Page 7

Chapter seven

Declan

T oday was going swimmingly.

Which could be literal given the amount of water pummeling the landscape. I enjoyed watching storms, but considering this one started with a tree down in my front yard, trapping both me and Noah here…well, enjoyable wasn’t the term I’d utilize.

I switched on the flashlight phone and used it to lead the way to my kitchen, where I kept extra flashlights and emergency supplies in the cupboard. Power outages were something I loathed, due to the unpredictability. Case in point, the lovely tree decorating my driveway.

“Shit, want me to call a guy I know who does trees?” Noah asked. He was close enough behind me I felt his presence, magnified in the dark.

“If you think they could get here fast, sure. My plan was to hit up my brothers for a contact.”

“Except I’m right here and equally invested in getting the tree out of your driveway.” Noah’s voice remained steady, despite the shift in our circumstances. He’d been preparing to head home. The last thing he probably wanted was to be stuck in my house. In the dark.

I managed to grab the flashlights, emergency candles, and lighter I had stored in a bag, and I handed a flashlight to Noah.

“We should get all the blinds up,” he suggested. “Bring in some of the natural light.”

I nodded, which was silly because he could only see what the flashlight illuminated. “Yeah.” My voice came out a little hoarse, and my adrenaline pumped hard. I hated the dark, a stupid, irrational problem of mine that had existed since childhood. I used to need a blue nightlight and the hall light on and the door propped open. Thank fuck I’d shared a room with Ollie. He could sleep in almost any condition.

The flashlight bobbed, highlighting a small scrap of the space until Noah flung open the curtains and blinds on one of the windows. Even with the dark skies, more light still came from there than inside the house.

The wind howled, and the house creaked and groaned horribly.

“Is this going to turn into a Wizard of Oz scenario?” I asked, my voice echoing in the quiet inside here.

“Well, since you’re not donning the ruby shoes, I think you’re safe,” Noah said, his voice the same calm and even as before. I latched onto that. It wasn’t that I couldn’t handle the dark as an adult, but purposeful dark versus forced were two different scenarios. I wasn’t a fan of the latter.

“How bad is this storm supposed to get?” I asked.

“Just a typical thunderstorm, however, I can say since we’ve got a downed tree in your front yard, it’s a pretty fair guess we already hit the worst of it.” Noah sucked in a sharp breath, which made my shoulders tense. “Fuck, we should check your basement. ”

“Go from a dark upstairs to an even darker basement?” The sense of that wasn’t computing at all.

“Yeah, in case there’s flooding,” Noah said. “With the issues in your walls, there’s a high chance the water will trickle into the basement. I hope it’s not finished.”

“No, it’s mostly storage and—”

Oh, fuck.

My workshop.

I bolted in that direction at once, my heart thumping hard. All the work I’d done remained down there, and I hadn’t kept my project off the ground. Sure, the actual data and formulas I had in backups and hard drives, but the demo model I’d been tooling with was on the floor. Papers I hadn’t scooped up rested in piles. Flashlight bouncing in front of me, I ran and tugged open the basement door.

My feet slapped against the stairs, echoing in the quiet.

Thunder cracked, a boom that made the whole house tremble, and I felt the reverberations deep in my soul. I reached the bottom of the steps and swung the beam of my flashlight in the direction of my project.

Noah bumped into me from behind. “Sorry. You darted away, and I wanted to catch up.”

“Yeah, I needed to check…” I directed the flashlight toward the table my battery design was on.

Fuck.

The glimmer of wetness snagged my attention at once. Water pooled on the floor around the table it lay on.

My chest squeezed tight as I approached with slow steps. Noah outpaced me, crouched, and placed a finger in the water.

“Some is coming in but not as much as I would’ve expected, given the shape of your walls.” Noah touched the piece of the battery I was concerned about. The charger that had been on the floor. “Oh, shit, this is sodden.”

My throat thickened. Was it getting harder to inhale?

