“Well, there’s still a chance for her to do that tomorrow—the tearing-my-head-off part. The sex is long over and done. I’ve decided to embrace a vow of celibacy for a few years.”
“A few years?” Maddie laughed. “Yeah, that vow’s gonna last. Until the next time you go to the beach and meet some pretty blond girl in a bikini and—whoa! What’s that? Is that…?”
“Earthquake! Shite! Hold on!” Dingo confirmed, knocking his wall away to reach for her. “It feels like a big one!”
Pete was in the kitchen when the tremors started.
He’d washed again after returning home late from the base, and he was wearing board shorts and flip-flops and little else, his hair still damp from his shower.
He was gazing into the fridge, as if hoping something more exciting would magically appear when the unmistakable shaking started.
Shayla! Shit! And Maddie! Jesus, did Maddie know what to do in a quake? He had no idea—he also had no idea where she was, but he hoped to hell she was somewhere safe.
He swiftly closed the refrigerator door, making sure it latched, and moved away from the kitchen cabinets and into the doorway that led to the living room. If it was going to be a big one, the cabinet doors would come open and dishes and glasses would turn into missiles. Likewise, keeping his distance from the front windows was smart, and Jesus, the shaking was so intense, the walls seemed to ripple as his furniture jumped and shook. As he figured out his next move, he braced himself against the doorframe—if he hadn’t, he might’ve fallen down.
The power went out, plunging him into darkness—and great, it wasn’t just his house, it was the entire street at least.
Throughout the neighborhood, car alarms had triggered and were going off, but they sounded almost faint beneath the quake’s roar. Movement of the earth’s plates was never a quiet thing. Still, he heard a crash from behind him in the kitchen—and he didn’t need light to know that Maddie’s new computer had been out on the counter. With his luck, that had been what he’d just heard hitting the floor, probably along with the empty mugs from the coffee that he’d shared with Shayla last night.
He couldn’t see Shay’s house in the pitch-darkness. He knew it was stupid as fuck to move, but he scrambled across the room on his hands and knees—the shaking immediately pushed him down to the still-moving floor—and out the front door.
The row of shrubs that lined his front path tripped him, and he went down, hard, but used his momentum to roll farther out onto the lawn and away from the windows, as the tremor finally, blessedly stopped. The postquake “silence” was filled with those car alarms and barking dogs—and despite that, it still felt quiet without the low-pitched rumble.
As Pete pushed himself up, his eyes were already adjusting to the blackout—it seemed to be contained to just his neighborhood because he could see the haze from lights just a few streets away, which was good. “Shayla!” He ran across the street to her house. None of her windows seemed to have broken, either—that, too, was good. The entire quake had lasted maybe twenty-five seconds—from experience, he was guessing it was around a five, maybe five-point-two. Not exactly small, but certainly not the Big One.
Still, Shayla wouldn’t know that, its being her first since she was a kid. “Shay!” He banged on her front door, but she didn’t open it, didn’t answer.
Pete ran around to the back and—
There she was.
Her back door hung open—she’d made it out of the house and was sitting in the middle of her yard, her face lit from the screen of her cellphone.
“Shay! You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, looking up at him and sounding extremely normal, like riding out a five-point-two was no big thing. “Are you?”
“Yeah.”
She held up her phone. “Maddie’s okay. The boys and Carter are, too. I tried to call them, but I got one of those weird busy signals, but then I remembered that texts often get through when calls don’t, so I texted, and they all just texted me back.” Her thumbs moved across her phone. “I’m texting Maddie that you’re okay. She was shaken, pun not intended, and worried about you—I mean, she didn’t say that, but…She was definitely worried. I was just about to go check on you. I texted, but you didn’t answer.”
“I don’t have my phone.” Pete sat down next to her. She was sitting, tailor-style, right on the ground, dressed in what must’ve been her pajamas—a barely there white tank top over boxers that were covered with little flowers, possibly pink ones. Her arms and legs were bare but she didn’t seem to notice that the night air was cold.
She’d managed to put on sneakers before leaving her house—no doubt she’d had them right beneath her bed. For such a rule-follower, it was weird that she hadn’t stayed put in a doorway, but then he realized that she’d come out here so she could check on her kids, and go rescue them single-handedly, if she’d had to.
Her phone whooshed with the sound of an incoming text that she immediately read. “What?” She looked up at Pete with an expression of outrage and disapproval. “Tevin says that was only a four-point-nine on the Richter scale. Seriously?”
He had to smile. “My guess was a little higher,” he told her. “But just a little. The amount of shake also depends on depth—how shallow it is. And the location of the epicenter.”
“Tevin says it was about a half mile east of us.”
“That sounds right.”
“So Southern California’s still here.” She chose to embrace the good news rather than be pissed that the quake wasn’t as big as she’d thought. “No need to go into Zombie Apocalypse Prevention Mode.”
He smiled again at that. “Nope.”
Her phone whooshed, and she looked down at it and laughed. “Earthquake selfie,” she said, showing him a photo of her sons, their heads together, making wide-eyed, openmouthed faces into the camera. She used her flash to take a similar photo of herself, smiling as she sent it back.
He wanted that, he realized. That easy, friendly, intensely devoted relationship that Shayla shared with her boys—he wanted that with his daughter. But the odds of ever having it were slim to none. Even if Maddie did a complete about-face and suddenly welcomed a relationship with him…He was a lot of things, but unlike Shayla, funny and fun-to-be-with weren’t on the list.
Right now, however, he’d settle for being glad that Shay thought Maddie had been worried for his safety.
Also? “If Maddie felt the quake,” Pete said, “that means she’s still somewhere local.”
“So not in Manzanar,” Shayla said. “Or Sacramento.”
“I’m betting Los Angeles didn’t even feel this one,” Pete told her. “Manzanar and Sacramento are both much farther away.”
She gave him some serious side eye. “I knew that. I’m not that geographically challenged.”