17. Emmy
“Want to go on a secret mission?” my father asks.
The rain outside is thunderous and he’s got his jacket on, so I know we’re going to Main Street to help with the sandbags. I scramble from the bed and he grins, telling me he’ll wait downstairs.
We’ll begin, I know, with Bradley’s mom’s store, though Bradley never comes out to help.
“Bradley’s mom says kids just get in the way,” I tell my dad once I’ve gotten in the car.
He smooths his hand over my head with a small smile. “Moms are wrong sometimes. Your mom is wrong about a lot of stuff, and Bradley’s mom is wrong about this. We’re going out there to protect the stores, but we’re also doing it to remind people that a community is a family, and we have each other’s backs when the chips are down. Kids and adults alike.”
I startle awake in the dark room. I’m sure it’s the rain that made me dream about my father and the sandbags, but it felt more like a premonition or a warning from beyond the grave.
That supposes, however, that my father is dead—something I don’t know—or that he’d care enough to warn me in the first place. Given the way he left, it seems unlikely.
I look at the clock. It’s just after four in the morning, but if it’s rained like this all night, the lake is already flooding, which means the theater—and all the lovely hardwood waiting to be installed in the grocery store—will be flooded too. Even if it wasn’t my father reaching out from another realm, I’m taking it as a sign.
I dive into my closet, fishing out leggings and a sweatshirt, which are the closest things I have to flood attire. I manage to get over the bridge to Main Street, where the water is running a foot high down the road before my car sputters and starts to stall. I gun the engine and make it to higher ground, then park in the historic section and run back down the hill. Water is lapping at the storefronts in the darkness, a vulture ready to swoop.
Fuck.
I’ve arrived way too late. Why the hell didn’t I come down here yesterday? Why didn’t I listen when Liam suggested it might flood?
“You brought this whole situation on yourself,” I say to myself, but my tirade comes to a sudden end.
There, in front of the grocery store’s front door, are sandbags, neatly stacked. And there, a little farther down, are Liam and his guys, saving the rest of the places on the street.
He’s here to save everyone, but he started with me.
A warning ache swells in my throat. “I swear to God, if you start crying,” I hiss at my reflection in the grocery window, “I will never forgive you.”
I walk down to Liam. I’m already so wet that I’ve given up trying to remain beneath the store awnings.
“Why the fuck are you here?” he growls. “I told you to stay put.”
So much for feeling moved to tears. Now I feel moved to punch.
“I came to check on the store,” I reply, “and no man tells me to stay put, FYI.”
He runs two hands through his hair. “And you drove here in that tiny car?”
“Sorry,” I reply tartly. “My monster truck is in the shop.”
“Well, I hope you get it back soon, because that BMW’s likely to be totaled when this is all said and done.”
I throw up my hands. I was going to offer to help, but since he’s being such a dick, I won’t. “Fine. I’ll drive home.”
“You can’t drive home,” he says, glancing toward the lake in the distance. “All that water you came through on the way here? Well, that was at a lower elevation than we are here and it’ll be flooded by now. Try driving into it and you’re gonna get swept off the road at best. Just go in your shop. When I get done here, I’ll give you a ride.”
Fuck. He’s right about the drive home. But I’m not waiting inside like the princess he thinks I am.
I grab a sandbag from the back of the flatbed truck and sling it up against the door of the bank. It’s far heavier than I remember them being, and I wonder how the hell I even lifted these things as a kid, but Liam’s hauled at least fifteen of them on my behalf. I owe him that many in return.
“Do you ever fucking do as you’re told?” Liam shouts.
“Do you realize that I’m a grown woman who’s not under your command?” I reply, grabbing another sandbag.
It doesn’t take long to grow accustomed to the weight, to the motion, and there’s nothing else to do while I wait anyway, so I continue on after I’ve thrown the fifteen sandbags I owe him. Other people have come out too, to assist stores that are not their own. Why are they all helping? What could compel this many people to get their asses out of bed before sunrise on behalf of strangers? And how can they be so good to each other when they were all so awful to me?
My heart sinks because I’m the common denominator. There’s always been something inside me that my mother was unable to like. And there was something that made my dad feel okay about abandoning me, and made the kids at school feel okay about the bullying.
It makes me want to give up, the way I’ve given up before, but a tiny part of me looks at Liam and wants to give this one more shot.
I want to see if just a little of this care they all feel for each other could possibly rub off on me. If I could care, if they could care about me in turn.
We work for hours, until every single store on the street is protected. My arms hurt so badly I can no longer lift them to push the hair out of my face. I won’t be able to do Chloe’s yoga class for at least a week.
“Come on,” says Liam. “I live about two blocks from here. You can get some dry clothes while JP borrows my truck and then I’ll take you home.”
I should probably ask why JP needs his truck, why JP can’t take me home on the way or why JP can’t wait until I’m delivered, but I’m too fucking tired.
He leads me uphill in the driving rain, toward the town’s historic section. We walk as fast as we can, but we’re too exhausted and soaked to move all that quickly. “It’s just ahead,” he shouts, placing a hand on my back to steer me down a side street. There’s something sweetly possessive in the gesture. I wish I could hate it.
A moment later we arrive at a restored cottage with a little white picket fence that looks like something out of a movie set in the 1950s.
“You live here?” I blurt.
He looks at me over his shoulder. “No, Em. I just thought we’d break into this stranger’s home to get dry.”
I smile. “It’s just not what I pictured.”
“I’m not sure I want to know what you pictured,” he says, opening the door and flicking on the light.
Inside the cottage is warm and dry and perfect. Completely restored, with fresh paint and built-in shelves.
“Come in,” he says, shutting the door behind me.
He pulls his jacket off. The T-shirt and jeans beneath it are soaked, clinging to his very, very defined chest.
“I don’t want to drip on your floors.”
He kicks off his boots with a quiet laugh. “I’m a single guy who works in construction. They’ve seen worse.”
He walks into another room and emerges after a moment with several towels and dry clothes. Our eyes catch as he hands them to me. In bare feet, he’s a foot taller than me and…very close. Suddenly, I’m considering a lot of ways we could pass the time waiting for his truck.
“Use the guest room,” he says, nodding over his shoulder. “There’s a bathroom in there, too, if you want to shower.”
Apparently, I’m the only one of us considering how we should pass the time.
He turns to go into what I presume is his bedroom while I head to the guest room to change. There was definitely a female around here at some point. Most single guys don’t keep Dior lipstick and La Roche moisturizer in the guest room medicine cabinet.
Are they his girlfriend’s? My former designer’s? I don’t know why I care. I don’t know why there’s a pang in my chest at finding them here.
I turn on the water, strip off my damp clothes, and shiver with pleasure as I step into the hot shower. I help myself to the expensive shampoo and conditioner that definitely isn’t Liam’s either.
Once I’m dry, I pull on the sweatshirt, which is five times too big, and skip the shorts, which would barely fit a child.
I don’t love the fact that Liam has clearly dated someone half my weight, but I do sort of like the idea of being nearly naked in Liam’s home.
And then I walk into the living room…where Liam is pretty much naked too.