CHAPTER 7
Daisy
One day later
I ’m three blocks from my house and it’s raining buckets. I try the half-walk half-run technique, but it’s way too late for that. I take off in a dead sprint for my door, and a few minutes later I’m in front of my house. I’m reaching in my backpack, but I can’t find the key. It hits me that I forgot my small clutch this morning, and where is it when I need it? Sitting on my dresser in my room. Crap!
I run around to the back of the house and lift up the flowerpot. What the heck? The key’s gone. My paranoid dad must have removed it after the incident with Duke.
I run next door and start nocking furiously, but I already know the answer. Nobody’s going to be home in my neighborhood this time of day. To make matters worse my dad is out of town and my bestie Dawna is at the gym, probably with her headphones turned up on full blast. I’m stuck.
What can I do? What can I do? I keep repeating the phrase over and over in my head.
I know if I call Duke he’ll come right away, but I don’t want to set a precedent of calling him when I’m in trouble. My dad’s out of town for the day, so he can’t help me right now anyways, not that he’d want to. The more I think about it I realize it’s my dad’s paranoia that has me in this mess. If the key out back was in place then I’d already be inside and have a hot shower running.
Wait a minute. Duke must have got into the shed to get the tools to do our gardening the other day. My dad surely gave him a key. And some of the tools Duke needed I know for sure my dad keeps in the garage, which is attached to the house.
And when dad and Duke met yesterday, I know my dad stormed off so there’s no way he got Duke’s spare key back. And I highly doubt he just mailed it to him. Military guys are all about security, especially SEALs, so it would be a handoff. A handoff that’s nowhere near happening anytime soon.
So there’s my solution. I’ll call Duke, but just to let me in. I won’t ask him for the key back, because then my dad will know. It’s that or stand out here in this sideways rain that’s starting to look like some of the typhoons I’ve seen on The Weather Channel. I’m not about to take a stray tree limb to the side of the head.
I pull my shirt up over my head and try to dial without getting my phone soaked.
“Duke!” I yell into my phone.
“Are you okay? Where are you?”
“Locked out of my house. Do you still have a key?”
“I’m on my way.”
Seven minutes seems like an eternity when rain, wind, and debris are obliterating you, but it’s probably faster than any first responder could have arrived in my town. I’m on the wrong end of town, at the wrong time, for that anyways.
But Duke is more than a first responder. He’s my only responder. The only person I really trusted in this situation.
I hear his tires squeal, amid cracks of thunder as lightning shoots through the skies. He rounds the corner with a quickness and parks right in front of my house. He’s out of his truck and sprinting to the front door practically before the engine is off.
“I got it,” he says, as he turns the key and pushes open the door with one hand and shields the rain from my face with his other.
The door flies open and I quickly step inside.
“What are you doing?”
“You asked for me to let you in,” he yells over the wind. “Nothing more.”
“Duke, it’s raining outside. I really shouldn’t—”
Thunder cracks and I see lighting hit the neighbor’s tree. The tree falls toward the house and Duke immediately wraps me up, protecting me from the tree.
Luckily it falls well short of the house, but his path to leave is now blocked.
“You can’t leave,” I yell.
“Throw ‘er in reverse, no problem,” he says.
He’s stepped back out in the rain, but he can see the fear on my face. I’m scared not only for this terrible storm, but for him. I don’t want him driving in this. The roads are flooding fast and if we just saw a tree struck by lightening then there must be more.
“Stay until it slows down, at least.”
“I can’t,” he says, but he’s not turning to go.
“Stay for me,” I say.
Duke is standing in the rain. He’s come and saved the day and he’s ready to ride off on his white horse without me. Not because he wants to, but because he has to because of his relationship with my dad.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. “Please, Duke. Just until it let’s up.”
I can see he wants to, but it’s the first time I’ve ever seen him act indecisive. He’s torn between his heart and his head. He just needs a reason. He turns to look at the water that’s flooding the street more and more by the second. By the time his head snaps back around I’ve stepped in closer and I’ve got my hands on his face and I’m pulling his warm lips down to meet mine.