Текст книги "Such a Rush"

Автор книги: Jennifer Echols

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

But I said, “Okay,” and grinned at him, like if I grinned hard enough, the hard ball of dread in my stomach would dissolve. I hoped he didn’t ask to get serious with me, physically or emotionally, because I didn’t know what I would do if that happened.

“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 grinned at me. “Come here.”

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 planners put one smack in the middle of the trailer park, because people out here wouldn’t complain when it rang in our heads, much as we didn’t officially complain about the airplanes screaming overhead. I lay in bed, holding on to either edge of the mattress. The wind shook a palm frond in front of the streetlight streaming through the window.

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.”

“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 funnel attached to a tube. You pour the ashes into the funnel and put the end of the tube out the window. It’s on one of the shelves in the back of the hangar. I can show you.”

“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.

After the silence had stretched, though, with the rain beating on the door again like someone knocking and urging me to go on, I asked him, “How did you figure all this stuff out for the business?”

“It’s amazing what you can do when you actually do it. If you act like you can’t take care of yourself, someone will step in and take care of you. Like my dad and Jake used to do for me, and like I’m doing for Alec now. If you act like you don’t need help, nobody will mess with you. I don’t need to tell you, though. You’re the queen of that.”

I laughed bitterly, thinking of Molly dragging me to Francie’s party. “Grayson, people do mess with me. Taking care of yourself makes you a target. And as Molly so kindly pointed out at dinner, the people who should have taken care of me never have, because nobody gives a shit.”

“I do.”

My body lit on fire with a new wave of the awareness I’d felt since I’d been here. But Grayson was manipulating me. Rolling on my back and staring up at the exposed pipes in the ceiling, I murmured, “You have a funny way of showing it.”

He was moving by the dark wall. For a second I thought I’d made him mad, and he would stomp out into the storm.

But then he was kneeling beside me, one hand very close to me on the cot. “Leah, I’m sorry about tonight with Mark. Patrick ran into the house to tell me Mark had grabbed you. I was afraid he’d hurt you. I may have overreacted, but”—he opened his hands, giving up—“that’s just what I do sometimes. You can’t hang out with Mark, okay? You’ll be really sorry.”

“Right,” I grumbled. “You care about me so much that you shove me toward your brother.”

Grayson sighed in frustration. “That’s for his own good. All of this is for him.”

“Tell me why,” I insisted.

“I can’t.” Grayson focused on me and his face was full of concern. “If I told you, you’d change the way you act around him, and he would know it was all for show.”

“Is he sick?” I guessed, hoping not. That would be too much for both of them to take.

“No!” Grayson said so vehemently that I believed him. “He just needs some help remembering that he’s human. I guess we all do.” He moved his hand from the side of the cot to my cheek.

Our gazes locked. Electricity formed in my cheek and zinged straight down, through my whole body.

He blinked slowly. Up close, his face was an elongated version of Alec’s. His long, blond lashes were the same. But his eyes were completely different from Alec’s innocent blue ones. They were stormy gray, swirling with heat.

Suddenly I knew why he’d been hiding behind his shades or looking down at his phone whenever I was around. Why he’d taken potshots at me yesterday for flirting with Alec, even though he was the one making me do it. He couldn’t have me. That would ruin his plans for me and Alec. But he wanted me.

We paused there on the edge. His thumb stroked my jawbone as he leaned closer. I closed my eyes.

And then we were kissing, panting, kissing again, his lips hard on mine, his hand sliding down my bare skin underneath the blanket.

Wow. Earlier that night and the night before, kissing Alec would have been nice if not for all the baggage with it. It felt good, and he acted like a gentleman. Grayson did not act like a gentleman at all. Kissing him was an adventure, a journey, a battle, every movement of his lips and hands sparking new explosions all over me.

“Oh,” he said, drawing back. Then he changed his mind and kissed me again. His hand cupped my bare breast, his thumb rubbed across my nipple, and I was not going to tell him no. I didn’t need to. He would make a fist and exercise the impulse control he’d been taught in five, four, three, two, one.

He broke the kiss and sat back on his heels. His hand moved from my breast to the center of my chest, over my heart. “Leah.” He was breathing hard. “I’m sorry. I do care about you. Please know that. I just… I don’t know what to say.”

“Tell me I don’t have to date Alec anymore.”

“What?” His face hardened against me, and he withdrew his hand. “No.”

“Tell me why I have to date Alec.”

“No.”

“Then fuck off.” Hugging the blanket tightly around me, I rolled over with my back to him.

Much later I woke again and sat up suddenly, alarmed at the weight on my chest. The lights were still off, but I could see in the dim glow through the cellar window that both blankets covered me. Grayson lay sprawled across the cement floor with no blanket at all, his wet T-shirt balled under his head for a pillow. I watched his smooth, muscled chest rise and fall for a few peaceful breaths. Then I lay back down.

“Leah,” he whispered. “Hey. Wake up.”

As I opened my eyes, he was moving his hand away. My scalp tingled like he’d been stroking my hair.

“Get dressed,” he said. “I’m waiting outside for you in the truck.” He climbed the stairs in his damp clothes and disappeared through the door.

The light was back on. I slipped my own cold clothes on, wishing for the warm blankets, and followed him up the stairs. Outside it was still night. The rain had moved away, leaving a heavy white mist in its place. The airport looked ghostly and abandoned but intact. I wondered why Grayson had woken me.

“What’s the matter?” I asked as I hopped up into his truck. “Did the tornado touch down?”

“Not around here,” he said. “A couple of people were killed in a trailer park a few counties west of here.”

Nothing unusual. A chill passed through me.

“But the storms are gone,” he said, “so I’m taking you home.”

“Couldn’t you let me sleep through the night and then walk home?” I grumbled.

“No, Alec might get here early in the morning and see you.”

“Why couldn’t you tell him the truth? That you didn’t want your employee to die, so you brought me into the storm cellar and slept on the floor across the room from me, and we made out for a few minutes but didn’t do it?”

The truck bumped from the highway to the gravel road through the trailer park. He said quietly, “It would look like we did it.” Gravel crunched under the tires as he stopped the truck in front of my trailer. “If I told him about it, he would figure out that I wanted to. He knows me pretty well.”

Though my fingers and toes were frozen, my blood heated as he whispered this.

He sighed, dismissing the thought, back to business. “Sleep late tomorrow if you need to. I’ll make up an excuse to tell Alec. Or take a nap on break. What matters most is other people—” He touched his thumb.

“Then me, then the airplane, then the banner. I know.” I jumped down from the truck and crossed the dirt yard, unhealthily pissed that every time Grayson and I were about to make an actual connection, he brought up business. Or Alec. They were one and the same for him.

I tripped over the edge of a miniature canyon the rain had carved into the dirt. That was the only difference the storms had made. In Grayson’s headlights, the trailer shone dully. Like a cockroach after a nuclear war, it would still be here when we all were dead.