AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“That I did.” Unrepentantly too. “What’s more, I bet you anything you remember the dance.”
He was right, of course. “W-well, I’m gay, and I was a teenager in the late nineties, so it would be culturally and physically impossible for menotto remember the ‘5, 6, 7, 8’ dance.”
He laughed, made a gun out of his fingers, pointed them, and then spun round twirling an imaginary lasso.
Like the man had said, it was not what I was expecting, not from someone who was ostensibly an adult, and certainly not from a man in orange waders. He wasn’t by any means a natural dancer. His body had clearly been designed to be shirtless and hefting hay bales around in the hot sun, rather than swaying its hips clumsily to his own rendition of faux-country themed pop music in the middle of a half-flooded street in Oxford.
But there I stood, charmed, utterly charmed, by the fact he did it anyway.
He got to the line about acowboy guy from head to toe, and stopped. “Except more like just your toes.”
“Yes. Cowb-boy guy in a very specific, localised area.”
“It’s important to mix it up.”
“Oh yes. I’m a”—I wanted to say badass, but I didn’t trust myself with aband adso close to each other—“maverick. Mixing it up. Is totally what I do.”
He grinned. God. Dimples. And I caught myself wondering if he had any more. At the base of his spine. Above his hips. All full of freckles.
“So anyway,” I blurted out frantically, “w-what’s your excuse?”
“Excuse?”
“For listening to Steps.”
“I told you, two kid sisters.”
Oh.
There it was again: mischief, filling up his eyes like light. “And, as you say, gay teenagers in the late nineties didn’t have much choice.”
Oh.
“Plus, I’m kind of a connoisseur of pop. The cheesier the better. If you think about it, ‘5, 6, 7, 8’ is almost a precursor to ‘Gangnam Style.’ It’s all about the—”
His lasso hand came up again.
“You wouldn’t dare.”
He dared.
And laughing with him, right there on the pavement outside my house, felt a little bit like dying. As though I might never breathe the same again.
“You’d better go,” he said. “Have a good long shower, and getthose clothes cleaned. You don’t have any exposed cuts, do you? And you didn’t ingest any flood water?”
That was when I remembered: he was kind, and this was his job, and suddenly I wasn’t laughing anymore. I wasn’t anything. And I hated both his kindness and his job because they felt so close to something else. Something they weren’t.
Flirting. I was pathetic.
So I reassured him, thanked him, and went inside, where I showered and cleaned my clothes. The washing machine thrashed softly beneath the fresh falling rain, and I was somewhere out of time, marooned in the middle of an afternoon.
Later that evening, a knock on my door and the blur of a yellow jacket through frosted glass made my foolish heart flutter.
But it wasn’t him.
His little task force was going to door to door, warning each of us in turn that we might flood, either tonight or tomorrow, as river levels were predicted to peak. An emergency shelter had been set up in the Blackbird Leys Leisure Centre, but I didn’t want to go. And, from a quick glance down the street, it didn’t look like anyone else did either.
I packed a bag, though, as I’d been told, bunged up my toilet, turned off my electricity, gas, and water, and then went next door to check on Mrs. P.
