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Huh.
She was so damned sweet. This didn’t seem like her.
Idly, I paged through a few and found they were inscribedto her by the authors. Most of those inscriptions had bled when the books themselves had gotten soaked. I wondered if these were some of what she’d meant when she’d said many things destroyed in the flood couldn’t be replaced. Filing that away, I repacked the books and put them in the closet.
Time to get home for dinner.
EIGHT
FELICITY
I stood at the kitchen window staring out at the moody gray day as rain drummed against the glass. Once upon a time, I’d loved rainy days. Staying cozy inside while mother nature had a good cry and thinking about how good it was for all my plant babies.
But that had been Before.
My fingers restlessly kneaded the fabric of my sweater, as if that would somehow release some of this bubbling anxiety.
“Hey, you okay?”
Startled, I turned from the window to find Gabe with one hand on the fridge door.
“Uh, yeah. I’m fine.”
He just continued to study me with that deep, impenetrable stare. “Why don’t I believe you?”
Busted.I wasn’t used to having a roommate at all, let alone one who was observant.
Feeling more than a little foolish, I shrugged. “Rain makes me nervous.”
“Why?”
“Because it makes me think of flooding. I know it’s not rational. It wasn’t a thunderstorm that flooded my house, but thisis just what my anxiety does. I haven’t really rested well anytime it’s rained since everything happened.”
And given it was Sunday, I didn’t have a day full of work at the shop to keep me occupied.
Gabe just nodded, matter-of-fact. “Well, seems like you need a distraction. You wanna watch a movie?”
I blinked at him, not sure he’d really made the offer. “Don’t you have something else to do today?” He’d been on the go pretty much constantly since he’d returned from deployment. Other than meals, our paths actually didn’t cross all that much—a fact that I both loved and hated.
“No. I’m waiting on materials. And I need to take an actual day off to rest here and there, or I’ll burn out. So, how ’bout it?”
Spend a couple of hours one on one with him? I doubted I’d be able to pay a lick of attention to whatever we watched, but he definitely fit the bill for a distraction. “I could go for a movie.”
He ducked into the fridge and grabbed a Coke. “What aboutMad Max?”
My heart gave a happy thump. “I loveMax Max!”
“I’ve never actually seen it.”
Abandoning my post at the window, I moved around the table toward him. “Oh, my God. How have you never seenMad Max?It’s a classic.”
“Don’t know. Just never did. It’s kinda old.”
“Why did you pick it?”
Jerking those broad shoulders in a shrug, he twisted open the bottle. “I saw some of the books at your place. Had to move them for the work I’ve been doing. I had no idea you were into post apocalyptic and dystopian stuff.”
I laughed. Yeah, I knew I didn’t seem the type. “It’s something I got from my dad. I grew up onMax Max,The Terminator, The Matrix, The Hunger Games.I guess I got into the books because I’m a big reader. After my mom left, I needed to readstuff that was about tough things but that still had a happy ending.”
