Chapter 6 Logan
First year of residency, my father pulled strings to get me into the OR for a heart transplant. I was there to observe—I didn’t touch anything—but back then I was arrogant enough that the nepotism of my presence in that room didn’t even bother me.
The patient had an LVAD. Dr. Singh led, and I watched her work through the scar tissue around the old hardware before she even got to the donor heart.
It was a fifteen-hour surgery, and I was so rigid with attention the whole time that when we finally scrubbed out, my body ached like it had been hit by a car, and I hadn’t even done anything.
That’s a little like how I feel right now.
Rose hasn’t said much, aside from perfunctory answers when I ask her something.
I’ve kept the radio off—she said the headache is gone, but I don’t want to chance it, and it would be hard to hear each other with the rain like this, anyway.
I can barely see fifty feet ahead of us, and it’s only getting worse.
We are, I’m fairly certain, driving directly into the hurricane.
Pearl flipped when she found out I wasn’t on the plane—that I was driving her sister to the wedding instead.
We texted back and forth a bit. I tried to make a joke about Rose to keep things light.
She kept apologizing over and over, hating that I had to spend this much time with her sister, despite my reassurances that it was fine.
And it is fine. Or it was until I pushed Rose about Easton.
I’m not sure what I expected, but whatever goodwill we’d managed to build evaporated.
I keep turning it over. One perspective, in Pearl’s defense, is that Rose knew what Easton meant to Pearl, but kept him around anyway.
It’s not Easton’s fault he wasn’t attracted to her, but Pearl feels everything so deeply, it would have cost them nothing to be a little gentler with her feelings.
But Pearl told me Rose and Easton were a couple—I’m sure of it. If he’s gay, there’s not a lot of gray area there. It’s hard to reconcile such a blatant lie with who I know Pearl to be.
Honestly, I don’t know what to think. What I do know is that Rose is pissed at me, and it’s only making me more tense and stressed.
“We can’t keep going like this,” she says.
Her voice is low and a little raspy, and something about the way it cuts through the sound of the rain makes it hard to think straight.
I have to remind myself she’s talking about the weather.
I glance at the GPS. We’ve added nearly three hours to the trip because of the rain.
“It’s barely two. We still have half a day of driving—I want to make a dent in it while we still can.”
“Logan. There are cars pulled over everywhere. The storm isn’t getting any better.”
She’s right. The sky has gone a flat, dark gray, and the wipers are barely keeping up. The wind isn’t too bad yet, but we’re deep in rural North Carolina, barely past the state line, and the further we push into these counties, the fewer options we’ll have if it gets worse.
I keep driving. Then a gust hits, and the whole car rocks sideways.
“Logan,” Rose starts. Her voice cracks slightly.
I don’t reply. I navigate around a massive pond that has formed along the shoulder. Another gust hits and the car shudders, and when I glance over at Rose, her face has gone pale. Fuck. After what happened yesterday, and now this. No wonder she’s scared.
“Okay. Next stop that’s more than a gas station, we’ll pull over.”
The relief in her voice when she says “thank you” is hard to sit with. I grunt back. At this point, I don’t care about making the wedding. I just want out of this car. Off this trip. Away from Rose.
Stuffed in this car together, all I can smell is her earthy cinnamon scent, blending with the petrichor, rain and wet asphalt. Every small shift she makes in the passenger seat registers along my skin like a static charge.
“There!” Rose points, and two miles ahead, a sign for a rest stop and lodgings.
I exhale—then a gust hits so hard that the truck in front of us lurches sideways across the lane.
I jerk the wheel. The truck isn’t correcting.
It’s hydroplaning, fishtailing, and I wrench us left to get clear, but there’s nowhere to go.
Rose grabs the oh-shit handle. Her other hand finds the dash.
The truck spins a full 180, and for one suspended second it’s coming straight at us, growing in the windshield, and I have no room and can’t brake and there is nothing to do but hold the wheel and watch. Panic tremors through me. This is it.
Then the driver catches it. The truck sputters on its last spin, then rockets past us and disappears into the rain.
I’ve slowed enough to come to a full stop on the side of the road.
The exit is just ahead. Neither of us says anything. I continue, then pull off the highway and follow the signs for the motel, not giving a shit what it entails, just needing to get out of this fucking car.
The Audi is brand new, but when I finally pull into the parking lot and kill the engine, I swear I feel it shudder and die beneath us, like it’s been running on adrenaline and can’t anymore.
Neither of us moves. We stare out the windshield at the rain sheeting down the glass.
“Flying might’ve actually been safer,” I mutter.
Rose makes a sound—half gasp, half laugh—and slaps my arm with the back of her hand, and then we’re both laughing.
“I think this trip is trying to kill me.”
“Fucking seriously,” she muses. Then she reaches over the console to grab her backpack, and for one brief, disorienting moment, the soft warmth of her tits presses against my arm.
She pulls back without seeming to notice, pushes open the door, holds the backpack over her head against the rain, and runs inside.
I sit there with my hands still on the wheel, watching her go. It takes me longer than it should to look away. That’s when I notice how full the parking lot is.
There’s a prickling dread I feel when I exit the car and rush in after her. And it intensifies when I swing open the door and find the lobby of this rinky-dink motel packed full of waiting people, all soaked and restless, the air thick with wet clothes and frustration.
I find Rose at the front desk and step up beside her just in time to hear, “What do you mean there are no rooms?”
