They rode through the rest of the morning and into the early afternoon, her body adjusting slowly but surely to the rhythm of the horse's gait and the feel of Kyle Walker's flat, hard chest and abdomen against her back, his jaw resting gently but securely against the side of her head. They were silent mostly: he focused on steering the sure-footed appaloosa over broken fences and around fallen trees, she mostly focused on gripping the saddle horn to keep from losing her balance and sliding right off the horse and onto the ground. Not only would that hurt but even worse, she shuddered to imagine how ridiculous she would appear to this man who did everything with easy strength and practiced grace.

It also didn't help matters that she was sore. From what, exactly, she didn't want to think about too much, but the things she and Cam had done in the bathtub ... well it had taken a toll on her knees, along with muscles she hadn't used in a long time, if ever. Then there had been his father earlier in the day—nope, no need to rewind. Meanwhile, of course, there had been a devastating storm, a tornado had slashed through town and taken key parts of her house and belongings with it, and the accumulated sadness, helplessness, and anger of months ... years really ... had finally come to a head, and she felt as though she had been hit by a truck. No, a bus. Or one of those really big pickup trucks with the massive wheels that her students liked to skid and swerve through mud pits and occasionally ram into trees or crash into ditches.

Yes that was it: she felt like she'd been flattened by a monster truck.

At least she was wearing jeans, picked out from the bag of clothing Kyle had rescued from her bedroom early that morning. Hours in a saddle would not have been kind to her bare legs and thighs. She also felt less ... exposed, and wished she had pulled on something more substantial than a flimsy white tank top. She could only imagine the figure they cut to the few neighbors they had run into so far: Kyle Walker riding with the high school English teacher squeezed up against him, like something from the cover of a cheesy romance novel.

They were approaching their third house now; the first two had been untouched, though the second one lacked power still. But they had ridden closer to where the storm had hid hardest, and she could tell it had taken a greater toll.

"The roof is gone," Kyle muttered, though she wasn't sure if it was to himself or to her. "The damn barn is gone."

All she could see as they rode up a dirt road was a house that appeared to have crumpled in on itself and an enormous pile of wreckage beyond it. Power lines lay dangling and broken.

"Jim!" Kyle called, pulling the horse to a stop before a large puddle that filled the driveway leading to the house. He repeated the name again, but the house, or what was left of it, showed no signs of life. She shuddered at the sight of it, and couldn't help but wonder if hers looked that devastated in the daylight. He tightened his arm around her waist, as though he knew what she was thinking.

"Can't go any farther with those power lines down near the water," he said, and slowly backed the horse away from the puddle. "It must have been the second one that got them."

"There were two tornadoes?" she said in surprise.

"At least," he said, and carefully steered them around the puddle so they came up to the house from behind. That's when she saw the dead horse, covered in blood, laying crumpled on the ground near the slabs of wood and metal he said had been the horse barn.

"Oh God," she said, and covered her eyes as they approached it. "No, don't go up to it!"

They halted near it and he was silent for a moment.

"Someone shot it in the head," he said, then rubbed his cheek against her face, which she still kept averted. His unshaven bristle brought a tingling relief to the tension building inside her. "We can go, they've gone to get help. Their truck is missing so I figured as much, but I wanted to be sure."

She knew he meant that he'd wanted to be sure that the people who belonged to this house weren't hurt or ... worse. As they rode away from the ruins that had been someone's home and livelihood she kept her eyes squeezed shut and, without thinking, placed a hand on her abdomen.

***

The next day, after breakfast, the three of them headed over to her house, each of the Walker men driving their own truck. Kyle ushered her into his in the driveway, and if Cam was bothered by it he didn't show any signs. In fact, he had yet to say anything about the dramatic confessions during their coupling in the bathtub, and part of her wondered if she had imagined the whole thing. Though she herself had yet to bring up her newfound realization that he had, in fact, tried to reach her during those long and lonely weeks in New Jersey. She had spent most of the previous afternoon and evening trying to get a signal on her phone, trying to connect to the Internet on her laptop, and sitting on a chair pulled up to an old fashioned radio in the kitchen so she could catch up on local updates about the storm's damage and intensity. Meanwhile, Cam and his father had riding around thousands of acres of their land fixing fences and checking up on cattle before the night fell and cast their rural world into an unbroken, pre-industrial darkness. Of course their house had electricity—and even if it had lost power from the storm there was a backup generator, Kyle had told her—and the outside flood light produced a golden circle of light around their immediate property.

Which, in her mind, only made the nighttime beyond even more disturbing in a way.

So she headed to bed early, and listened to the sounds of the two men returning home from the safety of her guest bedroom. She curled up underneath the handmade quilt, tried not to imagine whose long dead hands might have pieced it together, and quickly fell asleep amidst the whisper and murmurs of household ghosts, both real and not.

The next morning she woke with a feeling of lightness that she hadn't felt since before the storm hit, and was dressed and ready by the time Kyle and Cam had finished breakfast. On their way to her house she and Kyle said little to each other, and Kyle had changed the station away from the news and back to an FM station for country music. The roads had mostly been cleared, and she watched the landscape speed by to the sounds of "Texas country only!" as the station's deejay announced repeatedly. Like the day before, the closer they approached her side of the county, the worse things looked, and the light feeling she had woken up with dissipated along with the last wisps of morning fog clinging to the fields around them.

As they rolled to a stop at the only traffic light on her side of town her phone burped to life suddenly, and dozens of texts and voicemail notifications exploded onto her screen. Before she could open any of them a new one came in, from Cam.

You need to breathe Courtney.

He was still bossing her around, even from afar. Though he was right, of course. She inhaled a lungful of oxygen, and a little bit of the anxiety building inside her loosened its grip on her heart. It wasn't like she had every particularly liked her house. It was small, hadn't been renovated since it was built in the sixties, and Melvin definitely overcharged her. It was home though, and ever since she and her sister had moved their failing mother out of their childhood house, it contained all she owned in the world. Books, clothing, dust bunnies, and a bunch of newspapers that needed recycling. There had been all the furniture and stuff she had left behind at the apartment she shared with her ex, but in spite of his repeated offers she had never wanted to bring any of it with her, those tangible reminders of a life and future she had turned away from forever.

She took another deep breath, and smiled tightly at Kyle when he glanced her way, a look of concern in his eyes. Why was she always so obvious with him and with Cam? So damn easy to read, unable to hide the thoughts and feelings from their clear eyed gazes? At least they used their superpowers for good, unlike her sister, who liked to read her mind and then use it against her somehow: trick her into admitting things she didn't mean, or discussing things she preferred to hide.

"Looks like you've got yourself a visitor," Kyle said as they slowed down to turn into her yard.

Her anxiety's grip on her heart tightened; no doubt Melvin had arrived to start going through her stuff and throwing it away, or to demand that she keep paying rent no matter what.

But it wasn't Melvin, though for the first time in her life she wished it was.

It was her sister, sitting on the trunk of a rental car and scowling at her phone.