Fighting for Rain - BB Easton

Rain

With my arms around Wes’s waist and the roar of a motorcycle engine drowning out my thoughts, I turn and watch my house disappear behind us. My home. The only one I’ve ever known. The trees and darkness swallow it whole as we speed away, but they don’t take my memories of what happened there. I wish they would. I wish I could pull this ache out of my chest and throw it into that house like a hand grenade.

I also wish I weren’t wearing this damn motorcycle helmet. Wes should be wearing it. He’s the survivalist. I don’t really care if my head gets cracked open. All I want to do is lay my cheek on his back and let the wind dry my tears. Besides, the inside of it smells like hazelnut coffee and cold-cream moisturizer. Just like my mama.

Who’s now buried in a shallow grave behind that house.

Right beside the man who killed her.

I might have survived April 23, but not all of me made it out alive. Rainbow Williams—the perfectly preppy, straight A–earning, churchgoing, trophy girlfriend of Franklin Springs High School basketball star Carter Renshaw—is buried back there too, right next to the parents she was trying so hard to please.

All that’s left of me now is Rain.

Whoever the hell that is.

I curl my fingers into Wes’s blue Hawaiian shirt and look over his shoulder at the black highway laid out before us. My friends, Quint and Lamar, are up ahead in their daddy’s bulldozer, clearing a path through all the wrecked and abandoned vehicles that piled up during the chaos before April 23, but it’s so dark that I can barely see them. All I can see is the road directly in front of our headlight and a few sparks in the distance where the bulldozer’s blade is grinding against the asphalt. All I can smell are my memories. All I can feel is Wes’s warm body in my arms and a sense of freedom in my soul, growing with every mile we put between us and Franklin Springs.

And, right now, that’s all I need.

The rumble of the road and the emotional exhaustion of the past few days have me fighting to keep my eyes open. I nod off, I don’t even know how many times, as we crawl along behind the bulldozer, jerking awake the moment I feel that first twitch of sleep.

Wes slows to a stop so that he can turn to face me. A lock of hair falls over one cheek, but the rest is pushed straight back and tangled from the wind. His pale green eyes are almost the only feature I can make out in the dark. And they don’t look too happy.

“You’re scaring the shit out of me. You’ve got to try to stay awake, okay?” Wes shouts over the sound of metal scraping asphalt up ahead.

I glance past him and see the headlights of the bulldozer shining on the roof of an overturned eighteen-wheeler. It’s blocking the entire highway, but Quint and Lamar are hard at work, trying to push it out of our path.

I pull Mama’s helmet off my head and feel her disappear along with her scent. It’s replaced with the smell of spring pollen, pine trees, and gasoline.

“I know,” I shout back with a guilty nod. “I’m trying.”

A burst of sparks flies behind Wes as the bulldozer gives the tractor-trailer another good shove.

Wes puts the kickstand down and gets off the bike. “This is gonna take them a while. Maybe you should stand up and walk around a little. Might help you wake up.”

He’s just a silhouette, backlit by the haze from the headlight, but he’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen—tall and strong and smart and here, even after everything he just witnessed. As I place my palm in his, the tiny orange sparkles of light glittering in the background match the ones dancing across my skin, giving me goose bumps, even under my hoodie.

I can’t see his expression, but I feel Wes smiling down at me. Then, suddenly, his energy shifts. As I slide off the bike, he grips my hand tighter, lifting his head and inhaling so deeply that I can hear it, even over the grinding, crunching sounds coming from the bulldozer.

“Shit.” The profile of his perfect face comes into view as he turns his head to look over his shoulder. “I think I smell—”

Before the word can even leave Wes’s lips, the eighteen-wheeler explodes in a ball of fire.