The woman behind the desk gestures at the crowd. “Storm caught a lot of people off guard. We’re doing what we can to consolidate, but right now you’ll have to wait and hope something opens up.”
Rose turns to look at me. Her hair is wet from the short run through the rain, and her t-shirt clings to her skin. She’s worried. I have an urge to fix it—to take that distressed look off her face.
I scan all the miserable faces. I’m not getting back in that car.
“I’ll give someone a thousand dollars for their room.” I don’t shout it, but nearly everyone stops what they’re doing and looks at me.
A woman near the back grabs her husband’s arm. “Honey—” She looks at him, then at me. “We live an hour from here, thought it would be nicer just to get off the road and have a shorter drive tomorrow, but we can leave for a thousand bucks.”
Rose is staring at me in shock. And for some reason, the look on her face is not pleased, despite the fact that I just procured us a room.
I don’t carry that much cash, so I pull out my phone and we sort it out through a banking app. The woman at the front desk watches the exchange with a tight smile and processes the reservation cancellation without comment. I step up to give her my name, and Rose cuts in front of me.
“Ma’am,” Rose says to a woman wrestling a toddler on her hip while a five-year-old spins circles around her legs, like this hurricane is the best thing to happen to him all week. She looks stressed and anxious. “Looks like a room just opened up—it’s yours if you want it.”
The woman’s whole face changes. I swear she nearly starts crying. The desk clerk’s tight smile turns genuine, and Rose turns back to the room. “Anyone else willing to give up their room? This guy’ll pay a thousand dollars for it.”
Then someone else speaks up—they had two rooms booked, but decide they can squeeze in and share beds, and Rose takes the now empty room and gives it to a guy who’s on a fishing trip, traveling with his son.
She does this three more times. I’ve shelled out five grand in twenty minutes for a room that probably costs seventy-five dollars, until finally the woman at the desk, eyes glittering, lowers her glasses and says, “Oh, it looks like we have one more room available after all. Near the pool in the back. Single occupancy—I assume that’s alright? ”
Rose glances around the room. Before she can give it away, I wrap my hand around her mouth and say, “We’ll take it.”
“Great.”
I should be pissed. I’m… not.
Rose practically struts ahead of me under the metal awning as we exit, and I don’t feel guilty about brazenly checking her out after the stunt she just pulled.
I have the key. She steps aside at the door and waits, and I’m aware of exactly how close she is as I lean past her to unlock it, push it open, hold it for her to move through.
Of course, there’s only one bed.
After this nightmare, I’m surprised there’s a bed at all and not just a cot in a broom closet.
Rose kicks her shoes off, drops her bag, and leaps onto the bed, landing on her back, tits bouncing in time with the mattress.
“Have fun out there?”
She turns her head to look at me, still smiling. “I did.”
I laugh and look away, dragging a hand through my rain-wet hair. After a day like this, I need a shower—need to stand under hot water and not think. Need to put a door between me and the way she looks right now, sprawled out and pleased with herself.
“You need the bathroom first?”
She stretches her arms above her head, arching her back slightly. “All yours.”
Hands tucked behind her head, wet t-shirt pulled tight across her chest, nipples hard from the rain. I know I should look away.
I don’t.
She turns her head and finds me staring. The satisfied look on her face shifts into something else—something that moves through me like a current. Neither of us says anything. The rain hammers the window. I’m aware of every inch of space between us, and it feels like too much.
I grab my bag off the floor and head for the bathroom.
I unzip my suitcase and pull out a simple pair of jeans and a t-shirt. I had assumed I’d be arriving on the island today and dressed appropriately in slacks and a button-down. Yesterday, I was still wearing a suit since I stopped at the hospital before leaving for the hangar.
Now, though, I just want to be me. The water is scalding, the pressure is terrible, and I don’t care.
I should be annoyed about what Rose did, with the rooms, but…
I’m not. If it had been just yesterday, I would have been.
I’d have assumed she was playing a game.
Yesterday, she’d have said something cutting about me throwing money at everything.
But she didn’t say a word. And even though we’d just had yet another death-defying situation on the road with that hydroplaning truck, she still put the other people in front of us. I don’t know what to do with that version of her, the one I’m starting to get to know.
The way she confidently told everyone I’d pay for their rooms. The way she smirked at me and strutted out into the rain. The way she laid down on the mattress, like an offering.
Attraction has never been the problem with Rose. I’ve always thought she was beautiful in a way that felt almost unfair—like something designed specifically to be difficult.
The water sprays down my chest, the pressure abysmal.
I let it hit the back of my neck and don’t move.
When my hand finally moves down my stomach, I don’t pretend it’s accidental.
I wrap my hand around my length and my head drops forward.
I brace against the wall, jaw tight, trying to keep quiet in a room with one thin wall between me and her.
My cock is heavy. I squeeze once, feeling myself firm up. She’s right on the other side of that wall. She’d hear me.
Good, something inside me says. Let her.
Then I picture her face at the café—the moment she stopped fighting back. She tried to tell me her side of the story, and I brushed it off, explained it away.
I turn the dial all the way to cold. The water is shocking, but I stand there and take it, letting the cool ease my body down.
As much as I’m starting to like this new Rose, we’re on an unplanned road trip that keeps trying to kill us.
This time tomorrow we’ll be at the wedding, surrounded by family and friends—well, my friends, I realize uncomfortably.
This is just a pressure-cooker situation.
I haven’t got laid in a while, and she’s right on the other side of that wall, looking like sin.
One more day, and then we’ll be free of each other.