Page 9 of The No Touch Roommate Rule
“Fuck!” I croak.
There might be no way out.
No way out…
I bite my bottom lip hard enough to send pain flashing through my jaw.
No. This can’t be happening! I’m only thirty-three years old. I make killer hollandaise. I just kissed a ridiculously sexy man in the rain after dancing all night at my best friend’s wedding. I’m so close to moving off my storage shelf and into a real home. I have friends and family who love me and will be devastated when my body washes up somewhere.
I can’t die like this. I just can’t.
“Help!” I scream, even though I know no one will hear me. No one is here at night. That’s how I’ve gotten away with illegally shacking up in my restaurant for so long. “Somebody help!”
But there’s no one coming.
I have to at least try to get out. Now.
I slide off the front of the counter, back into the cold, murky water, but the current rushing through the broken side of the glass doors immediately pushes me backward.
I grab the counter to brace myself, recovering my balance with an ease that’s comforting. But shit! How am I going to fight my way to the door without something to hold onto?
Maybe if I were taller than five foot nothing, and the water weren’t already up to my ribs, I’d have a chance, but…
“I’ve never hated being short more than I do right now,” I whisper, my voice thin and childish in the red glare of the emergency lights.
The water is everywhere, rapidly turning the lobby into an aquarium where I’m the only fish. It smells like muddy Mississippi and rain, with a top note of sewage.
Thinking about the likelihood that I’m standing in poop water nearly makes me gag.
I probably would have, but my teeth won’t stop chattering.
And it’s not just the cold.
It’s shock from realizing…this is probably how I die.
Not in some blaze of culinary glory, gored by a razorback while cooking in the bush. Not old and successful with my own Food Network show and a line of cookware sold at a big box store. But here, alone, in my underwear, because I was so stubbornly determined to recover from the mess my ex-husband made of my life as quickly as possible.
Christian, my ex, who will probably show up at my funeral and pretend to be sad, like he wasn’t at least partially responsible for the fact that I was sleeping on a storage shelf in a flood zone in the first place.
The water shoves me harder, like it thinks I deserve this for being an irrational disaster with terrible taste in men and outlandish dreams that were never going to come true. It’s the last straw. The final nail.
I’m about to climb back on the counter and wait.
And hope.
And, I don’t know…try to make my peace with a God I’m not sure I believe in, or something, when I see them.
Headlights!
Bright white headlights cutting through the water outside, getting bigger, closer, until?—
Crash!
I wince, my hands flying to cover my face as what’s left of the lobby entrance explodes inward. I’m too far away for the shards to hit me, but it’s hard to think rationally when a truck is barreling through the floodwater like something out of an action movie, sending glass and hunks of metal flying.
My brain can barely process what I’m seeing.
This isn’t real. It can’t be. No way did someone just drivea truckinto my building.
