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"I'm not nervous."
Tyler peered over at her from beneath the rim of his tan hide cowboy hat, an expression of utter disbelief on his face. He took the toothpick out from between his teeth and flicked it out the open window of the car.
"Yeah, you are," he told her, a slow smile spreading across his face. "Why you nervous, Line? You've met these people before."
"I'm not nervous," she said again, glaring out the window where Tyler's discarded toothpick had gone. It took everything in her not to unbuckle and walk around the truck to pick it up and do away with it correctly, but she abstained, surprisingly. It was wood, anyway. Wood with Tyler's spit on it—but just plain earth.
She shook her head to clear it, clocking Tyler's grin as a downhill slope in another small bickering spat cresting between them. "Don't say I'm nervous, 'cause I'm not. I just... have no idea how to interact with your friends."
Tyler let out a little chuckle. "Alright, well, let me give you a little breakdown. Boone's gonna be loud and obnoxious at first—"
"At first?" Caroline said, raising her eyebrows. "He gets better?"
"Oh, no," said Tyler with an amused shake of his head. "Nah, you just learn to live with it. He's a good guy beneath all that hootin' and hollerin'. And Lily—ah, she's a sweetheart. Got a bit of a sour mouth, but who doesn't, right?"
"Kate," Caroline suggested, eyes trailing over to where she was bidding her mother goodbye.
Tyler shrugged off the answer to his rhetorical question. "And Ben, he's just in for the week, I don't really know him all too well, but he's got a damn good attitude for a guy in his mid-fifties being dragged along into the middles of tornadoes."
"I liked Ben," Caroline recalled in a wondrous tone, tilting her head to the side to remember. "Yeah. He's got the British accent. All posh-like."
"That's Ben," Tyler confirmed enthusiastically. "Big fan of the guy."
Kate opened the back door of the truck and tossed her bag in before herself. "You two lovebirds ready to hit the road? Got a long day ahead of us, if Caroline wants to keep this pace of hers up."
"What pace?" said Caroline in a feigned tone of innocent. "Oh, just the fact that we've already test-run this twice today and now we got some good-lookin' cells up over in the west that we need to catch if we wanna run it again, for real this time? Yeah, that's all."
Tyler shook his head vigilantly and let out a short whoop. "Let's do this!"
He floored it. The truck ripped out of the Carter's driveway at breakneck speeds, and Caroline and Kate flew back against their headrests with gasps of the air leaving their lungs.
