Page 43 of The Layover

A drop of water hit my cheek, and I frowned. That wasn’t right. Another followed.

Carly wiped her hand across her cheek. “What the…?” She looked up.

The sound of heavy raindrops hit the roof, and little splashes of wet splattered all around us.

“The roof is leaking.” I was already moving toward the ladders and scaffolding from the construction crew, with Raul and Carly hot on my heels.

“Help me move the scaffolding over here,” I barked the order at Raul. He’d understand both my tone and urgency. So would Carly. “Grab the plastic—” tarps, and something to secure them. I didn’t have to finish the command; she was already on it.

None of the individual leaks were severe. A drop here and there. But they were spread at random widths across the ceiling, and I needed to make sure that we stopped the dripping and that the structure itself didn’t look like it was in danger of collapsing.

Raul and I were used to working together without much conversation. When a task needed to be done, especially in an emergency, we tended to each know what the other needed. In this case, it was to make a plastic barricade, and direct any water coming in to buckets at the edge of the room.

Adding Carly to the mix should’ve been stressful, but she fit in like a missing puzzle piece.

As we worked, our delivery arrived. It would’ve been better fresh, but now was hardly the time to care about that. After making sure we didn’t need help, the guy left our food on the table and left us to work.

The entire process took more than an hour of climbing, securing, and rearranging, but when we were done, I was confident our floors would survive the night without being waterlogged, and our roof would survive the storm.

When we sat at the table again, my limbs were weary, but nervous energy thrummed under my skin, and I couldn’t stop bouncing my leg. “Thank you,” I said to Carly. “You didn’t have to chip in like that.”

“I did, though.”

“Have to protect the boss’s investment?” Raul’s joke was weak.

So was Carly’s laugh. “That too. But mostly I had to save this gorgeous old building, and, well, your dreams. And it helped distract me.” The last part was said softly. “Anyway, what is this?”

“See for yourself.” I helped Raul lay out the spread of food. There was fresh bread, prosciutto, and an assortment of soft and hard cheeses. “It’s all supposed to go on the bread right after the bread comes out of the oven, so the heat melts everything just a little.”

“It looks incredible, regardless,” Carly said.

For a few minutes, we were all focused on building our own sandwiches and eating. The edge from the panic had faded from my system, and I relaxed quickly. “May I ask what it is you don’t like about storms?” I looked at Carly.

She made a muffled chuckle-sigh through her mouthful of sandwich, and didn’t seem to be in any hurry to finish chewing. “I love the rain. A heavy downpour, a drizzle, gray and cold, warm and wet… I could spend hours in the rain.” This time her sigh was more obvious. “When I’m home. My home. A familiar place that I know my family is nearby.”

Close to family was a sentiment I understood, but I was fortunate that I was rarely far from mine. “If you don’t want to get into it, forget I asked.” I meant it.

“No, it’s okay. You’ve both met Curtis and you seem to have a good understanding of who he is, so you might appreciate the story more than most people.”

“You mean he gets worse?” Raul didn’t sound surprised.

Carly’s smile was thin. “Only if you piss him off. Or inconvenience him. Or he didn’t have enough coffee for the day. Or…” She gave her head a quick shake. “Besides, I don’t invite men back to my room at strange airports every… ever, so I feel like I should explain that, too.”

I had been curious, but so much had happened since then, that question had been pushed to the back of my mind. “We’re listening.”

Carly took another big bite of her sandwich—was it strange that I appreciated she didn’t seem to have any issues eating in front of us? It was one of those small things that also made her that much more genuine. She washed the food down with drink, and dropped her hands onto the table with a heavy thud.

“Right after Curtis and I got married, he moved us to Logan—that’s about two hours North of Salt Lake—so he could do his post grad work at Utah State. The weather’s a little harsher there, and we hadn’t been there for long when the first blizzard hit. He was working graveyards, I was home alone, and I got sick.”

That had to be rough. I hated to think of Raul or Eloise being alone when they were ill.

“It wasn’t a big deal at first. An hour or so after he left, the snow hit and so did my pain and nausea.” Carly drew in a deep breath and moved her hand to her right side. “I went to bed, figuring it would pass, and woke up a few hours later to more than two feet of snow, and the most intense pain I’d ever felt.” Her wince was the kind of ghost of a memory that I felt in my bones.

“I fluctuated between fever dreams and curling up in a ball and sobbing. We only had the one car, so I was stuck at home, we hadn’t had a landline installed yet, and my cell phone reception was shit. On top of that, I didn’t know anyone in town yet.” She looked pained, and I wanted to wrap her up and comfort her.

I settled for reaching across the table, and covering her hand.

Carly’s smile was sad, but she didn’t pull away. “Curtis didn’t come home when he was supposed to. Or an hour later, or three. Fever dreams plus panic equal some fascinating explorations into the psyche.” She dragged in a deep breath, and swallowed hard. “When I finally got my phone to work, no one at Curtis’s work was picking up, so I called my sister, Megan. She ordered me to go pound on neighbors’ doors until I found someone who could take me to the hospital.

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