Page 29 of Whiskey Shivers

Too late, asshole,I thought to myself.

“Here, sit,” I said and she did, lightly, on the edge of my bed, her eyes drawn to the lofty ceiling that’d I’d tacked up wood like the ol’ cabins up in Appalachia where I’d come down from. A little taste, a little sparkle of home, like the lightning bugs in the trees.

“Take a load off, Fable. I’ll be right out to get ‘cha,” I said with a wink.

She nodded and looked sort of torn and apprehensive… no,lost. She looked lost, and I hated that for her somethin’ terrible, but I can’t say as I didn’t understand it. You know?

I took her bag of girl shit into the bathroom and started the shower up, letting it get warm and reading the labels on everything to find a place for ‘em. The shower shit went into the shower, the other shit? Well, I reckon I needed to build a set of shelves or something, but for now? For now, I put them up as nice as I could on the back of my damn toilet. I didn’t know what else to do. If I put it all on the sink, there wouldn’t be room to do nothin’ else. It was like she collected this shit and had every sort of smell or whatever you could think of.

Not that I was complaining, mind you, I liked the way she smelled. Whatever she did, knocked it out of the park for me.

I went back out to the bedroom where she was sitting, looking a little forlorn, her sparkle considerably dulled.

I took a deep breath and kneeled in front of her, cupping one of her boot heels in one hand and gently supporting her leg above it, just below her knee with the other as I took it from her.

“Thank you,” she murmured. “I don’t know why he thought I would want my boots when I can’t even bend over or use both my hands for anything.”

“Because he was thoughtless, and only cares about himself,” I answered, and she drew in a sharp breath and nodded carefully.

“You’re right,” she said.

“Wish I wasn’t,” I told her, taking up her other foot.

“Why?” she asked. “I mean, I know you didn’t like him from like the word go,” she said.

I took off her other boot, set it aside, put a forearm to my knee, and looked up at her.

“Because I care about how you feel. If you were with him, I could accept that, as long as you were happy. But he didn’t make you happy, darlin’, and I suspect he hasn’t for a very long time.”

She stared at me for a long, drawn-out moment and said, “That’s probably one of the sweetest things anyone has ever said to me.”

“Ain’t that a fuckin’ shame?” I asked softly, my voice pitched low, and I reached up to touch her face. She closed her eyes and tipped her cheek further into that touch, and I smiled. I was glad her eyes were closed. She was sweet as could be, and I wanted a chance but I wasn’t willing to push her into anything. I also didn’t want to be just a Band-Aid.

“Gonna take this nice and slow, okay, Fable?” I asked.

She sniffed and nodded, those blue eyes of hers opening back up, making me suck in a breath that I hoped she hadn’t noticed. I wasn’t in the habit of telling anyone in a position to hurt me just what they did to me. She was so beautiful, so sweet to me, so, just,everythingthat got me going, that I knew deep down, she posed a very real threat to me. I just didn’t needherknowing that.

I hoped against hope that neither one of us damaged the other but rather made two halves of an incredible whole someday, butpriorities.

…and my number one priority at the moment was to get her clean, get her into a shower she’d remember for a long time.

I started by working the straps holding her arm immobile free of their positions, paying close attention to how the contraption worked, but knowing step-by-step instructions resided in her discharge paperwork. The nurse had gone over everything with me in a cursory fashion but I tended to employ some good ol’ redneck ingenuity where it was required and liked to figure things out on my own where I could.

“Okay,” I murmured. “Let’s get your good arm out first and give me some room to work with.”

“Okay.” She laughed a little nervously and had started to blush.

“Don’t pay it no mind right now,” I said, stopping her.

“Do what now?” she asked.

“The fact I’m a man and you’re a woman, and I’m about to see you naked for the first time,” I told her.

“Well, when you put it like that, that’s honestly theonlything I can think about… but I like the way you said that just now,” she said.

I felt myself frown a bit and asked, “What’s that now?”

“That you’re about to see me naked for thefirsttime… implying there will be more.”

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