidly defensive.

Katniss didn't even bother to dignify that with a response. "I bet you could get a bouquet every once in a while for special events. Effie would probably find a potted plant for you too, if you asked her. It might make for better conversation than the usual management."

Kids these days. Ungrateful, every last one of 'em. He glared at her over the lip of his glass. "She called my bar a dump."

"This place is a dump. Doesn't mean you can't try to make it just a little bit nicer."

"Here, try this." He set the bottle down in front of her. Though it was only March, condensation covered the bottle almost immediately. Down here, it got hot early in the spring and stayed damn near boiling all the way 'til October, sometimes November. Those outfits of hers were going to get real uncomfortable pretty soon here. He hoped she had a few less crazy pieces hiding somewhere in the back of her closet if she didn't like sweating through fifteen fricking layers of tulle or whatever those monstrosities were made of.

She picked up the bottle and studied it. "Mike's Hard Pink Lemonade? Where'd you find this?"

"They had it at the grocery store, and since it's the same price as the normal stuff, I thought I'd give it a try. The lady they had working there said the company put a buck or two towards breast cancer research for every pack sold." And while that was nice and all, he had decided to purchase them the second he saw them sitting there on the shelf. How many empty bottles of Mike's Hard Lemonade did he take on his monthly run to the recycling center? No one else in Abernathy drank it. And there they were in pink. He had thought of her the second he saw them.

She took a long sip. "Good?"

"When I was younger, I used to think that pink lemonade tasted better than the regular kind. Thought it was sweeter, I guess." She took another long sip. "I was wrong. It tastes exactly the same, but I still love it." Another sip. Must be good. Drinking had been more about getting as much alcohol into his system as possible and less about the taste for years now, but he might just have to give these a try. After she finished that sip, Effie held up the bottle not too far from her face and smiled. "And I think the color suits me rather nicely, don't you?"

Effie started playing with the bouquet the instant she sat down, fussing with them and taking off leaves that had died over the past two days. "I'm not going to have anything left if you keep picking at it," he said.

She looked up from her work. "It's these castilleja. They're pretty as can be, and I love that they're native to the area, but they don't hold up as well as I'd like them to." She had a little pile of twenty or so leaves in front of her, and Effie showed no signs of slowing down. "I'll get you another once these start looking bad, no charge."

"Castilleja, huh? Haven't heard of them before."

"I think they're also called Indian Paintbrushes."

"Well, those I have heard of." Haymitch considered that for a moment. "You know, when I saw the Hawthornes earlier, I told Posy – their youngest, probably five or so, I don't know if you've met her - that these were big posies. She got a real kick out of it."

"You weren't wrong. Posies aren't any particular type of flower. They're little bouquets."

"So I was right, is what you're telling me. Can I get that in writing?"

Effie looked up from the flowers to grin at him. "Have you ever heard anything about even a broken clock being right twice a day?"

Haymitch decided to close for the night when the weatherman replaced the Astro's game he had been watching on the bar's small television set. With his orange suit and hair dyed to match, Caesar Flickerman was one hell of a weirdo, but at least he didn't interrupt regular broadcasting for anything but emergencies. And judging by the way the wind was picking up, this definitely qualified as an emergency.

By the time he shut the windows and picked out a bottle to spend his evening with, the rain was really coming down. The noise it made against his roof was like ten kids playing snare drums as loud as they could. The roads were going to flood if it kept that up. Abernathy wasn't quite in the desert, but it sure wasn't made for rain. "Our Doppler is showing heavy rain all through the panhandle and down towards Odessa."

"No shit." He turned up the volume on the television.

Now loud and clear, Caesar continued, "We haven't seen any sign of tornadoes yet, but the conditions are right. We'll be keeping a close eye on the areas just north of Lubbock in particular. We've got some spinning in that area, but again, no tornadoes just yet. Still, if you live in Lubbock County, I'd be getting to your safe space." Haymitch snorted. If he went down into the cellar every time Caesar told him there was a little rotation in the area, he'd spend half his life down there. "The more immediate danger through most of the affected area is flash flooding. We've had unconfirmed reports of flooding on the interstate north of Odessa. We'll be bringing you more news of that as soon as –"

Haymitch's vision went white. As the lightning struck, a deafening boom shook the bottles on the shelf. The TV and lights shut off, and the hair on the back of his neck rose at the strange stillness that followed. It had been pouring down just a second or two prior, and the wind had been blowing so hard that the rain fell side to side rather than straight down, but now that seemed nothing more than a memory. He moved to stare out the window. The sky was a sickening green, a color he had never seen before.

Then, the sirens begin to wail, shrill and piercingly loud. He clapped his hands over his ears as he ran for the cellar. Haymitch's heart pounded against his chest as he opened the door and hurried downstairs, but he paused a step away from the bottom. Effie.

He sprinted back up and out into the storm. A deep roar reverberated through the town, and muddy water as high as his ankles flooded the street. A gust of wind nearly knocked him down, but Haymitch just turned up the collar of his jacket and kept running. He couldn't stop, not now, not when he was so close.

Thank God she hadn't locked the door. "Effie! Effie, where are you?"

"In here!"

It wasn't the clearest set of directions, but he followed the sound of her voice to the first guest room. She sat in the middle of the room, hands over her head, the way he had seen in movies about earthquakes. One problem: this wasn't a fucking earthquake. "You got a cellar?"

"A what?"

"A – never mind." He grabbed her and ran towards the suite's bathroom. Toilet, bathtub, sink, pretty standard fare here. "In the tub." She got in without question, and he quickly followed, the roar growing all the while, threatening to consume him. Effie pressed herself against his side, and he wrapped an arm around her waist. "Get down. Keep your head inside the tub."

He tried to lean forward, but then the noise got louder, and Effie was grabbing him and making him lie down next to her, and he couldn't do anything but hold her close as the world blasted itself to pieces around them. Something heavy dragged along his back. Glass shattered. Walls twisted and groaned and snapped. He kept his hand on her cheek through the whole thing, and she kept her face buried in his chest. It didn't make any sense that they would be any safer that way, but that's sure how it felt.

The twister managed to tear up all of Main Street. Not a single building was standing. It was strange, seeing the town he had known his entire life reduced to a few stairwells, bathrooms, and walls that had been lucky enough to escape the destruction.

They had been lucky too. Both had a few scrapes and bruises, and though he'd done his best to clean her off, bits of plaster still stuck to Effie's hair, but they had managed to emerge from that ridiculous claw-footed bathtub only a little worse for wear. It could have been worse, a lot worse. They had already taken one body out of the barber shop, and Sae had been bleeding from a head wound when they loaded her onto the ambulance. The emergency crews had told him and Effie that they had things under control and not to touch anything. That left them with nothing to do but stand around and think. In times like this, thinking never took you anywhere good.

"That was a stupid thing you did," Effie said as they watched the firefighters dig through the remains of the barber shop.

"Yup."

She turned to him. Through the miracles of hairspray and whatever other witchcraft she used, her curls had remained perfectly in place through the events of the last couple hours. The woman had gone through a tornado, and she still looked more put together than anyone else in town. It wasn't natural. "Why'd you do it?"

He shrugged. "Well, you've got a tab with me, and if you died, I wasn't gonna get paid."

"You're impossible." Effie surprised him by kissing his cheek. "Thank you."

"Anytime, sweetheart."