5| Rum raisin

5| Rum raisin

OTTILIE

I BLAST FORWARD with tooth-rattling force, then back against the seat as the car rocks in place under its own truncated momentum.

I'm vaguely aware of Knox's arm, spread across my middle, like his first instinct as he slammed on the brake was to attempt to single-handedly stop me from flying through the windshield. He pulls it away. I try to call for Gran but discover my voice box won't function.

Knox swivels in his seat to look back at her.

"I'm okay," she rasps before he can ask. "You two?"

"Fine." Knox turns on me, the lights from the dash gleaming on his unspoken question.

"Good." This time, my voice works enough to croak out a lie. We just crashed in a winter rainstorm on a freezing midnight after the end of the world, but I carry on lying because everyone else is. "I'm good. Airbags didn't deploy so it can't have been that bad."

He tries to reverse, then to accelerate, but nothing happens except the whir of the wheels spinning uselessly.

We're stuck.

"Stay here." He opens his door, letting in a rush of freezing wind and wet spatter, and steps out into the gale, turning on a single frail blue flashlight beam that hits the falling rain like tiny blue-white sparks.

"Pothole?" Gran asks as we wait for him to come back.

"Not sure." The car would have tipped if one wheel were in a rut, though.

"We had an opening," she says. "If we'd held up in the Map Room, greeted them, three calm people with guns asking for a conversation, we might have swayed them. We might be back there right now, with however many armed people on our side."

"That's a big might." I'm breathing hard, all the unvoiced anger rising up inside me that she thinks she knows. Did she think Gina would survive whatever mission she sent her on?

"We knew this wasn't going to be easy. We knew there would be adversity, and at the first sign of it, we fled."

My voice is thick as I say, "It's too risky."

"When did it become your decision to make?" she snaps.

It's like I'm standing on a tightrope, the words perched on the edge of my tongue; one breeze would knock them loose and change everything. It became my decision when she killed Gina.

Knox comes back, saving me from unleashing those words, the flashlight revealing rain slicking down his jaw, ice-blue against the relentless black all around, as he ducks down under the roofline to talk. When he talks, his breath makes fog that holds the light like a ghost hovering between us. "Cinderblock sitting right in the middle of the road."

"Christ," Gran mutters. "Of all the things. Why carry a cinderblock into the road when you could be moving water or food or helping a family member? Was it a defense?"

"It was just the one. Maybe it fell off a supply truck? The wheel is done, probably the axis too."

Gran begins gathering her things. "Backup house is only a few more blocks. We'll go on foot."

Knox and I lock eyes in the thin blue flashlight gleam.

Two blocks in an almost frozen gale, uphill, for a sixty-year-old woman with a bad kidney, is a terrible prospect. I look helplessly at the dark townhouses all around.

We could break into one. But any and every house likely contains corpses and the potential for unfriendly survivors.

We definitely can't stay here in the middle of the road.

We have to move.

The backup house belongs to the Alwestons, a wealthy family that owned a housing development business. They self-isolated at their ranch when the plague hit, so we know their Georgetown home is empty, up high, set back, with a big brick wall that rims the property, solar panels, trees high enough to hide a smoke plume, a pool full of water. It's a good spot.

Getting through this frigid rain to a place we know is empty is the best option.

I zip my coat a little higher up my neck. "Let's go."

Knox gets his backpack from the trunk, slings it over his shoulders, then tugs open the back door on Gran's side.

She's wearing a thick coat with a heavy hood. It's made of wool. Her shoes will get wet, but otherwise, she should stay mostly dry.

Two blocks, even in a gale, shouldn't take longer than five minutes.

I grab my backpack and step outside into the gale.

It's falling sideways, charging in thick currents down the sides of the roads, which are made slick with sodden leaf litter.

The rain soaks my hair, dripping blindingly cold down my neck.

We pass two storm drains clogged by weeks of uncleaned debris—suitcases, trash bags, branches, leaves, bicycles, once a corpse.

The water forms wide, powerful eddies that surge down the road, forming rivers that run to pop-up ponds around the blocked-up storm drains.

Repeatedly, we have to slow to step around fallen tree limbs, trash cans, bikes, suitcases, dog cages, and, twice, corpses. It's not long before my coat, not wool like Gran's or Gore-Tex like Knox's, but nylon designed for insulation over water resistance, is soaked through at the shoulders.

My teeth are chattering so forcefully it's more of a clatter.

I'm right behind Gran, who stops abruptly just before a crossroad to step around a fallen branch. I sidestep to avoid running into her, moving off the road and into the street.

What I thought was a cobblestone road turns out to be a pothole somewhere under the river of water running along the roadside by the curb.

