The road past Miller's Bend, the one by the creek, it flooded. My car is sideways in a ditch. I had to get out. Marcus leaned past her and looked down the hill. The road below his house was already moving, not standing water, moving water, black and wide, and carrying pieces of fence rail and something that might have been a trash can lid spinning in the current.
He couldn't see where the road ended, and the river began. You walked from Miller's bend, he said. A mile and a half approximately. She met his eyes. Are you going to make me stand out here?
He stepped back. She walked in. She stopped just inside the doorway and looked around his living room. The way people look at a place when they're really seeing it for the first time and trying to decide what it says about a person. Marcus watched her do it.
The room was clean, but unfinished bare studs visible along one wall where he'd been meaning to put up drywall since spring. A workbench along the far side loaded with a motor prop and a coil of marine wire. A couch that had come with the house and a coffee table that hadn't. A single lamp in the corner. No pictures on the walls.
I've got a sofa, he said again out of habit. It pulls out. She turned and looked at him. Not mean, not flirtatious, just direct in the way Clare Bennett had always been direct when she wasn't standing in her family's shadow. I'm not sleeping on a sofa, Marcus.
The sentence did something to the air in the room. He couldn't explain it. It wasn't what she said. It was the way she said his name, like she had rights to it. I've got a guest room, he said carefully.
It's got a bed. It's just got some storage in it. That's fine. She set her heels on the floor next to the door very deliberately and looked at her feet. The cut on her ankle was longer than he'd realized.
It went from the side of her heel nearly to the bone of her ankle joint. Sit down, Marcus said. Let me look at that. It's not fine, Clare. She sat down on the couch.
He went to the bathroom for the first aid kit. Came back and crouched in front of her. She held her foot still while he cleaned the cut and neither of them said anything for almost 2 minutes. The rain was loud on the roof somewhere below the house. Something heavy hit something else.
A tree limb going into the water probably. Or a section of dock breaking loose from down the road. How'd you cut it? He asked. Guard rail on the ditch.
You walked barefoot from a guardrail ditch a mile and a half in the rain. I had the heels in my hand. They weren't useful for walking in that situation. You couldn't have called someone. She looked at him.