He only nodded, his focus on the road. The rain was already pounding the roof and it was starting to get dark. I couldn’t see much, but Theo didn’t seem too bothered by it. We drove in that tense heavy silence for miles until I snapped, again.

“Theo, you can’t be mad at me for telling the truth.” He exasperated me with his stoic calm. Made me want to push, say things to provoke him until he finally gave up on this. Until he saw that I was nothing but a future headache.

“I’m not mad.” His voice was so calm, so detached. Like the conversation didn’t matter at all. I ground my teeth and kept my attention on the relentless spatter of drops on the windshield.

“You’re lying.”

He made a sound that clearly translated to you’re one to talk. And yeah, maybe I was being a hypocrite, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t right.

“You don’t want complications, Theo. You don’t need me and my chaos.” His jaw moved like he was struggling not to say something nasty, then a sound like a gunshot echoed through the car, making us both jump.

“Fuck, it’s really coming down,” he said, voice alert. “I need to get us out of this.” But if he was freaking out, like I was, you couldn’t tell from his calm voice or the easy way he maneuvered the car.

I sat there in nervous silence as Theo struggled to keep the car from skidding onto the other side of the road. But he kept his cool. Nothing fazed Theo, not a hailstorm, not a call to go on a rescue mission in North Texas in the middle of the afternoon, not an Olympic freaking competition. And that was part of the problem: as much as I looked okay on the outside, I was a mess inside and Theo didn’t tolerate mess. It was honestly baffling that he was even here right now.

I returned my attention to what he was doing when he suddenly veered off the road and made a U-turn.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going back to Miss Susan’s. There was a covered garage next to that shed, we can wait out the worst of this there.”

“Okay.” Miss Susan had said we could come back if we wanted something else. She probably wouldn’t mind if we took refuge at her place until the hail stopped.

“Why aren’t you going back to New York?” he finally asked when the turn for Miss Susan’s was already in our sights.

“Looks like she made it wherever she was going,” I said, ignoring his question, as I glanced at the dark house and her empty driveway. Once we were under the cover of the carport, he powered off the car and turned to me.