Page 18 of Absinthe Dreams
It was a cute little place – modern build, but made to look old and fit the charm of the original neighborhood. There was something like a second bedroom to it, but it was more like maybe an office space. She had turned it into a cozy little library and reading nook. It had a comfy chair in a corner, and the shelves against all four walls were nice and matched, a rich dark wood and floor to ceiling. There wasn’t anything cheap about the place, and while there was still a lot of room on several of the shelves, the rest were mostly filled.
There were a lot of medical texts and journals, old-school looking copies of things like the illustratedGrey’s Anatomy. I was pleasantly surprised to see some large illustrated tomes for some old-school classics. Things like Milton’sParadise Lost,Dante’s Inferno, and the collected works of Poe.
I slipped Milton off the shelf and smiled in appreciation. The illustrations were the Gustave Doré woodcuts, and they wereabsolutely divine. The black-and-white prints as timeless as the text they depicted.
She had good taste.
I opened the epic poem to a random spot and let my eyes travel the lines…
We can create, and in what place so e'er
Thrive under evil, and work ease out of pain,
Through labor and endurance…
Yeah, that definitely was a sign for me. Wasn’t that just what we were trying to do? The club, I mean. We were trying to create something from nothing with the distillery. Go legit and back off from the rough shit and secure a future. Yeah, we’d probably always operate under the shadows and evil – we couldn’t entirely escape that. But in this day and age? Who could?
Shit, even the good doctor was finding that shit out the hard way.
Who knew stopping a bona fide fuckin’ serial killer would come with such a brutal punishment?
Cops and the hospital were more interested in the optics. They didn’t want to look unfavorable in the public eye – and so they’d rather keep it under wraps than anything.
It was a tale as old as time, and one you saw more often than not on the fringe. She was right to call me. I was glad she’d called me.
I shut the large tome and slid it back onto the shelf.
I was used to not getting any sleep, and even though I was tired, I was also too jazzed to try and crash right now.
Instead, I quietly moved through her home and took stock of her life.
Seemed that she’d sacrificed friends and her social life on the altar of success in the medical field.
I knew something about that. Shit, if it wasn’t for the club, I wouldn’t have anything even close to resembling friends.
It was strange moving through her space, but nice. Learning about her through the pictures on the shelves, the knick-knacks, and the titles she owned.
She liked mysteries and thrillers aside from classic poetry.
I didn’t find any romances, probably because she was entirely too logical or pragmatic for those things.
She knew the life, dealt with the aftermath of it at her job on the regular. Hard to be romantic after so much blood and the heartbreak of long prison terms.
The fact that she’d remained so compassionate even through it all spoke to a quiet and admirable strength.
I fully admit, I’d wondered about her from the moment those seafoam green eyes of hers had met mine above the blue hospital mask she’d had on as she’d worked on keeping my ass alive all those years ago.
She didn’t know how grateful I was. How I felt that she’d reached down, down, down, anddown,with me sitting at rock bottom – shot to shit by my own club, and how she’d grasped my hand and lifted me up. Making me believe there was still some good in the world the way she’d gone to bat for me with her colleagues to make sure I was right proper taken care of.
My turn.
I was like a kid in a candy store, learning about her, wandering through her small house for hours, and yeah, pretty sure if she knew, she’d be creeped – but I just couldn’t help myself.
I’d dreamed of this a countless number of times, and I had to say, the reality of it far outdid any fantasy my mind could come up with.
The birds were out there chirping by the time I pushed off her bedroom doorway, just watching her sleep, and went back into the living room to the couch to lie down.
It was several hours later when I woke to the soft sounds of her moving around the kitchen. She was trying to be quiet, but I slept on a hair trigger. Part of that was a fucked-up childhood with a drunk stepdad with a whole lotta issues. Some of it was the life I led now, especially with the crazy peckerwoods up our asses by way of the Bayou Bitches.
