Page 8 of Moonshine Lullabies
“Mm,” he mumbled around the penlight between his lips.
“What?” I asked reflexively, and he chuckled and took the light from his mouth.
“You got some glass in there,” he answered. “I’m gonna go wash my hands and shit. Stay right there.”
He went to the kitchen sink and used the anti-bacterial hand soap to scrub up like a damn surgeon.
“You act like you done this before,” I said.
“A time or two,” he confessed. “Most of this shit is just common sense. My papaw is a man ahead of his time, smart as a whip and what a lot of the folks up in the Appalachians would call a folk healer. He learned most of it from my memaw who was a Granny Woman. A lot of the superstitious type of healing. When she died, folks around started coming to my papaw. The man did make the best cough syrup around with his shine and my memaw’s recipe.”
He shook his hands off in the sink after turning off the faucet with his elbow.
“I can treat small things, like a gash or fishing broken glass out of a cut, maybe a stitch or two. I can make a mean cough syrup and I know a fair bit about some other folk remedies. I could probably do a fair bit more ‘n that, even – but some things I like to leave to the real doctors. This? This I can handle, but it might not be something you like much. You want, I can take you someplace they can give you a numbing shot. You might need a stitch or two, but I’m pretty sure I can get away with a couple of butterfly bandages if you don’t mind me shaving a patch of hair.”
“You can stitch me up just fine if it comes to it. You ain’t cutting my hair,” I told him. “I don’t need none of that fancy shit, either. A couple of stitches ain’t worth all that.”
“Tough as nails, you are,” he said, coming back over.
“It’s the Cajun way,” I said.
“You know, you ain’t always gotta do things the hard way,” he said.
I gave a smile that was more a baring of teeth than anything else and told him the truth, “There ain’t nothin’ easy – the only way is the hard way.”
He pursed his lips and stalked over to me – that’s the only way I can describe it. His stride and that sway of his lean hips was hypnotic, and I couldn’t help but think to myself,damn, has it been that long?
Shit, yeah, it’d been too long – but yeah, no, I definitely didn’t need any more drama in my life. My brother had brought enough bullshit into my house and looking up at Collier in his uniform of worn denim and equally worn black leather, those ice-blue eyes piercing mine like he could see right on down into my soul? No. No, no, no – I didn’t need another “bad boy” or another man at all, really, in my life. Not until I was doing the empty-nest thing and could ensure that my boy wasn’t going to go down the same path of trouble and debauchery my brother did.
I never understood that. How John-Paul, with all his bullshit and arrest records, getting into fights and everything else under the sun – how he remained the golden boy. But me? I make one “mistake” in their eyes and I might as well bear a scarlet letter for the rest of my life.
“Hold still for me,” Collier said gently, and I huffed out a breath.
“Just hurry up,” I said.
“If I hurry, it’ll hurt more. Just hold still and let me see. Let me do it right.”
I gritted my teeth and didn’t say anything. I mean, he was being nicer than my ma or my daddy would’ve been, so there was that, I guess.
“Okay, breathe,” he mumbled around the pen light that was back in his mouth, the beam trained on the side of my head as he took up the tweezers he’d sterilized and made ready.
“You okay?” he asked, and I made an affirmative noise from behind my gritted teeth as he probed the small wound.
“Got it.” He put the bloodstained piece of glass aside on a folded square of paper towel.
I sighed out and sniffed.Good Lord, that hurt.
“Now for the fun part,” he said, taking up a bottle of antiseptic spray.
I groaned.
“Sorry, darlin’,” he said in that mellow accent of his, and I tried not to wriggle in my seat too much.
“One… two…” he sprayed it and I yipped and sucked in and out several breaths as I clutched the seat of my chair and tried to hold still.
“That’s it, you’ve got it. Hold still for me, now.” He pressed some gauze to the side of my temple and said, “You’re a good patient.”
“Thanks,” I muttered.
