Chapter 7
Chapter seven
Luca
This little cottage is set in a tiny yard.
It’s entirely surrounded by mature trees that were here long before someone decided to pay an outrageous price for a lot, clear some space, and build the easiest and fastest thing they could, just so they could rent it for a disgustingly obscene amount of money on some touristy website where touristy tourists have to suck it up if they want to vacation in the area.
I can’t see out the side windows because of the rain, and I haven’t moved to crowd Dulcie at the kitchen window, but the wind is probably doing a real number on those trees. I know what it looks like when it storms out here.
She spins around, wringing her hands. Fear widens her eyes, and she looks unnaturally pale. “Is now a good time to say that I really hate storms?”
“We’ll be okay. The place seems sound.”
“A tree could fall on us and crush us to death!”
“The trees might look like they’re not handling it well, but they’ll be fine. I’ve seen some bend nearly in half at my place in storms like this and—”
Crack.
Creak.
Crash!
Life has a way of proving a person wrong in the most humiliating way. Case in point, my face. But also, the apocalyptic crack, the resulting ear-splitting groan, and the horrific sound of crunching metal and busting glass.
“Fuck!” Dulcie whips open the door and flies out onto the porch.
I chase her outside, but she stops on the edge of the deck, teetering there, one hand out to catch the railing to keep herself from going over.
I grab her hand. Touching her is like pressing my palm to a hot burner.
It’s such a shocking sensation that, at first, my brain doesn’t even register it’s happening, but when it does, my whole body feels it.
“Oh my god. Oh my fucking god!” Dulcie yelps.
Through the blinding sheets of rain, we can both see Dulcie’s rental car. And the tree that’s lying right across the top of the caved-in roof. The tree trunk smashed and punched the thing in so hard that the top of the tree and all the branches and limbs are touching the ground on the other side.
“That’s not mine!” she squeals, pacing back and forth on the porch and doing some rapid-fire breathing that I’m afraid is going to turn into hyperventilating if she doesn’t slow down.
“You have insurance,” I point out. “You always do.”
She stops, her hand hovering near her mouth. It’s shaking. All of her is trembling, and it takes all of me not to step forward and offer her my arms as a place of shelter and comfort. Since when have I ever made anything right in her life?
“I got extra insurance. I… I just… I never thought I’d actually need it. This is insane. Infreakingsane. I thought you said the trees would be fine!” She shifts her hands to her hips and glares at me.
I toe the porch boards. At least they spent some money on composite decking here.
“About that… what do I really know? About anything. I think it’s established how colossally I fucked up your father’s life and then how mine went to basic shit.
I’m clearly not the all-knowing wizard of trees over here. ”
She gulps air, then actually lets out the smallest giggle. Everything she does is beautiful. She said she felt too awful to go anywhere and get food. Wait, no, she said she looked too awful. But she doesn’t.
I don’t think it’s possible for Dulcie to be anything but beautiful. With her messy hair and her smudged makeup, she has a distinctly artistic aura. Some people purposely try to achieve that exact look. But on her, messy is alluring.
She’s biting her bottom lip right now and picking at a hangnail, her mind probably whirring at a thousand miles an hour, trying to figure out what her next step is. Getting one’s car demolished by a massive tree isn’t something that happens every day.
“I can make some calls,” I suggest, instinctively wanting to take care of her.
“You don’t have to worry about anything.
” I extend a hand. She stares at it with burning eyes, the darkness sucking me in.
Something in my chest shifts, my brain goes haywire, and the universe enters a full-on cataclysm.
“You should come inside. It’s cold out here.
The wind… and you’re getting wet. The rain’s driving in.
” It’s not, actually, but it could change in a second.
“You said you haven’t eaten all day. The pizza really is good.
I don’t give sixes turned into eights easily. ”
Whatever it is between us is real. The longer she stares at me, the more my heart races.
Sticky sweat gathers on my skin beneath this hoodie.
It’s not just the sudden onslaught of humidity out here.
I can’t deny the underlying electricity and tension in the air that has nothing to do with the storm. There hasn’t been any lightning.
Storm? What storm?
The only thing that seems to exist right now is us in this strange vacuum out here on the porch. I force my brain to try to think of something to describe it, but all I can come up with is something science can’t explain. I don’t even have a name for it. I’m clearly not up with my mysticism.
