Page 75 of Absinthe Dreams
She clung to me with all of her strength, and I looked over to the nurse who stood, discharge papers in hand.
“You’re free to go,” she said. “The police said they’d contact you later.”
I nodded.
“Thanks,” I said, and I helped my lady get ready to go.
“Everybody go home,” LaCroix ordered from the center of the knot of us in the parking lot. “Anyone doesn’t feel like going home, head to the Swamp House.” His daddy’s house.
I looked down at my girl tucked tight into my side.
“My house, if you please?” she murmured.
“Absolutely.”
Familiarity would help. A shower in her own shower would help.
I put my helmet on her head, even though it was too big for her, and we rode out as a unit. We only started splitting off and going our own ways once we’d crossed back over the lake.
I pulled up behind her house, everything as we’d left it, and trailed her inside.
“You want me to go?” I asked her and she turned, her hand light in my grasp, a tenuous touch, and I felt incredibly fragile in that moment, waiting for the rejection that would shatter me.
“No,” she said. “No, I need you,” she said.
I nodded carefully and said, “You’re sure?”
She dragged herself into my arms and wrapped hers tightly around my waist, and her voice trembling, confessed, “I must be crazy, after that… but I can’t explain it. I just feel like I need you, now more than ever.”
“Oh, baby… you have no idea how much I needed to hear that right now.” I held her tight, and she broke down in fresh tears. Tears of my own sprang to my eyes.
“We’ve only just found each other,” she whispered, and I felt that. I felt it to my very core.
“I know,” I muttered into her hair, and I couldn’t stop kissing the top of her head. “I know, I know, I know.” I sighed.
I didn’t let us linger in the rear entryway for very long, taking her with me, moving into the bathroom to help get her out of her bloody clothes — her top, jeans, and riding boots. Her jacket was gone, likely in some paper evidence bag with the forensics team.
I’d buy her a new one. Whatever style, color, fuck I didn’t care. She could ask for a three-thousand-dollar bougie piece of gear, and I’d drop it without so much as a quip.
I sighed, and she looked up at me.
“I think I’m going to take a few personal days,” she said, and I nodded.
“Whatever you want. Whatever you need. I mean that,” I said.
She turned and looked into the mirror over her bathroom sink. She leaned in, peering at her reflection, the marks across her fair skin, eyes swollen and red from crying. She looked almost vampire-like in the harsh lighting. Her skin was so very pale and almost translucent with the warring body and brain chemicals she had going on.
I didn’t know the science behind it all, but I’m sure that she did.
“Come on,” I murmured. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
I got her into the shower and stripped down, quickly and efficiently, and got in with her.
She let out a trembling sigh and tipped her hair back into the spray. The angle made her look more drawn. Her cheeks werehollow, her hair slicked back, and the water filled it, running in a light pink stream down the drain.
I tried really fucking hard not to think about that. About how it wasn’t some stranger’s blood trickling out of her hair, tinging that water pink. About how it’d been my brother’s and my friend’s…
Fuck.
