My knees shook as I carefully scrubbed at my hands. Blood washed down the sink—pretty in pink, like strawberry syrup—but the purple stain clung.
And stung. Oooouch. Like, WTF, was there salt in the sugary mix?
Wasn’t there always?
I scrubbed again. Maybe the purple was getting lighter? The slash went from the lowest knuckle of the pointer finger on my left hand—my dominant hand, my drawing hand—all the way across to the wrist bone. Much deeper than Gwump’s scratch, which was now bleeding again from all the scrubbing.
X marks the spot.
I let out another breath, more like a snort. Okay, the cut wasn’t as bad as I’d first thought. It still hurt, but it seemed like that was mostly because of the purple goo. I made a fist, and though blood bloomed across my skin from both watery wounds, all my fingers worked.
And under the cold water, the pain was fading. Not gone, but numbed until I could forget about it. Which was good enough, right?
That made me think of Mom and her pills again, and I grimaced.
Slapping a blue high-vis bandage across the back of my hand—I needed the biggest one—I pulled on vinyl work gloves and went back to the damn mixer. I broke it all the way down. The plastic bag was completely tangled around the beater bar, and I had to get one of the big veggie chopper knives to attack it. My vinyl gloves were shredded by the time I had the stainless steel gleaming again.
And my fingers were all purple goo’d again.
Grimly, I hauled each part of the machine to the sink and washed everything in the hottest water, soap everywhere.
Fuck you, pomegranate. Fuck you, Brayden. Fuck everything.
By the time I was done, I was wet, cold, sweaty, slippery, pissed, and purple.
“You’re closing tonight,” I told Rique.
He took one look at me and the fourteen-inch knife in my hand and said nothing.
Yeah, he definitely had management potential.
I stalked out the door—sans knife—and got in my car. For a minute, I just sat there, clutching the wheel, staring out at the evening light. It wasn’t yet five o’clock, but the sky was all the beautiful hues of a Desert Freeze Sunday special.
I tightened my grip on the wheel, sending a pang through my left hand. The tough industrial bandage had started to peel up, and I picked at the corner until I could rip it off. More ouch. Underneath, the wet skin was wrinkly, but the wounds didn’t look too bad.
The puffy edges of the cuts were still stained mauve, but once I showered this day out of my hair, it’d probably fade to nothing. I let out a really slow breath, like the sunset draining out of the winter sky.
If I never saw purple again, I’d be perfectly happy.
See, just gotta set the bar low enough.
CHAPTER THREE
“I’M JUMPINGin the shower, Mom,” I said, letting the front door slam behind me and heading right for the bathroom. “The mixer exploded on me.”
I couldn’t talk to her right now. Not even for light, meaningless chitchat.
She’d made it to the hallway behind me. As slow as she moved, somehow she was always able to catch me. “Can we go for a walk after? My book club ladies are all busy tonight.”
“Yeah sure.” Not a chance. Her walks were important to her recovery—bodies in motion stay in motionwas her physical therapist’s motto—but there was no way I could keep myself together for her tonight. And no matter how much the pain got to her, she always seemed to know when something was wrong with me.
“Are you okay, hun?”
See? “Yeah, just got that freezie crap in my eyes.” Raising my voice covered the thickness in my throat. I locked the bathroom door in her face and stripped. My eyes were burning, but I wasn’t going to cry, dammit.
The shower pounded my head, washing everything down the drain. Not crying at all.
The X on the back of my hand was still numb, but now that I was finally alone, the rest of me was jacking up to a panic attack. My heartbeat wouldn’t settle with deep breaths. My throat tightened despite my forced calm. And my insides tingled so intensely that I burned—like blood coming back into a sleeping limb, except that it was all of me, and not just a part.
