chapter Thirty-Four
The following places are within a two-block radius of my house—a liquor store, a fae-run weapon shop and a grocery store. I visited all three in the hour after Desmond left me.
Leary Fallon—the merman or whatever the male version of a siren is—who ran the weaponry didn’t want to sell me a new gun. He looked at my streaked mascara and the paper bag with two bottles of Jameson whiskey in it and shook his head.
“I don’t facilitate suicides, McQueen.”
“F*ck you, Fallon. I’m getting married in three days.”
“Yeah, do you know what the leading cause of suicide is?”
“Being denied guns?”
“Divorce.”
“Bullshit. Just give me the SIG.” I made gimme fingers. I might have already opened one of the Jameson bottles on the way here. Maybe.
“What are you going to use it for?”
“Feral werewolves took my last one. I need a replacement.”
Leary was a weird-looking guy. Not conventionally handsome at all, but because of the whole dude-siren thing he had an unusual appeal to him. His face was too thin, his hair was too long and his eyes were the color of seaweed. He was wearing a shirt that said, It’s Okay, Pluto, I’m Not a Planet Either.
Hilarious.
“I’ll pay double.”
“P226 or P229?” He unlocked the glass cabinet and put two guns in front of me. Nice to know money trumped concern for my life. For enough money he would probably turn one of those guns on me himself.
I almost dropped my bottles.
“You look like you just saw a ghost.”
Not quite. But I had had a booze-fueled epiphany. “226.” I tapped the gun on the right. “How much silver do you have?”
“Only three clips that would work for this. You’d have had to special order if you wanted more.”
“I’ll take them. Do you have a holster I could strap to my thigh?”
“Have you seen this gun? And your thigh?” He held up the big weapon then pointed to my leg. “You wouldn’t be able to run for shit.”
“I don’t need to run.”
“Then what the hell do you need a thigh holster for?”
“Because I can’t wear a shoulder holster over my wedding dress.”
A half hour later I emptied my bounty onto the loveseat.
First, two pints of Häagen-Dazs peanut-butter chocolate ice cream, which the sixteen-year-old at the grocery store assured me was the number-one choice of dumped women in the entire Hell’s Kitchen area. Next, the two bottles of Jameson, one with enough missing that my vision had gone wonky and the bottles appeared blurry, making it look to me like I had four of them. Lastly, a new SIG, three silver bullet clips and a thigh holster that came with the warning, “I hope it isn’t a mermaid gown.”
Leary had thought the joke was hilarious.
He thought a lot of things were hilarious…namely himself.
I cracked the top of one pint of ice cream, peeled off the protective covering, scooped out a massive spoonful and dumped a shot of whiskey into the crater left behind. Picking up my cell phone, I pressed the number six and went in search of a spoon.
“Hello?”
“I’m having whiskey and ice cream floats,” I announced. Even my voice sounded fuzzy. “Desmond left me.”
“I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Brigit brought reinforcements with her. In Brigit terms that meant Dirty Dancing and a bottle of white moscato wine. For when I decided to take a break from the hard stuff. I didn’t want to take a break from the hard stuff. Every time I stopped drinking for five minutes the booze started to work its way out of my system. If I stopped for too long, I might notice how Desmond’s Xbox was still here or how there was a pair of his runners next to the door.
If I saw things too clearly, I might have to acknowledge he was really gone and these things were just remnants. Reminders of the man who had walked out the door.
So I sat on the armchair…nope…I sat on the floor because the armchair must have moved at the last moment. Floor was comfier anyway. I reached for the Jameson and realized I’d emptied the first bottle already.
What time was it, anyway?
“What time is it, anyway?”
“Time for the soothing powers of Patrick Swayze.” Brigit took the empty Jameson bottle and replaced it with the wine.
“I don’t want wine,” I snarled.
“Sure you do.”
“Okay.”
She hit play on the DVD, and Baby started telling us all about her magical summer in the Catskills. I’d never been good at being a girl, but I had to admit there was a soothing power to the movie. By the time Baby and Johnny were having the time of their lives and showing the whole resort how dirty dancing was for everyone, the wine bottle was empty.
“Bri?”
“Yeah?”
“Is he really gone?”
“I don’t know.”
“I f*cked this up, didn’t I?”
Brigit sat behind me, and I noticed the traitorous armchair didn’t dump her on the ground. Brutus.
“You didn’t do it on purpose.”
“But I hurt him.”
She started to braid my hair, her fingers tracing soothing paths along my scalp. Brigit was great at being a girl.
“You love him. Sometimes we hurt the people we love. If he didn’t really, really love you back, he wouldn’t have been hurt.”
“Huh.” I thought about the logic of her statement, and it made a funny sort of sense. “I don’t know how to fix it.”
“You need to give him time.”
“How much time?”
“It isn’t a set sort of number. Just give him time.”
“I need to know how much.”
She tugged my hair. “Secret, be patient.”
“Make up a number.”
“Twelve days.”
She said it too fast. She was making it up. When I told her so, she took the second bottle of Jameson away before I could open it.
We watched an infomercial for a juicer, and once it was over I was glad I drank blood instead of disgusting carrot-and-beet-juice blends. I was also sober, and the emptiness of my apartment opened before me so wide that my grief threatened to swallow me whole.
When Gabriel had left me, I’d promised to never let anyone in again.
Now I remembered why.