Such a Rush(53)
Author: Jennifer Echols

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 br**sts. 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.”