Back at the car, Alec covered my hand with his on the seat between us, not like flirting with me but like comforting a friend, and I gave him a small smile.
Grayson immersed himself in his phone all the way to the airport. We dropped him off at the hangar. He didn’t climb into his truck immediately. He unlocked the side door of the hangar.
“Is he really staying here that late to finish paperwork?” I asked Alec.
“He did last night,” Alec said. “Tonight he’s worried about the airplanes in the storms.”
On the short drive from the airport to the trailer park, I tried and failed to think of something to say. The night had been full and there was plenty to discuss, but every subject seemed touchy between Alec and me.
And I was so bone-tired. Maybe flying all day had fatigued me. Spilling my guts about my lack of a family. Unsuccessfully skirting Francie. Fighting with Mark. Nearly losing Molly. Pining after Grayson and hating myself for doing it.
“May I walk you to your door that is too an actual door?” Alec asked.
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 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.