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I shook my head back to reality as the power turned back on in the house.
“Keep the change,” Wesley said to the delivery guy as he brought the pizza inside. It smelled unbelievably good. When he put it down on the coffee table in front of me, it took all my energy not to just rip a slice out of the box and eat it whole.
“Can I get you anything to drink?” Wesley asked as he went into the kitchen, grabbing plates out of the cupboard.
“Just water,” I said. I was going to have the mother of all hangovers in the morning — it couldn’t hurt to begin the hydration process.”
The TV cut to a commercial as Wesley filled my glass. The commercial was for the 11 o’clock news, which promised an update on how long the storms were going to last.
“Wesley,” I said.
“One second.”
“No, come look.”
On the screen, the weatherman stood underneath an umbrella on the street with the Dyer house. And the flooding was out of control.
“Oh no,” he said.
With the level the water was at, if the rains continued at this rate, the flooding was going to reach the house within the hour.
“The sewers are backing up,” Wesley said. “If we don’t get there now, the mold is going to be the least of our problems.”
* * *
I was impressed with how prepared Wesley was for such an event, but not surprised. While I was standing around, being useless, he was gathering supplies.
“The thing about owning a house,” he said, tossing sandbags into the back of an old pickup, “is you need to be ready for anything. Because if something goes wrong, you’re responsible for fixing it. Whether it’s an earthquake, flood, plumbing issue, or whatever, I’ve seen it all and I know what I can and can’t handle on my own.”
His biceps flexed as he lifted the heavy bags in ways I didn’t think possible. I was used to seeing him in a suit, where his arms were hidden. Even on the couch, when he was just in an undershirt, his strength wasn’t obvious, but now he was handling those bags like they were nothing and I couldn’t stop staring, and the rain wasn’t the only thing flooding.
“Prevention is the key,” he said. “If we can get there and put out the sandbags in time, there won’t be a problem. The second any water actually gets inside the house? It’s going to cost a minimum of ten thousand dollars. And probably closer to fifty or a hundred thousand.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
The look he gave me suggested that I could figure the answer out on my own, but he gave me a clue just in case.
“These kinds of mistakes,” he told me, “you don’t make ‘em more than once.”
Maybe he didn’t but looking at him and his masculine confidence — someone who was in his element and knew exactly what he was doing — I was ready to make the worst mistake of my life over again. After all, what were the chances of ending up in bed with two bosses in a row that both turned out to be sociopaths?
With the last sandbag in the truck bed, he got inside.
“Come on,” he said. “Hop in.”
The ride was bumpy, and the truck was loud — it had to have been at least 30 years old.
“I keep this thing around, but I hate to drive it,” Wesley said. “It’s just too useful to get rid of when you’re dealing with houses.”
“You can’t just buy a new one?”
“Seems wasteful when this one’s still running,” he told me. “I guess I could sell it, but it’s not worth more than a few hundred dollars. I keep waiting for it to die, but it refuses. It’s just as well. This thing’s more solid than anything I could buy new.”
We arrived at the house as the water level was rising.
“What do you think?” I asked. “Do we need the sandbags?”
“It all depends on what the storm’s going to do,” he told me. “It’s always better to be safe than sorry, but my guess is that the rain stops the second we finish putting the bags out. And if we don’t put them out—”
