Page 94 of Bourbon & Blood

“You just tell me what you need and it’s yours,” he said.

I nodded and finished my food, believing him.

As I finished, a ringing came from downstairs.

“Aw, shit,” he muttered and got up, double-timing it down and back into the kitchen beneath me.

“Yeah?” I heard him answer, and it was rough. “Ah-huh. Yeah. Good to know. No, we’ll be in. Yeah.”

There was a clatter as the phone was put down, and I had to imagine it was his satellite phone. He came back up and said, “That was Hex. I gotta go back, but if you want to stay out here you can, otherwise, I’ll take you back to your apartment or the clubhouse with some of the guys.”

“The apartment is good,” I said. “I need to unpack. It’ll keep me busy so I don’t go crazy.”

He nodded and said, “I’ll see if some of the guys can help you, set it up how you’d like it.”

“Thanks,” I murmured.

We went back to the lower ninth ward, to the club, and my old apartment with all my things in it, looking like some kind of whirlwind moving bomb went off in it. As I sank down sitting cross-legged in the middle of what was the living room floor, I had to admit –a bomb had gone off, a hurricanehadswept through, and my heart was the thing that was truly obliterated from it.

La Croix had gone down to make a call that he didn’t want me to hear, so I just sat up here, alone for a minute, and tried to decide just where to begin… because all of this wasa lot. I mean, alot,a lot.

“Hey.” I jumped and turned around to my open doorway, Collier leaning into it. “Shit, sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m here to help. What can I do?”

I smiled and gave a broken little laugh. “Honestly, I don’t even know,” I said. “I feel like my brain just isn’t working. Like I have a one-track mind and that track ain’t here, you know?”

He slipped inside the door and nodded, surveying the carnage of mishmashed random furniture, boxes, and shit justall over the placein here.

“Okay,” he said. “First thing’s first… boxes in the rooms they’re labeled for. If it ain’t got a label, let’s open it up and figure out where the fuck it goes.”

I nodded. “Okay. Okay, yeah. That’s a good start,” I agreed. “Thank you.”

“No sweat,” he said, and I tried to smile. He went for a box, looked at it, and with a nod, carried it off to the kitchen.

I pulled a box to me, checked the scrawled writing, and ultimately decided it readbathroomon it.

We’d only shifted a few things around to where they belonged in their respective rooms, when La Croix returned.

“Hey, what’re we doing?” he asked.

“Uh, just moving things around, shifting them into the rooms they belong in,” I said meekly. He nodded.

“Okay, you keep on keepin’ on with that, cher. I’m gon’ steal Col here and we’re gon’ put your bed together. Call you when we got it to find out where you want it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Before you do, can you put these two bookcases against that wall?” I asked, pointing.

“You got it,” he said and waved at Collier to come help him.

The bookcases out of the middle of the living room and up against the wall by the door eased some of the tightness in my chest for some reason. I started shifting boxes of books over in front of them, so that I could unload them in a bit, while La Croix and Collier disappeared into the bedroom.

Once I’d been set to a task, I found my groove, the one small task leading to the next and the next.

I worked methodically, a room at a time, starting in the living room until the boys came out of the bedroom and needed me to point where I wanted the big furniture to go.

They’d already laid out my bedroom area rug, which I appreciated, and then immediately felt a little bad for having them completely shift it and the bed to a different position within the room.

I sat down on the unmade bed and sighed. It was a box-topian nightmare in here, too. A lot of these boxes only like half-full, and labeled everything from kitchen to bathroom. We got everything not marked bedroom out of there and then it was just me and La Croix for a little while, pulling things from boxes and folding them silently.

He would hand me piles, and I would secret them away into the dresser where I wanted them.

---