Such a Rush (18 page)

The back of the hangar was dim after the bright sunlight and the bright bathroom, and my eyes seemed to jump around in the dimness, unable to focus completely on his smooth skin, his muscled chest and arms, his compact body.

“I’m going out for a smoke,” he said. “Want one?”

I did. It would be a great way to bond with him and take another step toward him asking me out, but I couldn’t. I’d promised his dad that I would stop smoking. I
had
stopped, and I didn’t want to be tempted now, when I felt weak. “No thanks,” I croaked. “I’d better stay in here and cool down.”

He reached out and rubbed his hand up and down my bare
arm a few times, soothing. In the dim light, he was monochromatic, his skin and blond hair the same color.

I followed him into the main part of the hangar. While he kept going out the wide door to the tarmac, I stopped in front of an electric fan and let it blow on my bare stomach. The sweat underneath my bikini top turned cold.

“Good job, Leah,” Grayson called over the noise. “Nice acting.”

I was too stunned and hurt and angry to speak, but not too angry to look for him. He was in Mr. Hall’s tiny office, typing on a computer keyboard, gazing at the screen. He didn’t even care what horrified expression passed across my face.

The words
I quit
formed on my lips. Also,
You are cruel.
I took a breath to say them.

An alt-rock song, strange and tinny sounding, sang in his office. He picked up his phone and watched the screen for several seconds as if he thought it might change.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I didn’t want to care, but his face had gone white, like someone else had died.

He looked up at me in surprise. He’d forgotten I was standing there, though he’d lobbed an ugly insult at me ten seconds before. Whoever was calling owned all his attention. He shook his head almost imperceptibly—at me, maybe, but I wasn’t sure. He finally put the phone to his ear and managed a “Hi, Mom!” that sounded a lot more cheerful than he looked.

I turned my body so the fan cooled my back. My ears were out of the wind, though, so I could hear him as he said, “No, everything is good. The plan is good. He’s not making things any easier, but he’s doing what I told you he’d do.”

Nonchalantly I turned my head in the darkness so I could see Grayson in the bright office. Normally he acted comfortable with his tall body. He took up a lot of space when
standing. Sitting, he spread himself out over a chair and the surrounding area. But as he sat in the chair behind the desk in the office, he looked half his size, knees drawn close, ankles crossed on the floor, one arm hugging himself, head down and cradled in the palm that held the phone. “Alec told you that?” he asked.

I didn’t want to get in his business. The more I did, the more he was likely to get in mine, which was how I’d gotten in this mess in the first place. But I was so alarmed at how he looked that I watched him unabashedly now, waiting for a different angle so I could glean some information about what had gone so horribly wrong that he curled into a tight ball.

He glanced up at me, and I thought I was busted.

But he couldn’t see me very well, out in the dusky hangar. Almost as soon as he looked up, he looked down again, reabsorbed into the conversation, as if I weren’t there. “I’m doing everything I can. I’m doing some other things you don’t know about.”

To keep Grayson from blackmailing me, I’d been hoping for a way to blackmail him right back. Here it was. Whatever Grayson was trying to get Alec to do, their mom was in on it. I felt sure I was the part of the plan Grayson hadn’t told her about. She was a middle-class mom, after all. She’d been married to Mr. Hall once upon a time. I couldn’t imagine that she would approve of Grayson forcing me to date Alec, no matter what the reason was. All I had to do was threaten Grayson that I would tell her, just like he’d threatened to tell my mom about me.

But as I thought this through in my head, I realized there were big holes in my plan. I had no way to get to Wilmington to talk to this lady. I could steal Grayson’s phone, punch the speed-dial marked
Mom,
and call her. Then a strange girl
would be calling her to say her middle-class son had blackmailed me to date her other middle-class son, months after the deaths of their father and brother. She would call the police. When the cops cruised to my address and saw where I lived, they would arrest me for extortion. I lived in a trailer and people assumed the worst about me.

“Love you too. Bye.” He clicked off the phone and stared at it in his hand for a few moments. Glanced at his watch. Scooted back the chair with a rattle of ancient casters and walked out of the office. Stopped short when he saw me standing there.

While he was on the phone, he had forgotten
again
that I was there. He’d even forgotten about insulting me down to my very bones.

He realized I’d overheard him on the phone with his mom.

He was afraid he’d given away why he wanted me to go out with Alec.

He went back over his words, calculating whether or not he was safe.

I saw it all in his face, surprisingly easy to read when he wasn’t wearing his shades—which was probably why he wore them so much, like his whole life was a poker game and he was trying to prevent himself from telling his hand. I just wished I really had overheard something that gave away his secret. I still didn’t have a clue.

I spun on my flip-flop and headed farther into the hangar to refill my water bottle from the fountain, hoping the whole time that he wouldn’t hurl another stone at me. I wasn’t sure I could take it. Then I escaped back outside to my airplane.

Grayson had
lunch delivered to the hangar. My empty refrigerator must have given him a shock, and he wanted to make sure I didn’t faint in flight and crash his plane.
We’re not crashing any planes this week.

While we ate, I made another attempt to flirt with Alec where Grayson could see. Alec was friendly as always but hard to flirt with. I tried to talk to him about the alt-rock music I loved so much blasting from a speaker in the corner. He said it was Grayson’s. Alec tried to explain to me that he preferred country music but his player didn’t dock with the contraption they used in the hangar. Soon I would have to admit I’d never owned a contraption, a player, or a computer, and I had no idea how to download music. Grayson spent most of the hour in Mr. Hall’s office, poring over ledger books.

