“Ready?” I ask tightly.
“Sure,” he says carefully. On the way out, he reaches past me to push open the door, close enough that I feel the warmth of his hand on my back, but it’s gone just as quickly, and then we’re outside and running for the car.
Chapter 6: Logan
First year of residency, my father pulled strings to get me into the OR for a heart transplant. I was there to observe—I didn’t touch anything—but back then I was arrogant enough that the nepotism of my presence in that room didn’t even bother me.
The patient had an LVAD. Dr. Singh led, and I watched her work through the scar tissue around the old hardware before she even got to the donor heart. It was a fifteen-hour surgery, and I was so rigid with attention the whole time that when we finally scrubbed out, my body ached like it had been hit by a car, and I hadn’t even done anything.
That’s a little like how I feel right now.
Rose hasn’t said much, aside from perfunctory answers when I ask her something. I’ve kept the radio off—she said the headache is gone, but I don’t want to chance it, and it would be hard to hear each other with the rain like this, anyway. I can barely see fifty feet ahead of us, and it’s only getting worse. We are, I’m fairly certain, driving directly into the hurricane.
Pearl flipped when she found out I wasn’t on the plane—that I was driving her sister to the wedding instead. We texted back and forth a bit. I tried to make a joke about Rose to keep things light. She kept apologizing over and over, hating that I had tospend this much time with her sister, despite my reassurances that it was fine.
And it is fine. Or it was until I pushed Rose about Easton. I’m not sure what I expected, but whatever goodwill we’d managed to build evaporated. I keep turning it over. One perspective, in Pearl’s defense, is that Rose knew what Easton meant to Pearl, but kept him around anyway. It’s not Easton’s fault he wasn’t attracted to her, but Pearl feels everything so deeply, it would have cost them nothing to be a little gentler with her feelings.
But Pearl told me Rose and Easton were a couple—I’m sure of it. If he’s gay, there’s not a lot of gray area there. It’s hard to reconcile such a blatant lie with who I know Pearl to be.
Honestly, I don’t know what to think. What I do know is that Rose is pissed at me, and it’s only making me more tense and stressed.
“We can’t keep going like this,” she says. Her voice is low and a little raspy, and something about the way it cuts through the sound of the rain makes it hard to think straight. I have to remind myself she’s talking about the weather. I glance at the GPS. We’ve added nearly three hours to the trip because of the rain.
“It’s barely two. We still have half a day of driving—I want to make a dent in it while we still can.”
“Logan. There are cars pulled over everywhere. The storm isn’t getting any better.”
She’s right. The sky has gone a flat, dark gray, and the wipers are barely keeping up. The wind isn’t too bad yet, but we’re deep in rural North Carolina, barely past the state line, and the further we push into these counties, the fewer options we’ll have if it gets worse.
I keep driving. Then a gust hits, and the whole car rocks sideways.
“Logan,” Rose starts. Her voice cracks slightly.
I don’t reply. I navigate around a massive pond that has formed along the shoulder. Another gust hits and the car shudders, and when I glance over at Rose, her face has gone pale. Fuck. After what happened yesterday, and now this. No wonder she’s scared.
“Okay. Next stop that’s more than a gas station, we’ll pull over.”
The relief in her voice when she says “thank you” is hard to sit with. I grunt back. At this point, I don’t care about making the wedding. I just want out of this car. Off this trip. Away from Rose.
Stuffed in this car together, all I can smell is her earthy cinnamon scent, blending with the petrichor, rain and wet asphalt. Every small shift she makes in the passenger seat registers along my skin like a static charge.
“There!” Rose points, and two miles ahead, a sign for a rest stop and lodgings. I exhale—then a gust hits so hard that the truck in front of us lurches sideways across the lane. I jerk the wheel. The truck isn’t correcting. It’s hydroplaning, fishtailing, and I wrench us left to get clear, but there’s nowhere to go.
Rose grabs the oh-shit handle. Her other hand finds the dash. The truck spins a full 180, and for one suspended second it’s coming straight at us, growing in the windshield, and I have no room and can’t brake and there is nothing to do but hold the wheel and watch. Panic tremors through me. This is it.
Then the driver catches it. The truck sputters on its last spin, then rockets past us and disappears into the rain.
I’ve slowed enough to come to a full stop on the side of the road.
The exit is just ahead. Neither of us says anything. I continue, then pull off the highway and follow the signs for the motel, not giving a shit what it entails, just needing to get out of this fucking car.
The Audi is brand new, but when I finally pull into the parking lot and kill the engine, I swear I feel it shudder and die beneath us, like it’s been running on adrenaline and can’t anymore.
Neither of us moves. We stare out the windshield at the rain sheeting down the glass.
“Flying might’ve actually been safer,” I mutter.
Rose makes a sound—half gasp, half laugh—and slaps my arm with the back of her hand, and then we’re both laughing.
