She hums as I speak, explaining the funnel as it descends from the sky, spinning the clouds above us into a large twister. I can see her in the rear-view mirror, listening with rapt attention, her head ticking to the side each time she hears something that strikes her as particularly interesting.
We're a safe enough distance from the brunt of the storm, but the roar of the wind is still impressive. Our monitors are attuned to the storm so we can get a reading before the tornado is over.
“Looks like an F3,” Beck mutters. I glance at the systems, pulling my eyes from the storm briefly to see what he's looking at. I give him a nod before returning to the storm, and he goes back to studying the technical side of things. I don't drive towards danger to stare at monitors. I want to see the storm and breathe in the chaos.
“See how it's losing strength?” I call to Hayden in the backseat. “It'll begin receding back into the clouds now, but there's still a lot of momentum in the sky. We may see a second funnel.”
“The clouds are still rotating,” she says. If I didn't have a ride along I'd get out at this point, but girly sounds interested enough that she might follow. Drunks and tornadoes usually spell disaster, and she was already pretty unbalanced when I put her in my truck.
“There's a break,” I say then, and the funnel widens instead of tightening into a coil. The greenish tint to the sky is dissipated, and we're no longer being attacked by rain. The wild wind continues whipping debris, dirt and weeds around, but the violence from above doesn't return.
A few moments later, the funnel blows apart. Instead of cycling downward once more before it separates, the tension of the storm breaking as the twister subsides. I stare at the clouds suspiciously. Just because the main tornado is dispersed doesn't mean the storm is over. Plenty of storms produce more than one tornado at a time.
“Wow,” Hayden says from the back, and I look over my shoulder at her. Instead of the fear I'm used to finding on pedestrians who stumbled their way into storms, she looks enchanted. “Amazing.”
I shoot a smirk to Beck.Amazingis the kind of word I would use, but others don't feel as positively about tornados. This one touched down in someone's farmland, and although I see a lot of hay I don't see any structural damage. At least not from where we are. There might be some property destruction closer to the thick of the storm.
With the tornado finished for now, I’m comfortable getting out of the truck and stretching. Storm chasing makes me tense but the adrenaline rush usually puts me in a fantastic mood. Beck taps a few things on the screen to save our data; we’ll playback what the camera caught later. Popping open the door, I eye the passenger behind me. Hayden is still transfixed by the view. “Coming, girly?”
I don’t expect her to be totally sober, but seeing a tornado this close has to jar her senses at least a little. I lift her door and reachtoward the harness, her eyes drooping a bit when my hand slides between her breasts. My touch lingers as I study her, wondering what’s going through her head.
I have a lot of questions about this girl. Starting with why she was in the trunk to begin with. She could be giving us the full story but… it bothers me. It’s a trunk—not the bed of a pickup or the back of an SUV. I’m pretty sure she could still breathe in there; people don’t normally die being locked inside for a short time. But the real question is, how long was she in there?
Instead of asking her, I undo the clip and remove my hand, turning to gesture to the space behind us. “Stretch your legs. It’s a long drive back.”
She narrows her eyes, grasping my hand after a long pause. Without the storm and occasional lightning, its pitch black out. The clouds above shut out any starlight. We have the interior lights and headlights from the trucks but that’s all there is out here to help us see. She wraps her arms around herself, tilting her chin as she studies me.
“Who’s she?” Whitney asks, cutting through anything I might say next. I turn to glare at her, ignoring the annoyance in her voice. The lights from the trucks reflect across Whitney’s face, and she looks like she’s fuming. She jumps straight into her usual attitude, giving us that look I’ve seen more times than I can count. Whitney’s the only woman on our team, and she likes to keep it that way. In her mind, we’re her guys—like she’s got some kind of claim on the group. But the truth is, none of us really see it like that.
Well, maybe Beck, but he has an ulterior motive. I glare at her and she copies the look. We’re going to get into an argument before the storm officially dies.
“Whitney, chill,” Beck tells her, speaking before I do. “Focus.”
“I am focused,” she huffs. “The storm’s over anyway. I’m asking who she is—”
“And did I actually see you guys pull her out of the trunk of a car?” Dex continues, moving to stand beside Whitney as he looks between the two of us. Hayden tilts her head up curiously at him, peering around at the group with questioning eyes. She’s a little off, but I haven’t really read into it that much.
Before I can distract them, Hayden speaks up. “We were just… partying. It was supposed to be fun. Not dangerous. Or mean. They just…”
“Forgot you?” Dex asks, lifting his brows.
Hayden blushes, looking around before dropping her gaze. “Well, yeah. They don’t really understand the weather. I think the storm coming spooked them.”
“So you didn’t mind getting in the trunk?” I press.
She hums instead of responding. It might irk me, but it’s not really any of our business, either. The seconds drag on as she avoids a response, and I clear my throat in the awkward silence.
“Alright,” Drew says after a moment, glancing at Whitney who stands at his side. He’s too far in the shadows to make out what the hell he’s thinking. “Wild child. I dig it.”
I catch her blush in the glare of the headlights. “Well, there wasn’t enough room. I wanted to go so Scott pushed me in.”
I frown, grabbing her shoulder. The wind keeps blowing, but I can feel it start to settle around us. “He pushed you in?”
Hayden peers up at me, those pretty blue eyes darkening with the sky. “Sort of. I agreed to be the most backseat driver.”
The most backseat driver.I shoot Beck a look over her head. She’s still decently drunk then. “Uh huh. Do we need to—”
She pushes away from me all of a sudden, hurrying to the field past the bumpers of our trucks. Now that it’s getting quiet, it’s easy to hear her vomiting into the grass. I’m grateful that she didn’t lose her stomach earlier in the truck.
