paper rings (l.h.)

55

Mary's POV

I had retreated back to the top stair as the water began rushing past me, along with patio furniture and various pieces of plywood alike. My teeth chattering and my hand around the post on the front step, I felt my hair blow in the wind as I tried to find the safest way back home. My information on my stomach felt like it was branded in my skin, the idea that it might be the only way someone would know who I was nauseated me. I tried not to think about it as I stared down a car in the distance. Driving slowly, headlights and wipers barely doing anything against the downpour. The car floated instead of drove, and I couldn't help but wonder if they had people at home who relied on them, too.

And I had stayed in one place for too long, the rushing water forced me to fall forwards and sent a large, half rotted sheet of nail-covered plywood into my thigh.

I reached down to rub my hand against my leg, at the blood that pooled out of the skin where it hit me and nearly dragged me downstream with it. After only catching myself on the guardrail to the building a few paces East, I decided watching and praying from the front step of the restaurant could be my best and only option.

So half soaked and freezing, I brought my knees up to my chest as I watched the water rise. Storm surge of up to eight feet, the weatherman had said. Why hadn't I known about this earlier?

It was too late now. Half the buildings around me were boarded up, surrounded by sandbags that did nothing against the water that splashed against their front doors. I watched as it slowly inched up, step by step, closer to where I sat atop this patio. Surely, I had no clue how to get up to the attic. I didn't know how to get to the roof if I thought that I had to. I was too busy watching the owners of the vehicle from earlier climb to the top of it, out their opened side windows and phones pressed to their ears.

I would have believed I was truly alone had it not have been for the door behind me creaking open, and a baggy-jeaned and sickly-thin chef greeted me with a cloud of cigarette smoke.

"I thought you'd be washed up against some fence by now," Tommy glanced down at me, taking a deep inhale of cigarette smoke before exhaling so much of it that I debated diving head-first into the water to escape it.

I blinked slowly as I realize who my company included, now that the rest of the place had fled home and left the new girl alone with Tommy: the same man who wasn't allowed alone with me, suddenly abandoned in the middle of the biggest storm they'd seen since 2016. I ran my hand along the scrape on my thigh, feeling its sharp bite at each movement and each flex my leg muscles made. It hurt, and I'd no doubt need plenty of antibiotics once things get back to normal. But the slash was the least of my worries, knowing that I was nothing but prey who could quite literally not escape.

I watched as Tommy approached the other side of the walkway, leaving me a second of privacy to force myself on my feet. Grinding my teeth, I pretended not to be in heaps of pain as I straightened myself out. But it didn't work, not while my body moved a touch too quickly and send shots of pain down my thigh, into my knees and my hips, something like a yelp escaping my lips.

"Jesus," Tommy's eyebrows raised as he glanced at the wound. "Is that from the water?"

"No," I tried to steady my breathing, to focus my racing heart while waves of pain nearly sent the breakfast I fixed this morning back up and into the water that slowly approached the second step from the top. I didn't want him to know I was injured, or that I'd be easier to become entrapped in his wicked schemes, if any. Still, I owed it to myself not to take any chances. "I'm fine."

Tommy nodded inside, ashing his cigarette on the side of the patio, into the water. "The dam broke."

"What?" I look over at him, finding that my quickest way out of this situation would to be to dive straight into the water, if I were to need a way out.