I stopped and turned to Bucky. I held out my pinkie. “You have to pinkie swear first and only then I’ll tell you, but only because you’re my best friend and I know you won’t tell anyone.”

“I’m your only friend,” Bucky reminded me, rolling his eyes.

“Don’t make me punch you in the gut, BUCKY,” I said. He might have been older than me, but he was small for his age. Kids made fun of his size as much as they made fun of me for my pink hair. We’d bonded over being outsiders in the second grade and became fast friends. And now we were swearing, the most sacred and serious promise in the world, so that I could tell him all about the blue-eyed man with tattoos who changed everything.

Bucky grabbed my pinky with his own. “You have to swear you won’t tell a soul what I am about to tell you, and when you’re old and grey that you will take this secret to your grave, and even then you won’t tell like other ghosts and stuff,” I said.

Bucky nodded, shook my pinky, and spit on the ground, sealing his swear. “I promise, now spill it Pinky,” he sang, throwing my own hated nickname in my face. This time I did stick out my tongue as we dropped our pinkies.

We didn’t get on our bikes when we got to the road. Instead, we pushed on the handlebars and continued to walk beside each other. I pulled the ring back out of my shirt so Bucky could see it, turning it over so he could get a good look of the skull.

“Is that a real diamond.”

“I think so,” I said, unable to help the huge smile that spread across my face.

“So how’d you get it?” Bucky asked.

“This here?” I asked, holding up the chain, “This is a promise.”

“Like a pinkie swear?”

I shook my head. “Nope, it’s way more powerful than that.”

“How’d ya get it? You steal it? Looks like it cost a lot of money.” He reached out to touch it and that’s when I tucked it back into my shirt.

“No, I didn’t steal it,” I corrected. “It was given to me.”

After a long dramatic pause, Bucky shrugged and waved his hand around. “By who? You gonna tell me or not, Thia?”

I patted the ring under my shirt as I recalled the day Bear walked into my life. In my excitement, I may have embellished a little, not realizing then how close to the truth I really was. “This ring was given to me by the biggest and strongest man in the whole wide world. He could’ve given it to anyone he wanted, and he chose me. It means that we’re linked…forever.”

Bucky’s voice got all high, like I’d just punched him in the nuts. “Forever?”

Just then, an older man riding a motorcycle, a big silver one with a tall windshield flew by us on the road. A small woman with grey hair sat low next to him in a sidecar. We fanned the dust away from our faces, and while Bucky was busy coughing, I watched the bike drive off, completely fascinated and in awe of the sound it made, how fast it was going, and how the old lady looked so comfortable in her little seat she could’ve been knitting instead of barreling at break neck speeds. I stared after it until long after it had disappeared around the bend.

I turned back to Bucky and smiled my biggest smile.

“Yep. Forever.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Thia

THERE ISN’T MUCH out there in the world that scares me. Life is way too scary to waste time being afraid of the unknown when the known is frightening enough. I was never scared of the boogie monster or anything lurking under my bed or in my closet at night when I was a kid.

The only thing I was scared of were things that could actually happen.

Like tornadoes.

It’s not like Jessep, Florida, my hometown, ever saw the kind of tornadoes that inflicted real catastrophic damage. The kind we got were the small ones. The occasional shingle-shifter or tree-toppler.

Yet somehow, all of my nightmares since Bear went away have revolved around the descending spirals of doom. Leveling buildings, farms, towns…

Lives.

The afternoon storms had been rolling in with a vengeance over the past several days. Darker. More menacing. Like they were trying to send me a message of darker days ahead.

The clouds were at war with the sky, just like I felt as if I was at war with myself. Love and hurt both existing in equal measure inside me. It turned physical and after a few days had developed into a devastating full body ache.

A dark line of clouds approached, encroaching on the blue sky as the afternoon’s impending storm made itself known. Rolling and billowing toward me, my nightmare coming to life.

I was swept up in the fear that—at any second, I was certain—spiraling clouds would descend from the sky right above my head. I found myself waiting for the moment that the tornado was going to strike and inflict more damage than most people could possibly imagine.

Than most people could handle.

I could almost feel the wind, the wreckage. The sensation of being picked up and slammed back down over and over again.

To me, a tornado has always been the force of nature capable of the most damage.

Until I met a force of nature that would make a tornado seem like a morning breeze. One that picked me up, made me feel like I could soar as it tossed me around, sent me reeling, and threw me back down to the ground, leaving me broken and fighting for my life.

And his.

Bear.

Before my brother died and well before my mother went off the mental deep end, my father used to stay out in the orange grove late into the night. I’d assumed he was fixing the always broken irrigation system or any of the other run-down and failing equipment.

One night I grew curious and snuck out of the house, but instead of finding him attached to the generator or the broken pipes, I found him on his knees in the dirt. The full moon shining down on his face, illuminating his watery eyes as he looked up at the trees as if they were more than just fruit on branches.

It wasn’t even the sight of him talking to the trees that surprised me.

It was that he was begging them.

Begging for a good harvest. For the Sunnlandio Cooperation to miraculously increase the contract, for gas prices to drop, for the workers to stop striking for more money, for the forecasted record frost to skip over our farm.

Then finally, for my mother to love him again.

My heart broke for him right there.

That was the night I realized that all the “Everything is fine, sweetheart” remarks my father gave me every night at the dinner table was the lie I’d always suspected it was.

On some of those nights when my dad was out late, my mother would come and drag me from my bed and into hers. We’d cuddle up and watch cheesy romantic comedies.

It was those movies, and not my parents’ cold/colder relationship, that gave me my first glimpse into what love was. I got so upset when the couple faced an obstacle that could prevent them from being together. I lived for the big romantic gesture at the end. The one that would finally bring them together forever.

Every single time when the movie ended and the credits rolled, my mother would sigh and brush my hair off my forehead. “You know that none of that is real, right? Movies are make-believe. That kind of love doesn’t exist.”

Unrealistic is what she’d call it.

Except, that was another lie, even if she didn’t know it at the time.

Because that kind of love did exist.