Phoenix
I knew the moment she noticed the storm behind us. I felt her whole body tense. Then, she was busting my eardrum screaming at me about it. I noticed a change in the atmosphere a good 20 minutes before she did. I didn’t tell her because there was no reason to alert her if it turned out to be nothing. Once I realized it was going to be something, it was just a matter of when she noticed.
At first, I wasn’t concerned in the slightest about it. I’d ridden through many storms over the years. It wasn’t my favorite thing to do, but the weather was a fickle bitch and sometimes your ass got rained on.
As the miles passed with no sign of civilization, my concern grew exponentially. The wind was getting stronger by the minute. I glanced in my mirror to check the storm’s progression and there was no mistaking what was behind us. The textbook definition of a funnel cloud was rotating in the distance.
“Annabelle, get on your phone and see if you can find somewhere nearby for us to pull off and take shelter,” I ordered.
I felt her shifting around behind me. I kept going while I waited for her to find something. Her shaky voice came through the speaker, “I don’t see anything, Phoenix. There’s nothing around here. What are we going to do?”
Fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
I scanned the area for anything we could use for shelter. “Annabelle, I’m going to keep moving as long as I can. Start looking for anything we can use for shelter, and I mean anything. We don’t have a lot of time to find something.”
We’d made it another mile or so when the wind rocked the bike. She screamed, I grunted, and by the Grace of God we stayed upright.
Fuck. This.
We had to get off the road and off the bike or we were going to end up dead.
I was slowing down, preparing to tell her we couldn’t go any farther when I saw it. Just up ahead, there was a creek that appeared to flow under the road. I sped up, trying my damnedest to get us there.
When we got close enough, I took the bike off the road and drove us right into the culvert. I tapped Annabelle’s leg. “Come on, doll face, we need to get off the bike.”
I took her hand and pulled her to the middle of the culvert with me. I left my bike just inside the opening we entered, hoping it might shield us from flying debris and prevent the culvert from turning into a wind tunnel. We clung to each other and pressed ourselves as far against the side of the culvert as we could. “I’m scared, Nix,” she whimpered. Nix. She was the one and only person to ever call me Nix and I loved it.
I ran my hand over her hair, trying to comfort her as best I could. “I know, doll face. It’ll be over soon.” She started crying and tried to pull me even closer. I pressed soft kisses to her forehead and cheeks all the while murmuring words of comfort to her, which did not seem to help her in the slightest. So, I gave my next tactic a try. Distraction.
“Do you remember when we went to the party Badger threw when his parents were out of town?” I asked.
“Who?”
I chuckled. “Sorry. Aaron Marshall. He’s my VP and goes by Badger now.”
“Oh! How could I possibly forget that night? It was horrible!”
I laughed. “It wasn’t horrible. It was fucking hilarious. It is still the funniest damn thing I have ever experienced firsthand. I love telling that story. You want to hear my version of it?” She nodded against my chest.
The wind was howling through the culvert, rain and hail falling from the sky, accompanied by cracks of thunder and flashes of lightning, as I retold one of my favorite memories with her. “We had been at Badger’s parents’ place for a few hours and I’d had too much to drink to drive us home. Instead of staying there for the night, you wanted to drive us home in my truck. We pulled up to a stop sign and just before you pressed the gas pedal, this ball of fur and teeth comes flying at us and slams into the windshield. You started screaming while trying to roll up the windows, close the sliding rear window, and lock the doors at the same time. Then, you started yelling at me because I wasn’t helping you and we were ‘under attack.’ That was about the time you noticed the ball of fur at the bottom of the windshield. Screaming like a banshee, again, you hit the windshield wipers to fling it off.”
I had to pause there to get my laughter under control so I could continue. “You panicked and turned the wipers on, thinking it would knock the thing off the truck. But, you didn’t know the thing was stuck. So, when the wipers came on, bat wings shot out of the furball, moving at an arc in front of us. You were screaming and it was screeching with each pass of the wipers. Eek! Eek! Eek! I thought I was going to piss myself.”
She huffed. “I wanted to hit you. I thought it was one of those dinosaur creatures from that movie. You know, the little one everybody thought was cute until it came at them teeth first. Whatever it was, I just wanted to get it away from me as fast as possible. How was I to know it was stuck in the windshield wipers?”
She slapped her hand against my chest. “Then, you wouldn’t help me get it out!”
“Of course I wouldn’t. The damn thing was still alive. Plus, bats are usually very precise. The fact that it dive-bombed my truck meant something was wrong. It probably had rabies. But, even though I wouldn’t get rid of it, I did provide you with a way to get it out of the wipers, didn’t I?”
She slapped her hand against my chest. “Giving me $20 to pay the crackhead at the gas station to pluck it out of the wipers with your jumper cables doesn’t count, Phoenix Black!”
Tears were running down my face from laughing. That story never got old. “It most certainly does count. He took care of the bat, we went home, and all was well...except you refused to drive at night after that for a long time. Wait a minute. Are you laughing?”
She pushed her face under my arm to hide it from me, but I could feel her body shaking. I pushed her back so I could see her. She was always beautiful, but when she laughed, she was like nothing I had ever seen before.