My foot plunges down into frigid water that soaks me up to the knee, filling my shoes.

I lose balance, my ass plunging into the rushing water that hugs the curb to find the pavement below, and the motion of the current drags me several feet down the road to a massive pool of water circling a backed-up drain.

I'm soaked to the skin as thoroughly as if I'd jumped into a swimming pool, clothes heavy, making movement hard. The water is only a foot or so deep, but it's strong. And it's cold enough to make me shriek, sputtering and gasping to get out of it.

"Tilly!" Gran cries out.

"I'm okay," I gasp, twisting to get as much of me out of the rushing water as possible.

A set of warm hands drags me bodily out of the water and carts me back to the curb.

"Can you walk?" Knox asks, dragging me bodily up the hill.

"Yes." My teeth chattering painfully, I charge forward and nearly stumble again, but he slips his arm under mine. My legs feel like they're made of splintered glass, every step as painful as if they were slicing apart my bones and sinews. "Let's just … get Gran out of the rain."

Water pours off of me, sloshing out of my sneakers, weighing down my clothes, so it's like carrying fifty extra pounds, and my legs don't want to work normally.

I keep up my momentum as best I can.

"She's soaked," Gran says, rushing in to catch my other arm.

"It won't kill me," I say, my voice little more than a breathless gasp as they tug me faster up the hill.

"Move," Knox says tersely and I know we're all remembering the dashboard reading in the car. It said 34 degrees Fahrenheit. So close to freezing.

By the time we get to the Alweston's driveway, my teeth have quit chattering, and my feet don't want to move.

They talk but I mostly tune it out.

He picks me up.

Because I guess at some point I quit walking.

"Staying awake. Fuck."

Fuck.

I wriggle my toes, but I don't think it works. They feel like potatoes. My fingers, too. Hard, painful, little lumps that don't belong to me, bumping against my coat sleeves, which don't even feel cold anymore. They rattle as Knox jogs up the driveway with me in his arms.

Under the small overhang at the front steps, the wind and the rain die back, then inside, the sound of it lessens, and the silence is restful, peaceful, as is the sway of his body as he carries me.

I let my face come down to rest against his rain-slick shoulder, my eyes to drift.

"Ottilie? Ottilie!" He dumps me forcibly onto a sofa of some kind. "Ottilie, stay awake!"

Awake.

Awake sounds terrible.

It's so peaceful in the dark, and his voice, even agitated, makes me think of safety, a door opening to a place that's warm.

"Tilly!" Gran says, her voice shrill and high-pitched, and that, more than anything, has the first trickles of alarm rippling through me.

I wrench my eyes open heavily.

"Good. Keep those eyes open. You're doing great." Knox unzips my coat, the sound loud, mixing with the frantic rush of his breathing. He yanks it out from under me, and it hits the ground somewhere nearby with a heavy, sloppy-wet plop. "Open!"

My eyes must have slipped closed again, and they seem stuck that way.

His hand palms my face, shoving my hair, wet like seaweed. Then rougher, jostling me.

It's not a slap.

It's a smack.

Smack smack smack to my cheek with one hand while the other wrenches my heavy arms from the sleeves of my sweatshirt, sticking to me like a second wet skin. Not hard, the smacking , but enough that, combined with his insistent, annoying shouting of my name, it gets my eyes opening.

"Here. M'here."

" Stay the fuck here." He's not gentle as he gropes along my body, and he finds my sweatshirt soaked through. "Get me a blanket, Viola. Something. Anything. Rip down the goddamned drapes. I don't care."

No cookies and lazy smiles from Knox, not right now.

He yanks the sweatshirt over my head. Reaches for my frozen pants. "Now!"

The heavy, sluggish things that keep hitting against me dully, I realize, are my own numbed limbs, but my brain is stuck wondering if anyone's ever yelled at Gran before—about me.

Knox peels down my sodden pants, gets stuck at my sneakers and my socks, so he leaves them temporarily half-pulled while he deals with the laces.

There's a loud ripping sound near the window, and then heavy fabric is tossed over him like a tent, entrapping our two bodies beneath a layer.

He rips away my soaking underpants.

His hand slides under my back, unhooks my bra.

And then I'm entirely naked, and the air inside our makeshift tent feels boiling hot on my skin, and sleep feels like a solid goal.

"Don't you close your eyes," he snarls. "Keep those eyes open. Fucking open, Ottilie."

"Use your body heat, Knox. Clothes off for you too," Gran says. "Don't look at me like that. For Pete's sake, people thought my generation were prudes."

There's a rustling sound as he pulls off his shirt, his hips jerk, and a moment later, blistering hot skin slides along mine.

