Such a Rush(52)
Author: Jennifer Echols

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.