Chapter 9
Cade
She let me have it.
I listened, content to sit back into the arm of the couch and watch her talk with her hands, gesturing at nothing. Her frustrations about her teacher and friends were all things I could relate to. I’d had some a-hole teachers, and I’d also been involved with mutinous friends who turned on me. Though, if I were being fair, they probably saw me as the mutineer, and technically that was accurate.
The part I didn’t like, the part that made anger climb my spine like a knotted rope, was that her friends had ditched her because of her ex. I hated that guy. I hated more the way she talked about him with a forlorn look in her eyes. I hoped it wasn’t because she was still in love with him. She definitely had been hurt by him. The sting of it showed in her slumped posture when she brought him up.
“Every time I see him, I’m reminded I wasn’t good enough to keep him, you know?” She asked that question to her lap, shoulders curled. Then she snapped her gaze to mine, eyes going wide. Pretty sure she hadn’t meant to say that aloud. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go into the Tony stuff. I guess I was on a roll.”
Spunky Tasha looked uncharacteristically fragile, and I was so unused to that look on her, I lifted my hand and brushed her jaw with the backs of my fingers. Her eyes closed and she blew a soft breath into my face. She smelled like peppermint candy and beer.
I leaned in for a taste, and she had to have felt the cushion between us depress, but Tasha kept her eyes closed. Mine were open and watching as the beautiful girl on my couch leaned closer to me. She wanted me as much as I wanted her. It was a heady realization.
Our lips touched, and just as my hand came up to cradle her head—just before I slid my tongue along hers—a high-pitched wail pierced the air.
Siren.
She jerked away and I blinked, dazed, as my brain chugged into gear.
Eyes wide, she gripped my arm. “Is that the tornado siren?”
Yup. It was.
Outside the kitchen window, the wind whipped leaves and rain against the glass. Tasha shook, her hand around my arm tightening as a small, helpless sound left her throat. Another instinct flooded me. This one, to protect her.
I snatched her pack, knowing she’d worry about it if I didn’t, and clasped her hand as I led her out of the room. She held on to me while I navigated the basement stairs. The house was a newer build, and since my father wasn’t much of a handyman, the room down here was not finished. The previous owners never bothered, and despite my mom’s—er, Joyce’s—insistence that she wanted a rec room, it hadn’t happened.
A sound like rocks pinging the siding made Tasha cling closer to me as we took the stairs down to the chillier air of the basement. In the midst of studs and shiny silver insulation, there was one furnished corner my dad had carved out for himself. After Joyce left.
I walked Tasha over to the television setup, the recliner in front of it. There was a rug, a table, and a mini fridge stocked with beer and water bottles. It was as good a setup as we could ask for in this situation. I turned on the television to find a somber weatherman pointing to a very blotchy map.
The words “tornado warning” scrolled along the bottom of the screen with a list of the affected areas. In the distance the siren continued to wail. Tasha hadn’t left my side, the shake in her arm having worked itself down her torso. I knew because her entire body was plastered to my side.
“Is that hail? Is it a tornado? Oh my God, what do we do?” Her voice was a desperate, dry chafe as her hands twisted my shirt. I curled her against me, my hand rubbing up and down her arm. She rattled, not unlike the house was doing right now.
“Shh,” I said, hoping I was soothing her. I read the scrolling information on TV. I’d heard similar warnings from this same weather guy in the past, except the warnings rarely affected our area specifically. The only reason I’d recognized the siren at all was because they tested it the first Monday of every month, which set off the neighborhood dogs—a series of howling alarms themselves.
TV guy wasn’t saying anything new. Stay away from windows, take cover in a bathroom or lower level. There wasn’t a bathroom down here, but it was plumbed for one. Figuring huddling there would be safer than standing in front of the television with basement windows behind us, I walked Tasha over to the tangle of pipes and sat, my back against the wall.
She sat down next to me, knees to her chin, arms wrapped protectively around her while her shoes tapped the floor nervously. She was still shaking like a leaf. The wind blew louder than the sirens warning Ridgeway to take cover, and a shock of alarm ran through me. This could be the real deal.
The rock-pelting sound grew louder as hail ticked the windows. That last one sounded like it cracked a pane upstairs. Tasha shrieked when an even louder thwack! shook the house, and buried her face in my T-shirt.
I held her close and rubbed her arm some more. Fuck if I knew what to do if we were Auntie Em’d to Oz, but that she trusted me to protect her gave me my first real sense of purpose in a long, long time. I was unused to the sensation of my chest filling with pride. It’d been a while since I’d done anything heroic.
Scratch that. I didn’t think I’d ever done anything heroic.
I put my lips on her hair and inhaled. She smelled great. She felt great. She felt right. I hadn’t been good to her in our recent or far-reaching past, yet here she was, in my house, relying on me to save her from the big, bad act of God raging outside.
She could be the key to saving me from the one raging within. I had no idea how to tame it, but if this moment held clues, I was less filled with fear and doubt with Tasha in my grasp.
How about that?
“H-how long will it last?” Tasha stuttered into my shirt.
Half my mouth lifted into a gentle smile, then faded. Her stutter was cute, but I didn’t want her to be afraid. I wasn’t. Not really. I had to be strong for her.