Ten months later
“What the hell?” I gasped, jumping at a loud, and getting louder, sound that seemed to shake the walls of our impenetrable fortress. “What is that?” I asked, having to yell to Caleb despite him being just a few feet away, trying to scoot a particularly large spider that neither of us wanted to squish into a cup to bring outside.
When his head turned in my direction, his gaze was uncharacteristically serious.
“That’s a helicopter,” he yelled back. “Landing on the roof,” he added.
And it all clicked then, making me immediately understand his look of shock with just a hint of worry.
If a helicopter was landing on this roof, there was only one explanation.
I mean, sure, in a wine-soaked giddy mood, we’d gone up there and painted our own version of an SOS on it.
Almost out of wine.
So, yeah, it was possible that an actual rescue team saw it, and was going to come and check to see if anyone was still alive inside.
But it seemed slightly more logical to assume that the owner of our palatial mansion where we’d lived and thrived and fallen in love was back to reclaim it.
Just as suddenly as the deafening sound of the helicopter started, it stopped, and Caleb made his way over toward me.
We were both frozen, unsure what we were supposed to do in this situation. I mean, the world ended. All the laws went out the window. Looting and stealing and squatting were all just what we had to do to survive.
He couldn’t exactly been pissed.
“We kept the place pretty clean,” Caleb reasoned.
“You’re forgetting the water slide and the bowling alley and the mural we painted in the dining room.”
“It added some much-needed character.”
It was our very terrible attempt to recapture the day on the beach. There was a boat with both of us on it, zombies on the shore, and one in the water with his ass up. We’d even painted Caleb’s dearly departed big-boobed lady float. And the severed hand I’d needed to detach from my wrist.
ThankGodI’d managed to talk Caleb out of depicting us both naked.
Both our gazes went to the closed door where we knew the stairs to the roof were situated, hearing the hurried footsteps of someone who was likely glad to be home.
I don’t know what I’d been expecting.
But he was a good-looking guy maybe in his early forties with medium-brown hair, green eyes, and a fit frame under his fancy dark gray suit.
Looking like he’d just come from a business meeting.
“Oh,” he said, coming to a sudden stop at seeing us both standing there side-by-side. “Hey.”
“If we knew we were expecting company, we would have put on our formal wear,” Caleb announced, making me suddenly very aware that he was wearing a graphic tee with a big tabby cat smoking a blunt and holding a mojito. I didn’t even want to think about the fact that he was wearing the man we were looking at’s suit pants that he’d cut off at the knees.
I was slightly less embarrassed in a simple black tee and yoga pants.
It had been so long since I’d seen another human being aside from Caleb that I wasn’t prepared for the rush of self-consciousness that assaulted me, making me wonder what state my hair was in, if my skin was blotchy, all that old nonsense that my brain had been free of for so long.
“You two have been crashing here this whole time?” he asked, and he didn’t sound angry, just curious.
“Well, no. My lady here, Catie with a C and ie,” he said, and I had to fight the urge to laugh, “just joined me nine months ago.”
“Ten,” I corrected.
“Ten,” he said, throwing an arm around my shoulders. “How could I forget that extra, glorious month?” he said, and was immediately forgiven. “You pissed?” he asked, point-blank.