Page 85 of Cognac Secrets

“Man, I’m fine,” I said. “I don’t know if they’re going to let her come home tonight. She took a bad knock to the head, lost consciousness, threw up. She’s lucky to be alive right now. She could have aspirated or?—”

“She didn’t, Bennie,” LaCroix told me. “She didn’t do any of those things you’re thinkin’. Just stay in the truck with thoughts like that. Stay with your woman. The club has your back.”

I sighed, a thing deep and full of regret.

“I feel like I’m letting you guys down,” I confessed. “First Louie, then the rest of you when it comes to the plans surrounding Louie. I feel like a damn mess.”

“First of all, you didn’t fail Louie. You did everything you could and kept him from dyin’ alone. Second of all, plans are still moving, and you’re the one that put ‘em in place. Every road has its speed bumps. You just be hittin’ ‘em one after the other – you got this, we got you – nothing is moving without you and we ain’t held up yet. Just feels that way from your perspective.”

I stopped for a second to think about that, and it just about blew my mind thathe was right… just so fucking much had happened in such a short amount of time, I was losing just about all sense of time.

“Thanks, man. I mean that, thank you. I needed that reality check.”

“A brother’s always got your back,” LaCroix said. “Go see to your woman. Club’s got you both.”

“Thanks,” I said and the line went dead in my ear.

I sighed and lowered the phone and looked around. The waiting room was deserted, and it was just me.

I was afraid of being alone with my thoughts more than just a little bit. The stress was catching up to me. I could feel myself going in that bad way, but there wasn’t anything I could really do about it or to fix it, you know?

All I could do was sit here and wait for the word about Sandy.

After an hour, I went up and asked what the fuck was going on, only polite like. I wasn’t trying to get my ass thrown out of a rural ER while my girlfriend languished inside.

They said they’d check on her, but when a half an hour went by and no one came out, I really started to worry. I went up again to the dude at the desk and he frowned and picked up the phone and called back again.

“Yes, the family of patient…one-thirty-fouris asking again for a status update.” He was quiet and listening a minute. “Right. Okay. Sure. I’ll tell them. Thank you.” He hung up and said, “She was still in imaging the first time you asked and they wanted to get her back to her room and all settled in before they talked to you. She’s upstairs now, in room two-twenty-eight. Just take that bank of elevators to the second floor and go right.”

“Thanks,” I said and it came out a little more gruffly than I’d intended. Looked like we were going to be here overnight. She’d been officially admitted.

Shit.

CHAPTERTWENTY-EIGHT

Sandrine…

Imaging sucked. Getting my dislocated, but thankfully not broken, shoulder back into its socket sucked worse… by comparison, getting the stitches through my eyebrow where it’d split when I’d crashed to the garden path outside Gerard’s didn’t suck so bad – but honestly, I was glad Bennie missed those parts. I was a whiny little bitch and didn’t want him to see it.

Sitting around waiting sucked pretty hard, too… and asking and them not telling me anything but ‘soon’ when it came to when I could see Bennie was making me cranky.

Like, if we were both stuck waiting, why the hell couldn’t we waittogether?

I hated hospitals… with a passion. Hated coming to them all the time when I was a kid for my mom when she was going through surgery and treatment. Hated how my father made fun of her and berated her for no longer being a woman after her radical mastectomy.

I could officially say, now that I was a patient, that I wasreallynot a fan to the point I’d pretty much rather die than be imprisoned in one ever again.

I was devastated when they told me the results of the CT had them worried and that they wanted to keep me overnight for observation.

I askedagainwhen they would let Bennie back to see me, and finally I was told pretty much not until I was admitted and when I was in my room for the night.

That’d hit hard. I didn’t understand why they were being such fucking dicks about it, and as they wheeled me through the hallways, I just sat stiff and silent, my rage about the unfairness of it all trickling down my cheeks.

When he batted the curtain aside to come into the room, I nearly pissed myself with relief and held out my good arm making a grabby hand motion for him to come over to me.

“Hey, easy,” he said. “I’m here, I’m right here.”

I cried and held onto him as tight as I could while he held me back and whispered that he had me… and all I could really think about was how one second I was on the side of a busy freeway with the Louisiana State Trooper, a stranger, and how he’d just suddenly appeared, running up the side of the road from behind the patrol car with its flashing lights.

---