Page 142 of Return To You

“Come on.” He squeezes my shoulder and guides me to the living room.

We sit on the couch facing the deck, watching as the howling wind bends the trees. I instinctively nest myself inside Ethan’s embrace when the dreadful crack of branches sounds. Lightning strikes in the distance, Woodbury Knoll strobing eerily.

“It’s kinda beautiful,” I say. Ethan wraps me tighter against his warm, hard, and almost naked body when thunder rolls. “I watched it go down. Our tree house,” I add in a whisper. “Two summers ago.”

Ethan stays silent. It’s possible he didn’t hear me, the noise from the storm is so loud. But he pulls me against him and kisses my hair tenderly. So maybe he did hear me. Maybe he did and he’s just like me. There’s nothing really to say.

Lights flicker and the power goes out.

“Shit,” Ethan says, pulling himself gently from me to stand. I hear him open and close the dryer.

“Are they dry?” I ask.

A deafening crack tears through, the house seems to shake, and Ethan stomps up the staircase. “Fuck.”

As he barrels back down, I jump off the couch to meet him at the bottom of the stairs.

“What is it?”

“There’s water coming through the ceiling. Probably a tree. I’m gonna check. Try to find Damian,” he orders, then steps outside. If trees are falling, shouldn’t he stay inside? As he steps out, another tree falls with a murderous roar, taking the limbs of other trees with it as it lands with a bounce on the side of my front yard.

“Ethan!” I shriek. “Come back here!”

“Shit,” he says as he steps back inside. The wind recedes as quickly as it had picked up, but the rain persists, long, steady sheets of water coming down. “D’you have a bucket? Or three,” Ethan says, looking up. The telltale plop-plop-plop of a water leak is unmistakable.

“Under the kitchen sink,” I say as I go to the bathroom to take another one.

We both run up the stairs. There’s a mostly empty room at the end of the hallway, but of course that’s not where the leak is. No, it’s where Skye’s bedroom is. Right next to her bed. Ethan starts pushing the furniture away from the water, and I roll the area rug and hoist it out of the room. The first bucket is almost half full already.

Ethan frowns when he sees me. “It’s not safe here. Wait for me downstairs.”

I empty the bucket in the small upstairs bathroom and return to find him leaning out the window.

“Ethan!” I screech.

He pulls back in, shuts the window, and shakes the water off his hair. “Yeah, babe?”

“What are you doing?”

“A huge branch fell through your roof. It’s not safe here. Pack a change of clothes. Soon’s the front is gone, I’m taking you out of here.” He takes my hand and pulls me down the stairs. “Call your parents, see how they’re doing. See if I can drop you off there. The roads to the farm might be cut off by fallen trees.” He stomps to my bedroom and looks under the bed. “Come here kitty-kitty. Come on!” He pulls a trembling Damian out. “Got a bag for him?”

The protective streak is sweet. “I’d rather stay here and look after my house.”

Ethan turns around, Damian cuddled in his arms. “I’ll look after your house. I’m gonna go find tarp. I’ll see what needs to be done to the roof. But I can’t do that if I’m worried about you.”

Seriously, how can I resist that? The vision of my little cat protected by his muscular arms. The idea that he’s putting me out of danger so he can take care of my house.

The wind is receding, but the rain keeps falling steadily, with no sign of letting up. There’s an ominous crack upstairs.

“Let’s go,” he says, seeing my resistance weaken.

When we get to Mom and Dad’s, they’ve lost power too. To top it off, their basement is flooding. There’s a small brook behind their property that’s generally dried out in the summer. With the sudden rain, that seems to have hit the whole state, it overflowed with a rage, and water quickly seeped inside the house. “There’s a washer and dryer, plus a freezer down there,” Dad says, standing uncertainly at the top of the basement stairs.

“Where’s the breaker box?” Ethan asks.

“Over there,” Dad answers.

Ethan shuts the power off. “Safer this way, when the power returns.” Then he asks, “You have a generator?”

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