“Excuse me,” she said. She swept her hand back and forth and realized he had straddled the step, jamming his good leg between this rung and the next, resting his cast on the step below them.
“Sit with your back toward me.” He had taken his arms out of his parka, leaving it hanging from his shoulders. She did as directed, drawing her knees up, draping her coat over them like the proverbial wet blanket. He wrapped his arms around her. “Better?”
“A little, yeah.”
“It won’t keep us in the long run. It’d take our clothes three days to dry out in this humidity, and the temperature can’t be much above forty degrees. But I’ve always found it’s easier to think when you’re warm.”
“This isn’t exactly warm.”
“Give it some time.”
She let her head tip back. He rested his cheek against her hair. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest as he sighed. “I should have made you stay in the car,” he said.
“Darn right, you should have.”
He laughed, and she joined him, laughing helplessly and shivering and clutching at her coat so it didn’t fall.
Eventually, they fell silent. Where their bodies met, wet shirts crumpling between them, she began to feel warm. Even the damp underside of her coat didn’t seem as frigid as it had a few minutes ago. “I think we’re throwing off heat,” she said.
“It wouldn’t surprise me.” His voice was dry.
She opened her mouth to make a joke and was amazed to hear herself say, “I’ve thought about this.” He was quiet. The darkness, the anonymity of it let her go on. “About you holding me, I mean. Not about being stuck in a wet, freezing cellar. In fact, when I imagine it, it’s usually in a much warmer place. With fewer clothes on. And, of course, none of those inconvenient moral issues hanging over us. So it’s pretty much a fantasy. Free-floating. Please stop me before I make more of an ass of myself than I already have.” Her cheeks were so hot she could have steamed her coat dry with them. “Sorry. I tend to babble when I’m nervous.”
He tightened his arms around her. “I know,” he said, his voice low in her ear. Then she felt his lips on her cheek, and she turned her head, and his mouth slid over hers and they were kissing. It was sweet, so sweet, and as his mouth moved over hers she felt a string she hadn’t known was tied tug free inside her chest, and everything that made her who she was fell open to him. She made a noise, encouragement, maybe, or applause, and he slanted against her harder, his hands tangling in her hair. His mouth, his hands, the moan trapped in his throat made her mindless. She licked, kissed, stroked, clutched, utterly lost in him until a twist of her hips sent her coat slithering down across her knees, heading for the water below. She yanked free of him and grabbed it before it fell.
They both froze. The cold, damp air chilled her blouse, raising gooseflesh all along her arms. She could hear him, rasping for breath.
“I’m-,” he started to say, and she cut him off.
“Don’t say you’re sorry.”
“God, no.” In the pause, she could hear him trying to catch his breath. “Are you?”
She ought to be. She knew that. “No,” she said.
Another sharp breath. She thought she could feel him, leaning toward her. Then he said, “This isn’t the time. Or the place.” His voice was thick and harsh.
There isn’t any time or place, she wanted to cry, but she kept it to herself. Instead she said, “Hold my coat. I’m going to try the other door.” A jolly wade through icy shin-deep water should cool her ardor. She thrust the coat at him and went down the stairs by hand and foot. They weren’t as far above the water as she had thought, and when she stepped off the stairs into the icy murk she knew why.
“The water’s rising.” She tried to keep her voice calm. “It’s up past my knees now.”
He swore. “The river,” he said. “It’s rising.”
“What?”
“Every year, we get some flooding with the snowmelt. Add in a few hard rains, and presto. Flash flood. Goddamnit.”
His muffled swearing followed her as she sloshed across the floor, hands outstretched. She cast about for the other stairs, and had a moment of disoriented panic before whacking into a semisubmerged step. She crawled out of the water to the top and pushed against the trapdoor. She shoved and rattled it for form’s sake, but she knew she wasn’t going anywhere.
“Any luck?” he called. His voice spread through the darkness, lapped against the outermost walls. She realized the cellar was bigger than she had thought, probably encompassing the entire footprint of the building.
“It’s not budging.” She gritted her teeth and descended into the water again. “Any idea how deep it’s likely to get?”
“Deep. The Millers Kill has been known to rise ten feet above normal, and we’re well below water level right now. There must be a weak spot in the foundation.”
“It’d have to be more than a weak spot. It’s got to be coming in by the gallon to rise this quickly.” She waved her hands in front of her and struck a brick column. She paused. “I don’t hear any water rushing.”
“Probably a chunk missing near the cellar floor. Could be this place is partially underwater most of the year, except maybe midsummer when the river is at its lowest. The good news is, the ceiling is definitely above water level, even when the river’s high, like it is today.” His voice was much closer. She sloshed forward, gritting her teeth against the cold slicing into her legs.
“And the bad news?”
“It’s not much higher. If the water rises to level with the Millers Kill, we’ll be sitting in it up to our necks.”
In water a few degrees above freezing. He didn’t have to spell it out for her. As the heat leached from their limbs, they would go numb. Then, as their bodies started to shut down, they would get sleepy. Finally, when their core temperatures cooled to seventy degrees, they would die. She had seen a special on the Discovery Channel that had said fishermen in the North Atlantic could survive ten minutes in the water without survival gear. She and Russ wouldn’t last much longer.
She collided with the stairs. “I think there may be a way out,” Russ said as she hauled herself, dripping, up the steps. “I think there may be a bulkhead here somewhere.”
“You mean a door in the cellar? With steps coming down from the street?” She sat on the rung below him.
“C’mere,” he said, wrapping his hands around her arms and lifting her into the cradle of his legs. He drew her close and tossed her coat over her. “There’s nothing on the street side. But I’m pretty sure I remember seeing one facing the river. I used to fish all along the kill back when I was a kid. It was a long time ago, but it’ll still be here. Somewhere.”
“But if it’s facing the river, wouldn’t it be underwater, too?”
“Maybe. But even so, we’d be out of here. At the worst, we’d be carried down-river some until we could swim for the shore.”
“No, at the worst, we’d be swept away in the freezing water and drown.”
“Yeah. Well.” He tightened his hold on her. “I’m going to try it. I want you to sit tight on these stairs.”
“So I can be the girl from Titanic who stays high and dry while you, the guy, vanish beneath the icy waves? I don’t think so.”
“Didn’t we just agree you should have stayed in the car?”
“I was joking.”
“Clare.” Maybe it was the total darkness that made his voice so intimate. “If anything were to happen to you, I’d…”
“You’d what?”
The darkness, and the sense that they were the only inhabitants of a world bound by the unseen walls stretching out around them.
“I’d walk into my brother-in-law’s field and lie down and let the corn grow up around me.”