Actually, I needed a line of “anothers,” but I couldn’t get Josie’s voice out of my head. “I’ll have a water.”
“A what?” Brandy’s mouth dropped open a bit.
“A. Water,” I repeated slowly.
Brandy looked at me like I’d grown two heads. “Anything else with your . . . water?”
Even rolling my eyes was painful. “Ice.”
Brandy gaped at me for a while longer before heading back to the bar. In all fairness, looking at me like the world as she knew it had just changed because Garth Black had ordered a glass of ice water in a bar was probably to be expected. Despite being underage, I’d been venturing into Brandy’s bar since I turned fifteen, and that was the first time I’d ordered water. Waiting for my H2O, I grabbed a couple of napkins, twisted them, and stuffed them up both nostrils to stop the bleeding. As far as medical attention went, that was about all I needed.
“You sure you don’t want anything else? It’s on the house.” Brandy set a tall glass of ice water in front of me and waited.
“No, I’m good. Me and my water. What else could a man wish for?”
Brandy shifted, dropping her hand on her hip. “I could think of a few things. You decide you need something else, anything else, you know where to find me.” Glancing at the back room, where Brandy and I’d had plenty of after-hours “get-togethers,” she winked before walking away.
Sex was, like alcohol, my go-to when I wanted to block out something like a shitty day, getting thrown from the bull before the eight-second buzzer, or taking a serious beating. I’d already drowned myself in alcohol. Sex was the next thing on my journey toward “healing,” but sex with Brandy wouldn’t cut it. I don’t know how I knew that, or why; I just did. Sex with just anyone wouldn’t work like it normally did for me. When the face of who I did want flashed through my mind, I wished I’d asked for a bottle of whiskey with my water.
I wasn’t going there again. Not with her. Not ever. Once was enough to f**k a man up good for the rest of his life. I didn’t want to be f**ked in the hereafter as well. Not that I wasn’t already f**ked when it came to any kind of hereafter reserved for the likes of me, but that wasn’t the point.
“Since when did you start drinking vodka on the rocks?” Josie slid into the chair beside me and dropped a first aid kit on the table.
“Since never.”
She scooted her chair closer until her legs brushed mine. “What are you drinking then? Gin? Tequila? Hemlock?”
I gave her another tight smile. “What you basically ordered me to drink.”
And I thought Brandy’s face had been shocked.
“Water?” I nodded. “No way.” She grabbed the glass and actually took a sip. “Well, crap. Just when I think I’ve got you all figured out.” She set the glass down and shook her head.
“I go and order a glass of water? Mind blowing, I know.”
She fumbled through the first aid kit before pulling out some bandages and ointment tubes. “Consider my mind sufficiently blown.” She pulled out a few small squares and tore one open. Even though I felt like a panty-waist sitting in a seedy bar having a chick patch up my war wounds, I wasn’t about to get up and leave. I probably should. Being alone and in close proximity to Josie Gibson did strange things to me . . .
Like making my heart feel like there was something more to it than just pumping blood.
Speaking of panty-waists . . . I was so far gone in the land of make-believe and shit that I barely registered when Josie lifted a damp towelette to my face. That changed real quick when she pressed it into the gash above my eyebrow.
I didn’t flinch. I didn’t wince. I all but leapt out of my skin. I was doing fabulous things to my notorious rough-and-tough reputation. “Shit, Joze, warn a person before you douse alcohol on a serious wound. Give them a second to brace themselves first.”
She gave me an exaggerated eye roll, holding the bloody alcohol swab off to the side. “First of all, I hardly consider an alcohol swab to be ‘dousing.’ Second, you gave up the right to call any of your wounds serious when you refused to seek medical attention and left me strapped with the burden of patching you up in the corner of some hygienically-deficient bar. And third”—she had to work to disguise her smile—“I thought you were immune to pain.”
Josie might as well have just slit me open and gutted me for as vulnerable as I felt. She was looking at me like she could see everything, everything, and was waiting for an explanation. I gave myself a proverbial shake before replying. “I am immune to pain, but no man, not even the toughest son of a bitch in the universe, is immune to alcohol applied to a gaping wound.”
“Gaping? Really? You on some sort of exaggeration kick or something?”
I couldn’t catch a break with Josie to save my life. “You said I needed medical attention. If something isn’t gaping on my face, you’re the one exaggerating, not me.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus. You are the most exasperating person I’ve ever known,” she said around a sigh, reaching for another alcohol swab. “For a man who doesn’t seem too picky about his alcohol, you wouldn’t think he’d turn his nose up at the rubbing kind.”
“Let’s get something straight. You, princess”—I lifted a brow until the pain registered. No raised brows for me for at least twenty-four hours—“are the most exasperating person I’ve ever known. And if it has the audacity to call itself alcohol and put a warning on itself saying not for personal consumption, then hell yes, I’ll turn my nose up at it. Calling something alcohol when you can’t drink it is kind of like Colt Mason calling himself a cowboy. It’s heresy.”