“You want to get food?” She wrinkles her nose. Eyebrows pulled tight, she lifts her chin to look at me. “Together?”
“I was going to ask Ernie and Dave, but you’re a good runner-up.” I laugh when she grabs a pair of rolled-up socks and launches them at my head. “C’mon. I’m starving, and I’m sure you are too. I’m going to drive myself to a restaurant to get dinner. If you want to join, I’ll keep the seat on the other side of the booth open. It’s forty-five minutes, not a marriage proposal. You can handle that, can’t you?”
Quincy hesitates. “Is anything open?”
I’m glad to have a task. Something to focus on besides her, because there’s a mark on her forehead from the helmet I want to rub away with my thumb. A rogue piece of hair I want to tuck behind her ear.
I busy myself with searching on my phone for something specific, and I smile when I find what I’m looking for. I plug in the address to my GPS and glance her way.
“Do you trust me?” I ask.
“Do I have a choice?”
“You always have a choice.”
“Three weeks ago, I might’ve said no.” A long pause. The husk of a soft laugh. “Tonight? The answer is yes. I do trust you.”
That makes me the happiest motherfucker in any zip code, and I stomp down on the pride zipping up my spine.
“Do you want to take one car or two? The place we’re going is in the opposite direction from the highway, so you’d have to circle back anyway,” I say.
“One car is fine. Can you drive?”
“’Course.” I spin my keys. “I promise to return you when we’re finished.”
“In one piece?”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
Her laugh is louder now. We pile into the rental car I leased for the summer and head south, making small talk on the way. I navigate around downed branches and the occasional stoplight without power, but damage appears minimal. There’s no major flooding, and that’s a good sign for our first landfall of the season.
Quincy asks for the name of the best pizza joint in Manhattan. I make her tell me the spring specials at my favorite local restaurant I missed out on. She gives me shit when she finds out my building has a doorman, and I hand over my phone so she can send the photos I took of her to herself.
Our conversation halts when we pass a car with a tree on the hood and a live power line sitting dangerously close to a house.
“I hope no one is using their generators inside.” She presses her nose against the window, breath fogging up the glass. Every time I glance over, her bottom lip is caught between her teeth. She’s scanning the streets like she’s checking to make sure no one out there needs help, and there’s a sharp and jagged ache behind my ribs. “I try to remind people about carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“Fear makes folks do things they wouldn’t normally do. It makes them forget things too.”
“Truth or Dare, Dunn?” she asks, and I grin.
“Truth, Monroe.”
“What’s the worst natural disaster you’ve covered?”
“Wow.” I blow out a breath. “That’s a hard question. There was heavy flooding in Tennessee a couple years ago. I was tracking the system in the days leading up to it, and ABC decided to send me out there. It was …” I shake my head. “I’ve never seen that kindof devastation before. Towns were there, then they weren’t. The search and rescue was the worst part.”
“I’m sorry.” Quincy reaches over, a hand on my forearm. It’s a good thing I’m sticking to well under the speed limit. I almost jerk the wheel sharply to the right at the contact. “I’m sure that wasn’t easy.”
“I’ve seen shit. I know you have too. But finding teddy bears washed up on the banks of the river? Whole houses moving miles downstream? That shit fucking rocks your world.” I take a second to push the images out of my mind. It’s not something I want to linger on. “People assume we become desensitized to destruction because we cover it so frequently. Maybe some meteorologists and reporters do, but it’s hard as hell for me. Every time I share a death toll number from an earthquake or a mudslide or a tornado that plows through the Great Plains in the middle of the night, it makes me sick. One person. Thirty people. Doesn’t matter. It all hurts.”
“I haven’t been around much postdisaster relief efforts. I’m not sure I’d be able to handle it. Sometimes it feels like I care about things too much. Like I’m too soft for all of this.” She pulls her palm off my arm, gesturing at the windshield. “But it’s important to tell these stories, isn’t it? So people remember why we do what we do.”
“Yeah.” My throat is scratchy when I swallow. “What about you? What’s the worst natural disaster you’ve seen?”
“A Category 3 hurricane two summers ago. An entire mobile home park was wiped out.”
“Jesus.” I stare out at the road, worn out in a way that could have me sleeping for fifteen hours. I’m easing down from the adrenaline of the storm, and it’s the best kind of tired. Heavy eyes, exhausted limbs. “Every time I get back from a natural disaster event—whether it’s a blizzard, forest fires, dust storms—”