I hiss.

"A little good old-fashioned body heat," Gran continues her diatribe. She says words like thermostat and fire and finally, "I'll go figure out some tea. She's going to be fine. We just need to get her warm."

Gran is babbling.

Knox is snarling.

This must be serious.

I burrow into him, even though it hurts, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, his naked chest pressing against mine, naked thighs, hard and hairy, sliding between mine.

He hisses when my toes touch his calves, and so do I. My toes feel like they're being shoved into an open flame.

"Ottilie?" he whispers. My name on his lips feels insanely personal somehow. "Ottilie?" His lips brush my ear, hot as a brand. "Say something," he whispers. "You can't fall asleep. Not yet."

"M'awake," I manage, and he pulls the drape-slash-blanket higher to cover over my wet hair like a hood.

"Stay that way," he says, those lips dragging against my temple again as he pulls me even closer against him. "Talk to me."

"About what?"

"Mmmm … you hate peanut butter cookies. What's your favorite kind?"

"I … like peanut butter fine," I mumble, words sluggish.

"Just not with tea. What do you like?"

"You," I say without thinking, our hips are tucked together, one of my thighs between his, the other curled around his, like we're two halves of a puzzle, and I've never done this before, not with anyone, so it's hard to focus. I remember vaguely that I just said something embarrassing. I should say something to make it go away. Anything. And fail. "Oops," I say.

He pulls me in a little closer, and the burn shifts from my skin only to the deeper layers beneath, and it feels like I'm being burned from the inside out.

"Your grandmother's making tea. You can sleep after you drink it."

I nod, my nose bumping against his jawbone, where the smell of him is indescribable, like vitality and man and hope, and I let my fingers slide around his ribs and up his back. If my cold fingers bother him, he doesn't comment.

I scramble for something to say and settle on cookies and arrive at the worst one.

"I'd eat rum raisin for you."

That's not what I meant to say.

There's no time to be embarrassed, though, because he laughs, his body rolling with it. "I'd eat rum raisin for you too."

And then my body starts to shake, my teeth chattering again, and every nerve ending I have realizes it's on fire.

Shivers wrack me, too, which has my body spasming against his in ways that make it undeniably awkward. There's no pretending that wasn't my frozen nipple dragging up his chest or my bare vagina against his thigh.

"Shivering's good," he says when I'm just about thinking the awkwardness might be so bad it's worth risking freezing to death. "You're warming up," he says, and his voice is slightly stiff and pained.

"It's not good. It fucking hurts. It f-feels like you're on fire."

And that was definitely an erection I felt.

"Sorry," he says faintly, and from the way he says it, I think he means his penis, not the fire. He shifts to move it away, but all it does is move it so it's pressing against my low belly instead of my hip.

By then, Gran comes back, and I can't decide if that makes it more awkward or less.

"I diluted it," she says as she hands the mug to Knox, and a waft of icy air comes in as the covers shift so he can take it.

More awkward.

Definitely more awkward.

"It's not hot enough to burn," she says, and for a single second, I'm sure she must mean his penis, but then the frozen blood in my brain must warm because I instantly realize she means the tea. "The heat is working now. Set to sixty-eight to conserve power. It'll take a while to get there, though. I'm going to go sleep in a real bed. You two are on your own." Her words are pointed, deliberate, like she's aware of how awful it is to have my naked pressed against Knox's naked with my grandmother in the same room.

The sound of her steps retreating loosens some of the discomfort inside me, but not all.

"Is she okay?" I ask Knox.

"Barely got wet. She's fine." He helps me sit up enough to sip from the cup, keeping me covered with the blanket, which I'm grateful for since it's not dark anymore, with a fire and a flashlight nearly blinding after the constant dark of our escape.

The warmth of the tea slides down my throat, warming my belly as I swallow it down, not really even tasting the flavor.

When I'm done, I hand it back to him.

He sets the teacup down on the coffee table beside us, exposing the inside of an exceedingly sculpted biceps muscle before he tucks the blankets back around us.

"I'm going to sleep now," I whisper.

"Okay. You'll be okay," he says gently, his voice soft, maybe the softest I've ever heard, very different from the way he cursed and shouted at Gran earlier, and somehow, I believe him.

Not just in this moment, but overall.

He's here.

We'll be okay, despite the apocalypse, despite losing the White House, despite everything.

Eventually, I fall asleep, vaguely wondering if lips brushing against a temple counts as a kiss?

It does, doesn't it?

And I'm not sure, but I think the last thing I hear before I fall asleep is his voice saying, "I like you too."

I'd be lying if I didn't say it's the best I've slept in months, years, decades, maybe ever.