Such a Rush

“I would have been okay.”

“Well, you and I have different definitions of okay, as we’re finding out.”

He parked the truck beside the airport office, where stairs led down to the cellar door. I’d been in the small cellar before. The airport stored old records there, and every now and then I had to dig up a hangar rental contract. A lot of people had the key—everybody who rented a large hangar, so they’d have access in case of a storm exactly like this—but the last time I’d taken a peek, the cot and blankets hadn’t been there.

“Did you bring these down?” I asked from the bottom stair as he closed the door at the top, shutting out half the noise of the rain.

He looked around from his high vantage point. “Yeah.”

“You thought ahead.” I meant this as a compliment. Mr. Hall had yelled at him countless times for not thinking ahead.

“I knew the storm was coming and I had a feeling it might blast right through here. If I’d really thought ahead, though, I would have brought you an umbrella.” His eyes drifted to my tank top, which must have been see-through. He forced his eyes away.

Now that he was being nice, I did cross my arms on my chest. “It wouldn’t have done any good with the rain blowing sideways.”

The tornado siren shut off. That didn’t mean the tornado was gone. The siren sounded only a few minutes at a time so everybody did not go insane.

He trod down the stairs in his wet flip-flops and kicked them onto the cement floor at the bottom. Shaking out one blanket from the cot and holding it between us like a wall, he said, “You can take off those wet clothes. I won’t look, promise. I know you’re cold.”

Well, I just did what he said. Why not? My teeth were chattering, I faced a long night of sleeping down here, and the blanket would be a lot more comfortable than wet cotton plastered to my skin. The flirty Leah described by Alec might have dangled her wet clothes out one side of the blanket to tempt Grayson. I was no-nonsense Leah and I had to get some sleep and fly tomorrow, assuming the airport was still here then. An airport fifty miles inland had been destroyed by a tornado last month.

I stripped off my boxers and tank top, plopped them on the floor, and took the blanket Grayson was holding up. Cocooning myself in it, I lay down on the cot, facing him.

He picked up my boxers, squeezed the water into the drain in the center of the floor, and stretched them out on the stair railing to dry. That was optimistic, because the air was cool and humid here underground, in a spring storm. He did the same with my tank top.

Then he pulled off his T-shirt. The cotton clung to the muscles of his chest and arms like it loved him and didn’t want to leave. Finally it popped off over his head. He shook his curly hair out like a dog, water spraying everywhere, droplets touching my face. He wrung out his shirt in the drain and hung it beside mine on the rail.

He glanced over at me and saw that I was watching him, waiting for him to take his shorts off.

He would not. Grabbing the second blanket, he hunched it around his shoulders and sank against the cement-block wall, staring into his phone.

“Is the tornado gone?” I asked.

“Yes. Looks like it was a circulation that never touched down, but—”

The tornado siren cranked up again, quietly at first so that it could have been mistaken for a motor humming, then escalating into a grating wail.

“—there are more behind it,” Grayson yelled.

I waited another few minutes until the siren relaxed, its voice fading until it disappeared. Then I asked, “Are you going to stay up all night?”

He looked up from his phone and shifted uncomfortably against the wall. “If I have to. Why?”

“You’ve got me down here. There’s nothing you can do about the airplanes. Why are you watching the weather? If a tornado comes through here, are you going to run out in the rain and stop it?”

A sad smile played at the corners of his mouth. “Good night, Leah.”

I snuggled down into the blanket. My head was cold because my hair was sopping wet. My feet were cold. But curled up on itself, my body at its core was warm.

I hadn’t been very aware of my body in the past few days. It was a tool to get me what I wanted. How it looked and how it performed mattered to me. How it felt did not.

Now I began to feel again. The blanket was soft against my elbows and my knees and my breasts. It was all that separated me from Grayson a few feet away, brooding into his phone, then glancing up at me with hard gray eyes.

I didn’t sleep at first. I regressed into some kind of animal state in which I wished the world away and didn’t want to be touched. I might have been able to sleep except that the unfiltered lights in the ceiling were on, or I dreamed they were, drilling into my head and prying their way behind my closed eyelids.

Then I knew I’d been asleep, because I woke with a start. Something was different in the dark room. “What happened?”

“The power went out.” Grayson was nothing but a shadow now, sitting against the wall with his long legs bent in front of him, his phone gone dark. “It flickered first. That’s probably what woke you.”

I sighed and tried to relax again into my blanket, warm with my own heat. My body still tingled with the same awareness of itself and of Grayson that I’d felt when I first lay down. I must have been dreaming about him.

“Leah,” he said out of the darkness.

“Mm,” I answered, still half-asleep, wishing his gentle voice really was pillow talk.

“Do you know how to scatter ashes over the Atlantic?”

That woke me up. He was talking about a Hall Aviation service. A lot of the people who retired in Heaven Beach wanted to be cremated and have their ashes scattered over the water by plane. It had been a surprisingly large portion of Mr. Hall’s business. I said, “Yeah.”

“Do you just dump them out the window or what?”

“No.” I didn’t laugh at this idea, because that’s what I’d thought too, before Mr. Hall showed me otherwise. “They would blow back in the window. There’s a special fu

“Thanks.”

The rain pounded on the door at the top of the stairs. When it began to fade again so we could hear each other, I ventured, “Do you need to do that for your dad’s ashes?”

“Eventually. I don’t think Alec’s ready for it yet.”

There it was again, the strange protectiveness I kept hearing in Grayson’s voice when he talked about Alec, like he was Alec’s older brother rather than his twin.

“For Jake’s ashes, then?” I prompted him.

“No. My dad suggested it, but my mom wanted Jake buried at the cemetery in Wilmington. They fought even about that.”

Now that I couldn’t see Grayson, I could sense so much more in his tone. Loss of one brother. Love for the other. Desperation to hold together what was left of his family.

Failure.

He cleared his throat. “It’s just that ASH SCATTERING OVER THE ATLANTIC is painted on the side of the Hall Aviation building.”

“True.”

“I don’t have any contracts for it right now. But I can tell from the books that Dad made a lot of money doing it. In case someone calls about it, I need to know how so I don’t look like an idiot. Any more than I already do.”

Even though I couldn’t see his face in the dark, I propped myself up on one elbow and gazed toward him. “You don’t look like an idiot, Grayson. Everybody is amazed at what you’ve done for this business.”

“Because I acted like such an idiot before,” he said softly.

I didn’t say anything. He hadn’t acted like an idiot before, just like someone who didn’t care very much. And that was no comfort when his father was dead.