“Hopefully it can dry out.” He placed the charger on the table. “But we’ve got to sop up the flooding before it gets any worse. Do you have towels?”

I stood there unmoving, staring at the droplets of water dripping off the charger to my battery. The flashlight illuminated it in stark detail. I needed to get towels. Needed to stop this flooding. Needed to breathe .

The charger was ruined.

That’d set me back…fuck. My mind screeched to a halt. Just white, screaming nothingness. All the work, the constant hours, the endless tooling around. My chest felt crushed, like a dying star had dropped right onto it, and I still wasn’t moving.

“Dec, are you okay?” Noah asked.

I opened my mouth, but the words weren’t coming out.

Without that, I’d never end up in the direction I’d wanted. My chance of working in the field I’d longed to had been drowned in a storm.

“Hey,” Noah said, stopping in front of me. He was inches away, and he placed a hand on my shoulder. The careful touch made my skin scream, but still the words wouldn’t come out.

I needed to either be isolated in a bubble or crushed until this terrible feeling was squeezed out of me. However, the panic flared so goddamn loud in my mind. So damn loud. Each time I tried to push words out, they stopped before they had a chance to leave my lips, like an invisible barrier existed.

Instead of trying to speak, I took one step to close the distance between Noah and me. It was a gamble, but once upon a time, he’d known me better than anyone. I leaned against his chest, needing him to understand.

“Oh, shit,” he said, his voice hoarse. Thick arms wrapped around my waist, and he squeezed me tight to him and didn’t let go. Noah didn’t budge, just held me with the force I’d desperately needed. The must from the basement invaded my nose, mingling with a different musky scent that made my body tingle, along with the woodsy cologne that belonged to Noah. His arms were muscular and strong, and the flat surface of his chest was warm. I all but sagged against it as he hugged me like he tried to put my jumbled pieces together again.

Slowly the panic pinging around in my brain receded.

Noah hadn’t moved, standing in this quiet dark with me as the slow trickle of water reminded me what had triggered this in the first place. Yet with the way he enveloped me, his body so much bigger than mine, my autonomic nervous system responded, and the first tendrils of calm filtered in.

This was a setback.

I still had the information from the battery. The demo needed repairing, and that was simply a setback.

That wasn’t a worst-case scenario.

I sucked in a shaky breath and didn’t bother removing myself from his embrace. We stood like this as my processes chugged along, gradually shifting bit by bit. Right now, the contact was the one thing keeping me stable. “Thank you,” I whispered, the first words I’d managed in…who knew how many minutes had passed.

I kept my head against his chest, not looking up at him, absorbing the heat that was bringing me to life, even in the middle of the inky dark with a few slashes of light from the flashlights. Why had I avoided Noah so long when he could feel like…this? Most of the time, when I was ne ar him, my skin prickled, my heart accelerated, and his presence got me discombobulated.

But in a single motion, he’d managed to put me back together, and that was nothing short of a miracle.

“We represent the Lollipop Guild…” Noah sang in an obnoxiously high-pitched voice.

I glanced up at him. “What the fuck?”

“Just welcoming you to Oz,” he teased, though his voice grew softer around the edges. His chest rumbled with his laugh, the vibrations traveling through me.

A snort escaped me, and the edges of my mouth lifted on their own volition. Somehow, he’d snapped me out of the panic-induced spell that had gripped me. Gratitude flushed through me, along with awareness I was still pressed up against his body, those strong arms still wrapped around my body. My cock took notice too, a slight zing. Well, that was new.

I’d never experienced any urges like this toward him.

Granted, since I was of the age to have those urges, he hadn’t been pressed up against me like this.

I clamped my teeth down on my lower lip, trying to process what had happened.

Wait, water. Flooding.

“We should get the towels,” I said, even though I didn’t want to leave this cocoon. Now that I knew Noah could calm me, it’d be impossible to expunge that knowledge from my mind. The comfort, how he’d managed to silence my brain with his crushing touch, made me see him in an entirely different light, and I didn’t quite hate it.

