Fully Loaded - Blake Crouch [60]
Lightning touched the plain a mile away, the blast of thunder vibrating the ground beneath their feet.
Melanie clutched his arm.
“Should we go back to the car?” she asked, and he couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed. You embraced a storm by standing in the middle of the goddamn thing, feeling the rain beat down on your face, letting the wind bully you, trying not to flinch when the thunder dropped right on top of your head.
“Sure,” he said. “We can go back.”
They experienced the storm from inside the RV, everything reduced to gray through the rain-streaked glass and nothing to see beyond fifty yards as thunder detonated all around them, the Winnebago creaking and listing against the stronger gusts.
Melanie reached over and pried Peter’s right hand off the steering wheel and laced her fingers through his. Her hand was small and warm, and he was afraid if he looked at her she would kiss him.
When the storms had passed, they went on, taking backroads into Kansas, the late afternoon sky going bright and clear, Peter feeling with every passing breath like the RV was shrinking, the air being compressed from his lungs.
Thirty miles north of Hoxie, he pulled off onto the side of the road.
“Why are you stopping?” Melanie asked.
“I just need some air.”
He walked around the front of the Winnebago, the overworked engine pumping eddies of heat through the radiator. Twenty yards from the road, he stopped. The only disruption in all that prairie a grain mill several miles to the east. Peter took deep breaths until the mayhem in his head had gone quiet and he could hear the grasses scraping at his jeans.
Melanie said, “You all right, Peter?”
The sun had dipped below the western horizon.
“Yeah. You?”
“Uh huh.”
They traveled in silence for another mile.
“I mean, did I do something? Because I thought we were having a pretty good time this morning, but now—”
“No, of course not.”
“We weren’t having a good time?”
“No, I mean you didn’t do anything.”
She stared out her window.
They cruised south on Highway 23, and the quiet had grown cancerous by the time the headlights of the RV swept across the porch of Melanie’s farmhouse. He shifted into park and turned back the ignition. Melanie unbuckled her seatbelt.
“Hold on,” Peter said.
“What?”
He wanted her out of the RV. Wanted nothing more than to drive back to the motel, crawl into bed.
“This is my fault,” he said.
“What are you talking about?”
“It was my idea. I invited you.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“I thought…”
“What?”
“I shouldn’t have asked you to come.”
Melanie put her hand on the door.
“It’s not your fault,” he said, reaching across the open space between the seats, almost touching her, letting his hand rest instead on the edge of her seat. “I just thought I was capable of doing this.”
“Of doing what? Being with me? Is it so difficult?”
“Being with anyone is, but when I saw you in the café last night…I don’t know…something shifted. I’ve said more to you in the last couple days than I have to anyone in twenty years.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“If you understood, if you could be in my head for two minutes, it would.”
The interior lights cut out.
Peter said, “This morning, you asked me where I lived, and I told you I was from Providence.”
“So?”
“That wasn’t really the truth. I lived there a long time ago, but I don’t really live anywhere now. I bought this RV in 1987. Been my home ever since.” Out Peter’s window, a lightning bug flared against the glass. “It’s the hardest thing right now for me not to ask you to get out.”
Melanie opened her door.
“I’m not saying I want you to.”
“I need some air.”
She climbed out of the Winnebago and walked across the gravel drive, easing down on the front porch steps. Peter looked at the keys dangling from the ignition. He touched them. Opened his door and stepped down into the grass.
Lightning bugs everywhere.
A lone cricket screeching