But here’s something mystical. I met a woman two days ago, and I felt like I knew her better than I’ve known anyone, including the woman I asked to marry me.
She blew into my life like this storm, and that car over there that does exist because, of course, we don’t live in a bubble.
It’s a pretty apt metaphor for how I’m doing right now.
Mysticism? Try skepticism and cynicism, but I can’t summon either of those emotions properly. Same with rage, hurt, and denial. They’re not working for me. In fact, they’re against me. I shouldn’t even be here right now. I should be staying as far away from Dulcie Piecroft as possible.
She’s right. I could make up with her father without ever having to see her again. I’ve said what I came to say. I should be leaving now.
Or at least as soon as the storm lets up.
I’m so in my head that I barely register Dulcie moving until she’s walking past me.
She holds the door open for me against the wind, and once I step in, she shuts it and locks it.
It definitely might need the extra support.
The rain pelts down against the roof and the side windows with renewed fury.
I’m slightly relieved when Dulcie picks up the plate with the slice of pizza on it and plunks down in the chair. She starts eating, chewing methodically. Resolutely. Like she’s not even tasting anything.
As a man who once made food in all forms my greatest passion, I find nothing more disheartening.
I lower myself into the chair across from her. “Storms like this… they usually blow up and then blow themselves out just as fast.” I think it’s already been proven that I’m full of shit, but her eyes flick to me, and she listens, soaking up the words as the comfort I mean for them to be.
“Hard roads don’t always lead to pretty places,” she mutters under her breath as she studies her lap.
“Sometimes they just lead to getting stuck in the mud so badly that all you do is spin out and wreck your freaking four-by-four system and axles and whatever else it all entails. Sometimes, it just ends in a shitty soup of boggy bullshit.”
I have no idea what to say to that.
“Sorry. I think it’s just the hangriness talking.”
I get a second piece out of the box just to have something to do.
Plus, it’s rude to talk with one’s mouth full, so that saves me from having to make conversation that I’m sure as fuck going to be awkward at.
Like more comments about trees not falling on cars two seconds before it happens, which doesn’t exactly work well with the curse theory.
As in, I’m not cursed. And they don’t exist.
“Do you have a garden?” Dulcie asks loudly to be heard above the rain battering the place. It’s only getting gnarlier out there.
Yes, gnarly. If any word deserves a revival, it’s that one.
“I do. I enjoy it very much,” I reply.
“Is the rain going to wreck it?”
“It might not even be raining at my place. The weather is so weird when you live on the water. It’s extra humid, so the plants grow fast. Sometimes the seeds are up in two days.” I realize I sound like a boring, dry old fart, but Dulcie doesn’t get the memo.
Her lips quirk into a half smile that pulls a falling tree stunt and flattens me all over again. She finishes the first piece of pizza and goes for another. “You’re right. This pizza is for sure a solid six, but I’ll round up too, for the novelty of the size.”
A low groan rumbles through the earth, and Dulcie’s smile drops immediately. She shudders.
“Hey.” My hand hovers over the top of the pizza box. I don’t know what it’s doing there, so I quickly tuck it back at my side. “It’s alright. It’s just thunder this time. No more trees coming down.”
She gulps. “I’ve always been scared of storms. Ever since I was a kid.
I don’t really know why. Nothing bad ever happened to me during one.
I’ve never been in a tornado or anything horrific, and I think the skies are always so beautiful after.
Rainbows are so breathtaking. It’s just… when it happens, it feels ominous.”
She gets up to distract herself. There are a few dishes beside the sink. She runs the water for a long time before it’s hot and then puts the plug in and squirts some dish soap from a half-sized yellow bottle.
“Do you want a cup of tea?” She watches the window closely, as though the storm might come for her like a predator.
“There’s only mint, and the kettle takes forever to boil the water.
There’s no thousand-dollar coffee machine here, I’m afraid.
And the tea was something I found in the cupboard.
It might be five years old. Maybe that’s why it didn’t taste all that great. ”
“You’re really selling me on it. A cup sounds great.”
“There might be bugs in it,” she adds.
“Even better. I’ve been rather protein deficient as of late.”