“Right.” Noah didn’t move either. Was it his turn to devolve into a crippling panic, and we’d be stuck here for the next century, neither of us willing to pull away ?

The idea held appeal.

The scent that belonged purely to Noah seeped into me and woke up my senses. My cock grew a little harder in response. While Noah was different from my normal stimulus—women—I couldn’t say I had a fair sample study on men. I’d only ever gone on dates or hooked up with women, so there was a high chance I’d been missing out on an untapped market. I shifted, brushing against his leg. Sparks exploded through me.

“Okay, okay,” Noah said, his voice a little strained. “Let’s go get some towels.”

He unwrapped himself from me, which I hated at once. The loss of comfort was stark, and I opened my mouth but closed it again, the words simmering under the surface. Noah strode toward the steps, the beam from the flashlight bobbing. I started after him as if I’d snapped out of a stupor.

This was Noah Langston, not some stranger. The guy who’d gotten weird on me in high school, who was in such high demand that he always got pulled in a thousand different directions. However, a prickling feeling pierced through me as if I had missed a piece of the puzzle. Which wasn’t uncommon for me, albeit no less irritating.

I ascended, the steps creaking, and the trickling of water pouring into my basement set my nerves on edge again. Seeing the dripping wet charger I’d worked ages on delivered a sharp shard through my chest.

Right, my dreams were suffering a major setback. That was enough to make my cock wilt.

I swallowed hard and continued to my first-floor bathroom. The flashlight beam sliced through the murky dark. Judging by the shuffle and banging of doors, Noah had already found it, and when I looped around the door, he was pulling out towels from the closet .

“Grab a stack,” he said, offering a few over as the beams from the flashlight traveled back and forth with the movement. Outside, the storm still raged, a combination of the boom of thunder and the flash of lighting, and I hoped with all my might that no more trees would be dropping. At least, the few in the backyard wouldn’t hit anything detrimental.

Not like the massive one keeping us from leaving my house.

Which meant Noah was stuck here with me until someone managed to remove the tree. I licked my lower lip, unsure how to feel about that.

I managed to grunt, grabbing the towels and pivoting on my heel to head back down to the basement. My mind reeled as if it kept skipping over a step in a process, rewinding until I figured it out.

Seeping wetness leaked onto the concrete floors of my basement. A shot of adrenaline coursed through me, and I swept over at once, dropping towels to try to soak up some of the mess. Noah had moved my charger to the table, but the delicate mechanics wouldn’t be easily fixable after a drowning like that.

Noah’s footsteps alerted me of his arrival, a thump, thump, thump that matched the erratic beat of my heart.

Another towel was dropped onto the puddle, drawing up more of the liquid.

“I grabbed a bucket too,” he said, “so we can wring out the water and keep sopping up what we need to.”

“Mmm.” I pulled up one of my towels and did like he suggested, words still difficult. The monotonous movements and work steadied me, and we both lapsed into quiet as we maneuvered around each other to clear up the flooding. Even though the floor still glistened when we finished, the rain wasn’t at a roar anymore, so unless the storm intensified again, we should be good. The bucket was almost full from the water we’d gathered from the floor.

I still cursed myself a thousand times over for leaving the charger on the floor.

“Want to head up to where there’s some outside light?” Noah grabbed the bucket by the handle and lifted it as if it weighed nothing.

“Most definitely.” I followed him up the stairs and to the kitchen, where he dumped the water in the sink. Then we made our way to the living room.

The idea of lying on the couch with him, his arms wrapped around me, popped into my brain, and fuck, I wanted that. Instead, we both plunked into seats beside each other.

He glanced my way, and our gazes locked.

“We’ve dodged around it for over a decade, Dec,” he said. “What changed between us? Why don’t we hang out anymore?”

Well, that was one way to step on a minefield.