Page 26 of Such a Rush

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 f**k 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.

fourteen

“Is he really asleep?” I called to Alec, just loud enough to be heard over the drone of the fans in the hangar.

We both sat in lawn chairs. I’d just started lunch, Alec was finishing his, and Molly was outside, getting his next banner ready. I’d thought Molly would make my job flying for Grayson more fun and less awkward. She’d said she was here to protect me. Yet because of the way our meals and breaks fell, I hardly saw her. When we did speak, she acted funny, like there was something wrong between us.

Or maybe that was me, still miffed about Francie’s party last night.

Grayson lay on the couch in front of Alec and me, obviously unconcerned about its dust issues. He’d been talking to us about the turbulence we’d all felt that morning now that the days were getting warmer and pockets of hot air rose from the beach. He’d closed his eyes, but he kept responding to everything Alec and I said… more and more slowly… and now he looked like he had in the basement last night, his face at peace, his long body strangely relaxed.

Alec nodded. “He spent the whole night here last night, watching over the airplanes. In the one-in-a-million event that a tornado did touch down here, what was he going do? Hold on to one wing of each Piper to keep them from blowing away?”

Afraid to admit I’d asked Grayson the same thing last night, I shrugged. Grayson’s vigil had nothing to do with the airplanes themselves. It had to do with worry, responsibility, helplessness, and the need to do something, I thought. And it had a little bit to do with me.

Alec stood and threw his trash in the can. “I’ll see if Molly needs help, and then I’m flying. Don’t wake Grayson up, even if it’s time for you to fly, okay? Just let him sleep. And if he jumps down your throat later, tell him I told you so.” He crossed behind me and squeezed my shoulder.

I nodded, still watching Grayson. Alec disappeared into the hot afternoon. Out on the runway, Mr. Simon’s Stearman biplane passed in front of the opening of the hangar. One of his employees was taking a tourist for a ride instead of Mark taking me. The distant roar echoed around the metal walls and mixed with the drone of the fans, hum upon hum. Grayson didn’t stir. I took another bite of my sandwich as I examined him.

One long leg extended off the edge of the couch, past the armrest. The other leg was folded under him. His arms were folded across his chest too, hugging himself. His face settled to one side, toward me, his features softened by sleep, his blond lashes long against his cheeks. His shaggy curls peeked from behind his head on the sofa cushions. In that moment I saw him differently: not as an American boy with a tenuous grip on the family business and his own sanity, but as a British teenager crashing after a night on the town in London, listening to some strange pop music, wearing the straw cowboy hat for offbeat fashion rather than to keep the glare of the sun out of his eyes. Tall as he was, with a long nose and elegant hands despite the engine grease that usually streaked them, he would make a good Brit.

I felt like a voyeur, watching him sleep as I ate my sandwich, as if he were a movie for my entertainment while I munched popcorn. He’d watched me sleep the night before, I reasoned, so I didn’t owe him this sort of privacy.

I finished my lunch and dumped my own trash in the can. Instead of walking outside to my plane, though, I sat back down in my chair, a few feet from Grayson. I didn’t think he needed protecting, exactly. Nobody would come into this hangar to attack him, not even Mark, while his uncle kept him busy. And Alec was right: I shouldn’t wake Grayson. He would be angry that we hadn’t woken him. Alec and I would argue that if he was tired enough to need a nap in the middle of the day, he was too tired to fly until he caught up on sleep.

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