Partway through Arkansas we hit the worst thunderstorm I’d ever experienced. The sky was black with clouds, and the rain pelted the car as hard as pebbles. Lightning lit up the air like an eerie moment of sun in a warped dream, and then thunder shook the earth as we were pressed back into darkness.
I admitted to myself I’d probably be afraid if I were with someone else, but with Kaidan I felt safe. It was a false sense of security, since even he couldn’t save us from a tornado. But Kaidan used his extra senses to see and hear, while other cars had to pull over to the side of the road. The storm seemed to go on for hours.
We passed through Little Rock and the storm turned to a steady rain without thunder, and then a faint sprinkling. The weather felt spookily calm after the storm, and I half expected a twister to jump out in front of us and sweep us away. What I saw instead took my breath away.
“Look!” I pointed at the brilliant rainbow stretching all the way across the wide sky. I’d seen lots of small rainbows at home, blocked by trees, but the entire arch of this one was visible.
“Hmm,” I heard him say, giving the rainbow a momentary glance.
I was way more impressed by everything on the trip than Kaidan.
“Does your father know you’re on this trip with me?” I asked.
“No. We spoke for a minute before he left this morning. He knows I’m going on a trip with a particularly stubborn virgin, but that’s all I told him. He commended me for my valiant efforts, although he thinks it’s too much time to spend with one girl. He expects her to be good and deflowered by the end of our time together.”
“Well, he’ll be good and disappointed then,” I mumbled, and he smirked.
I crossed my arms over my chest, wanting to say something that would knock the smirk from his face.
“Did you have fun with Marissa’s niece last night?”
It worked.
“No.” His tone was hard.
I left it at that, but wondered what the story there was.
By the time the drizzle completely stopped, it was dark out, and we were eating again. Kaidan had almost cleared the contents of the cooler. Patti was lucky she didn’t have a teenage boy to feed; she’d never afford it.
“We should probably stop soon,” he said. I nodded in agreement.
“I suppose we should get separate rooms,” he offered.
My stomach lurched. I wasn’t going to let anything happen with Kaidan. It seemed wasteful to make him pay for separate rooms just to satisfy my prudish modesty and Patti’s overprotectiveness.
“We can share a room as long as it has two separate beds,” I compromised. “And we won’t mention it to Patti unless she asks.”
“Fair enough.”
He pulled off at the exit for Webbers Falls and found the town’s only motel, the Shining Armor Inn, which was anything but shiny. Not that I cared, but Kaidan appeared apprehensive.
“Looks a bit dodgy.”
“It’ll be fine,” I assured him, though I imagined we’d be sharing the room with several bug families.
While he checked in, I stayed in the car and called Patti to tell her where we were. She wanted to know every detail about Kaidan. I promised her he was being kind. I told her about the rainbow, and about Kaidan’s appetite, which she thought was funny. He came back to the car with a plastic key card.
“Okay, well, I’ll call you tomorrow, Patti.”
“All right then, sweetheart. Have a good night. I love you.”
“I love you, too. Bye.”
I hung up, having learned the basics about his phone, and handed it back to him. He paused in front of me.
“Do you always say that?” he asked.
“Say what?”
“That you... love each other?”
“Oh. Yeah, we always say it.”
He nodded thoughtfully, and pulled our bags from the backseat. It dawned on me sadly that Kaidan might have never said those words to anyone, nor heard them from anyone in his life, except maybe girls. We walked together, looking at the room numbers as we passed them.
Inside the small room we dropped our things, kicked off our shoes, and fell onto our beds. Kaidan took the bed by the window, and I was by the wall, with the bathroom on the other side. I peeked around the room. No roaches scuttling by.
Before long we’d both turned over, lying on our sides to face each other across the space between us. I was propped on my elbow watching him play with one of his knives. I cringed as he spun it on his palm, then wove it fast between his fingers and spun it on top of his knuckles.
“It makes me nervous when you do that,” I said.
“I can tell. I haven’t cut myself since I was a small child, so don’t worry.”
“You’ve been playing with knives since you were a small child?”
“When I was seven I came home from school after my first fight—the brother of a girl I kissed on the playground. My father gave me a switchblade and told me to learn to protect myself, because there would be many fights to come.”
“He wanted you to use a weapon in fights at school? Against other children?”
“No, no. Just preparation for defending myself when I got older, like now.”