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“You mean he didn’t cross any lines?”
“No, I mean you shouldn’t cross those lines, Abigail. Good grief.” Then she stomps off and calls “Go to bed, Abigail!” at me.
“Yes, ma’am!” I call back.
Ethan holds the front door open for me when I turn to go back inside.
“Sorry. Did I wake you?” I ask.
“Your side of the bed was cold,” he admits. “It didn’t feel right.” He looks toward Gran’s cabin. “She okay?”
“I was trying to get her to tell me if Pop put the moves on her, but she stopped my prying.” In a way only Gran can do.
“You think Mr. Jacobson tried something with her?” He looks appalled at the idea.
“I know she’d like for him to.” He looks even more appalled.
He scratches his chin. “Maybe we should tell him.”
I laugh. “Oh, I’m pretty sure he knows.” Gran’s about as subtle as a heart attack. I step up onto my toes and kiss him. He isn’t wearing a shirt, so I can see all his muscles. “You sure are pretty,” I say quietly.
He rolls his eyes, scoops me up into his arms, and takes me to bed. “You do
n’t have to flatter me into sex.”
“What do I have to do, then?” I ask as he pulls my shirt over my head.
He grins wickedly. “Just breathe.”
But I lose my breath with what he does next, and that’s quite fine with me.
36
Abigail
“I’m beginning to think this rain is never going to stop,” Gran says from her spot at the kitchen table where she’s shelling peas. I have never understood why anyone would want to shell peas when you can buy a whole can for less than a dollar, but she enjoys doing it. When she’d found them in a bushel basket at the tackle shop, she’d been overjoyed.
“It’s supposed to stop later today,” Ethan says as he walks in. He had to go and move some things around for Mr. Jacobson, but he has been inside most of the past three days, while the hurricane has stalled on the coast exactly the way Mr. Jacobson said it would. It was a category four when it hit the coast, and it has sat and churned, which gave us a little wind and pouring rain that hasn’t quit yet.
“How bad is the flooding?” I ask him.
“Pretty bad,” he says. “The campground is under water. Mr. Jacobson is glad he had me go tie down all the picnic tables before the storm hit, or we’d find them at the bottom of the lake when all this is over.”
He pulls his hat off and brushes his wet hair back from his face. “Mr. Jacobson is monitoring the police scanner. Five Mile Bridge is under water.”
“All the way under?” I ask, aghast. Five Mile Bridge, a bridge whose name is not appropriate at all since the bridge is only about half a mile long, usually has about fifteen feet of clearance between it and the water.
“Like, you can’t see the rails of the bridge under,” he clarifies.
He walks to the bedroom to get a dry shirt. He has a few things here, but most of his clothes are at his cabin which is where we sleep. We seem to have fallen into a rhythm of eating at Gran’s every night after he gets off work. For the past three days the schools have been closed because of the storm, so Mitchell has stayed with me during the day.
Right now, Mitchell is sort of upside down on the couch, reading a comic book. His feet rest on the back of the couch, and his hair hangs down off the seat cushion to touch the floor. I have learned over the last few weeks that Mitchell is almost never still. Even when he’s standing still, he’s moving something. He might be standing on one leg, or he might be upside down, but he is always moving.
“Did you call your mom?”
He grins. “I did.” He leans toward me and says quietly, “A man answered the phone.”
I lay a hand upon my chest. “A man?”
