Such a Rush

I laughed, trying not to sound nervous. I didn’t want to kiss Alec anywhere, but especially not at my door. “Can we stay in the car for a minute instead? The dog will calm down eventually. If we’re standing outside, he won’t.”

“Okay.” Alec parked in the dirt clearing and turned off the engine. Into that silence, the noise of the trailer park flowed: the pit bull having a fit at the end of his chain, the wind tossing the trees and making the joints of the metal trailers screech, a couple standing in the road and cursing at each other. Staying in the car parked in the dirt yard was awkward. I should have told Alec to come inside the trailer. But I wasn’t going to do that.

He cleared his throat. “I wanted to ask you something.”

Uh-oh. Every time Alec had asked me something tonight, I’d wished he hadn’t.

But I said, “Okay,” and gri

“It seems like you have two modes,” he said. “One is a giggly, flirty mode. The other is a no-nonsense pilot mode. They never mix or cross. You’re like two different people. Did you know you do that?”

My heart raced. I tried to talk myself down from panic. Alec hadn’t figured out I was putting on an act with him. He’d known me for a long time and had observed me acting different ways over the course of years.

I shook my head no. “I’ve been told that I do that, though.” I glanced slyly over at him. “Which one am I doing now?”

“Flirty mode.”

“Which one do you like better?”

“Definitely flirty mode.” He gri

The lead-up was so sweet and sexy. If I’d liked him romantically at all, I would have enjoyed his kiss. But as it was, the only thing good I could say about it was that it was fifty percent shorter than his kiss the night before.

He gave me one more peck on the lips and backed away. “Anyway, here’s the reason I asked about your modes.”

If I’d known he wanted to have an actual conversation, I would have drawn the kiss out longer.

“I have trouble reading you sometimes,” he said. “You have these two personalities. I never know which one I’ll be talking to. They get offended at different things. Then, at the café, you told us why you want to fly, and that was so…”

He looked out the windshield at the palm trees swaying violently in the wind.

“Honest. Finally. Maybe for the first time ever.” He looked straight at me.

I shrank back.

“I jumped on that and asked you about your dad,” he said. “And then, when you got mad… I’m really sorry about that. I thought about it later and realized that wasn’t a question I should ever have asked anyone. It’s just that you fooled me, because flirty Leah wouldn’t have minded. Anyone can ask her anything. No-nonsense Leah minded. A lot.”

I laughed. “She did.”

“Forgive me.”

“I forgive you.”

I hoped all this forgiveness would equal a good-bye, but he still walked me to the door and gave me another kiss. A short one, and then I was inside my trailer that smelled like a basement. I removed my slutty makeup and clothes and cuddled in bed to read myself to sleep, listening to the clock-radio yammer about a tornado one county south.

I knew from watching TV during tornado warnings in the past, back in the heady, luxurious days of owning a television, that the meteorologists liked to say, “If you’re in a trailer home, get to your safe place.” Like there was a safe place for me. What was I supposed to do without a car, go outside and lie in a wet ditch, waiting for the pit bull to jerk out of his collar and tear me to shreds? This time I even turned off the radio. Why bother? A tornado probably wasn’t going to hit me. And if it did, I was going to die. Hunkering next to the toilet wasn’t going to change that when my trailer home wrapped around a tree with me inside it.

Most of my life was a huge effort to look like everybody else. Occasionally I realized there was no point in making the effort, and there was a certain delicious luxury in giving up entirely. This was one of those times, I decided, as the tornado sirens woke me. They were spaced throughout the town, but of course the city pla

People who lived in houses said the noise of the rain was soothing. In South Carolina in the springtime, the rain pounded so hard it hurt. The sound on the metal roof of a trailer was a special kind of torture. The additional sound of a train, the tornado noise people talked about, would have given me such a rush churning through the forest.

I jerked up to sitting at a noise that trumped even the tornado siren and split the drum of the rain. Someone was pounding at the door.

I stumbled through the dark trailer, heart thumping, certain someone had gotten caught in the storm and was coming to me for shelter. Who? Nobody would come to me for help. Maybe my mom’s boyfriend, Roger, had dropped her off and she had lost her key. Or Mark was using the cover of the storm to trick himself inside. My instincts told me to pull more clothes over my tank top and boxers I’d been sleeping in, but I couldn’t spare the time if someone was in trouble.

“Who is it?” I shouted.

“Grayson!” He pounded the door again, a single blow that shook the metal walls. I jumped backward in surprise, then moved forward to jerk the door open.

He was soaked, his blond hair dark, rivulets of water streaming down his cheeks, his T-shirt plastered against his chest.

“Come on.” I put out one hand to drag him inside. There was an exception to my nobody-comes-in-my-trailer rule, apparently.

He hung back. “I’m already wet. There’s a tornado at the edge of the county. Get your stuff and let’s go.”

I ran back to my bedroom, able to navigate the dark much better now that it mattered. Saving myself from a tornado hadn’t been important. Now that Grayson was involved, the thought of the freight train tearing up the palm trees on its way straight for us made me sob. I shoved my feet into my flip-flops, grabbed my purse, and ran. I paused beside Grayson on the cement-block stairs long enough to lock the door. In the five seconds this took, I was already as wet as him. We jogged down the steps and through the yard, a floodplain of mud, to his truck.

The inside of the cab was a relief from the rain, but drops pounded the roof. As he ripped onto the gravel road, the raindrops turned to white streaks in the headlights. He yelled above the noise, “I called Alec to make sure he knew about the tornado. I asked him if he was with you, and he said no. I’d hoped you’d still be out with him.”

“No,” I yelled back, “he’s a perfect gentleman.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

I wondered what Grayson meant by this. He wanted Alec to keep me out all night until the public places closed and there was nothing left to do but go somewhere private and paw each other? Did he really intend me to do that with Alec, knowing I wasn’t into him?

The way Grayson was looking at me, it seemed that’s exactly what he intended me to do. As he paused at the highway, he glanced at me with a dark expression. Suddenly conscious of the soaked boxers and tank top I wore, I wanted to cross my arms over my chest, but I wasn’t going to let him intimidate me.

Finally he said, “It sounded like Alec was still out, though. Do you know where he went?”

“No.”

“And he didn’t sound particularly concerned about you. He told me he’d dropped you off and that you would hear the tornado siren and you’d be okay.”