Page 19 of Forced Proximity
She smiled, and that’s when I saw the blood in her teeth. “Not really. But the guys from the hospital need girls to fill the team, and I’m the only other one they know willing to play with them.”
I reached up and caught it in between two dirt-covered fingers before asking, “Did you witness us in this tornado?”
She nodded, causing the necklace to slip from between my fingers. “Yeah.”
I bit my lip. “Was it cool?”
She nodded.
“Are you ready for me to try to unhook you?”
“That would be grand.” She grimaced. “My hips are screaming at me. I’ve been hoping you were alive for about ten minutes now.”
My lips quirked and I braced myself to sit up.
Nothing hurt too bad, so I scooted over.
That, however, did hurt.
But not badly enough to stop me from getting her down.
Ignoring the pain in my left hip, I reached up and pulled the silver tab on her seat belt.
What I was not prepared for was her landing directly on top of me.
She landed on me with a squeak, and I grunted and fell back to the ground, my eyes once again on the black sky.
“What are the odds, do you think, of a plane crash, a tornado, and then a second tornado?” I asked curiously.
“Three for three is pretty impossible statistically,” she admitted. “Now, I’m not saying I’m the best in the world when it comes to statistics, but I really feel confident enough in this to say that a second tornado isn’t going to happen.”
That’s when the entire sky went green.
“That doesn’t look good, does it?”
She rolled off of me so she could lie by my side and stare at the green sky.
“No.”
Five
I grew up in a generation where parents took breathing hard as backtalk.
—Dru’s secret thoughts
DRU
A plane crash and a tornado.
The odds were nearly impossible, yet I’d been wide awake through it all.
I watched as the plane had disintegrated around me, yet miraculously, not one single thing had touched me throughout the entire process.
I’d watched as the flight attendant had been sucked out of the side of the airplane when a huge hunk had ripped free of it a few seconds before we’d crashed into the ground.
The couple directly behind us were next—I would never be able to forget their screams.
Then the trees ripped the plane to pieces.