Late in the afternoon, I let Grayson and Alec land first, hoping they’d want to pack up for the day and get out of there, and they would hardly notice me. As I came in for my own
landing, scanning the runway, I did a double take as a figure crossed the tarmac. Mr. Hall was my first thought—the same disorienting shock I’d received that morning. Then Zeke. But Grayson had sent him home for the day after we snagged our last banners. Because I’d been thinking about Grayson and Alec, they passed through my mind. As I came closer, though, I saw it was Leon, who was manning the airport office for the week while I was flying. He held up the airport’s cell phone.

I didn’t get phone calls. My mind spun to the only possibility: my mother was in trouble. She’d gotten in trouble before. But when she did, she didn’t call me at the airport, because I couldn’t help her. She only let me know through a friend of the moment or a begrudging ex-boyfriend who stopped by the trailer that she wouldn’t be home for a few more days.

I taxied my plane to the hangar and cut the engine. I didn’t want to answer the phone. But sitting in the cockpit and hiding from the phone would be weird. I opened the door and took it. “Thanks. I’ll bring it back over,” I told Leon, who was already retreating.

“Good riddance,” he called over his shoulder, like the conversation he’d had with the person on the other end of the line had been difficult.

I glanced at the screen. A local number. “Hello?”

“What did he have to do, FedEx the phone to you?” Molly demanded. “I’ve been waiting for five hours. Jesus! Did Alec ask you out yet?”

“No,” I said, relieved the call was from Molly and nobody was in jail. “All’s well that ends well.”

“Nah, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you and Alec bring the one with a rudder up his ass, what’s his name?”

I giggled. “Grayson.”

“Right. Bring Mr. Happy and we’ll all go to the club tonight. That way, you and I will get some spring break. Grayson will see you’re dutifully trying to screw his brother. I’ll be there to chaperone and make sure nothing happens and you stay safe from these perverts.”

“Um.” It sounded good in theory. I actually felt better just thinking about leaning on Molly throughout the night. Nothing these boys threw at me could be so bad if Molly was around.

Grayson came out of the hangar then. His final flight must have been broiling. Like Alec, he’d stripped off his T-shirt. His muscles were tanned and hardened—not from working hard, but maybe from playing hard, as Mr. Hall had told me. Mountain climbing with his friends whenever he could get away. Playing basketball for his school whenever he wasn’t benched for mouthing off to the coach. His wavy blond hair blazed almost white in the bright sunlight, darker around his ears where it was wet with sweat and kinking into tighter curls.

He’d forgotten to put his shades back on when he came outside, so he squinted almost blindly at me and tripped over something as he made his way to my airplane. Strange that I felt I was suddenly seeing him more clearly than I ever had, now that he couldn’t see me at all. Blinking, he opened the cockpit door, handed me something, closed the door, and headed for the hangar. His skin shone with sweat.

“Um,” I said into the phone again. A catastrophic vision formed in my mind of Grayson and Molly at the club, hooking up.

But Molly was having a little fun and getting me out of a tight spot, as usual. She had no designs on Grayson.

Of course, she had not seen him. Yet.

“Um.”

“So you’ve said,” she broke into my thoughts. “Just vote yes. Isn’t this better than going out with Alec alone, if he ever asks you? What if he’s a horndog? He already thinks you’re the airport whore, so where does that leave you? Flat on your back, missy.”

I laughed then. Maybe this date would work out after all. It was hard to stay depressed about my situation while talking with Molly, who couldn’t imagine having problems like mine. “Yes. I don’t know how to introduce this date idea to these boys, though.”

“Give the phone to the sane one. Alec. I’ll take care of it. I’ll convince him I’m a vivacious airhead and he has to follow along with my schemes.”

“Don’t get too far out of your comfort zone.”

“Ha.”

“And listen,” I said. “You can’t let on to Grayson that you know what he’s making me do. He is dead serious about this shit. I respect his ability to screw me over.”

“Roger that.”

“Hold on.” I hopped out of the cockpit and followed Grayson across the strip of white sunlight, into the shadowy hangar. I couldn’t see, but I heard water running. The farther I walked into the hangar, the more clearly I saw Alec bent over the industrial sink, pouring water over his head with a hose. “Alec?”

“Hey.” He felt around for a nearby towel until I handed it to him, and he straightened while scrubbing his hair dry. “What’s up?”

“This is hard to explain, but my friend Molly is on the phone and she wants to talk to you. I mean, everything about my friend Molly is hard to explain. Here.”

He’d been smiling already. His eyes smiled too as he held
out his hand for the phone and put it to his ear. “Hello, Leah’s friend Molly.”

I wanted to hear what he said, but it seemed awkward to stand there and listen in. As I wandered away across the hangar, I looked down and saw I’d been holding something in my other hand the whole time. While I’d been sitting in my airplane talking with Molly, Grayson had come out to give me a check for my first day’s pay.

He was in Mr. Hall’s office again, the overhead light spilling into the darker hangar. I didn’t want to follow him in there and have this conversation with him, but I had to. I shuffled to the doorway and knocked gingerly on the doorframe.

He looked up from his computer but didn’t gesture for me to come in. I walked in anyway and sat in the empty chair. “Thanks for the check. Could you cash it for me?”

“
Cash
it for you,” he said, not even a question, just a restatement of my statement, which he found ridiculous.

“The airport cashes my checks for me,” I said in my defense. “I can’t get to the bank very often.” Even when my mom spent time at the trailer with a boyfriend who had a car and we could run errands, I didn’t ask them to take me by the bank. I didn’t like to remind my mom I earned money. Then my paycheck would never make it into my account.

Without another word, he took a pen out of a cup on the desk and handed it to me. I endorsed the check and gave it back to him. He opened the desk drawer with the cash box. While he counted out the amount of my check, he asked, “What do you do with your money in between trips to the bank? Stash it in your mattress?”

“I have a better hiding place than that,” I said, “but I can’t tell you what it is. You might tell Mark, since the two of you are so chummy.”