The Parting Glass (Caitlin Ross Book 4) (11 page)

Dressed, I left the bedroom, Timber following me. I walked him down the stairs and to the front door. We both flinched at the wreckage we had made of the shop.

“I should stay and help you pick this up,” he offered.

“It’s all right. I can do it,” I replied, and I thought he seemed relieved. He couldn’t wait to get away from me.

Timber paused once, in the doorway. We looked at each other for the first time since leaving the bedroom. He still held his face carefully blank. I hoped mine was the same.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said, and walked down the front path into the growing dawn.

Something on the doormat caught my eye and I stooped to pick it up. The rowan wand. For a minute, I considered breaking it over my knee. Instead, I brought it inside and laid it gently on the counter near the cash register. Then I went to make coffee.

I had a lot of cleaning up to do.

By nine, I had the shop pretty well in order. But at ten-thirty, I hadn’t yet turned the sign on the front door to “open.” I sat on my stool behind the cash register, drinking the first cup from a second pot of coffee and fingering the rowan wand. Not thinking anything much. Just sitting there.

The bells on the door jingled and Sage came through, the blast of her energy about knocking me off my stool.

“Girl, do you know you haven’t turned your sign yet?”

“I thought I might stay closed today.”

“Closed yesterday, closed today,” she sniffed. “That’s not good for business. How was your Solstice?”

She peered more intently at me and gave a hearty whoop. I knew what she saw, because I had confronted the same face in the mirror not long before. My eyes were shadowed from lack of sleep and my cheeks were hollow, as if I’d missed a few good meals. I’d hardly even brushed my hair, only pulled it back in a careless tail. The t-shirt and jeans I’d plucked from the drawer at five were some of my oldest and rattiest, and I hadn’t bothered to change them. And I still wore the same jewelry I’d been wearing yesterday, my amber and jet necklace and earrings. Somehow I couldn’t bring myself to take them off, as if doing so would remove all trace of Timber MacDuff from my world.

“Oh-ho!” Sage crowed. “I thought so! Looks like you had a busy night. So tell me, is the big man big all over?”

I felt myself blush, but didn’t answer.

“Well, how was it? Did you have fun?”

Again, I didn’t answer. I had no stomach for girl talk about the man in my life. Or not in my life.

Sage narrowed her eyes. “Girl, you’re worrying me. I knew he could be trouble, but with the sparks flying off you yesterday… Did he hurt you?”

“No.” Not physically, anyway. I sipped my coffee. It tasted like bile. “I’m just…tired, Sage. I didn’t get much sleep.”

“Wore you out, did he? My, my.” She licked her lips and came closer to my counter. “Tell Mama Sage everything.”

“I honestly don’t want to discuss it.”

She picked up the hand that was idly stroking the rowan wand and turned it over, drawing in a sharp breath at the ring of bruises Timber had left on my wrist.

“I thought you said he didn’t hurt you.”

“He didn’t. Not much. Not in a bad way,” I lied. “He’s just very…strong. Overpowering.”

“Uh-huh.” She sighed. “All right, you don’t want to talk about it. But please tell me one thing. Tell me you used protection.”

“Sage!” I felt myself go beet red.

“Don’t you ‘Sage’ me, Girl. You didn’t, did you?”

“You know I haven’t been with anyone in so long…”

“And that absolves
him
of any responsibility? Did he even mention it? You don’t know where he’s been sticking it. He might have given you a disease.”

“Timber doesn’t have a disease!” I shouted.

Sage just looked at me.

“We didn’t expect…”

She snorted. “You and that man, together on the Solstice and you want me to believe you didn’t expect anything? Honey, Sage wasn’t born yesterday. Uh-uh.” Her coal black eyes looked me up and down, as a prospective buyer might examine horseflesh. “Where are you in your cycle?”

“Second week,” I muttered.

“That’s bad.” She shook her head, clicking her tongue against her teeth. “If I were you, Girlfriend, I’d take myself down to the clinic and get the morning after pill.”

My lip quivered. What in the world was wrong with me? Sage was only talking sense. I hadn’t been thinking, with Timber. I’d tried, but once we started, I couldn’t. So I hadn’t taken care of myself. Now I should.

“What is this?” Sage demanded. “You’re not crying, are you?”

“No.”

“You are. Baby, what did that man do to you?”

I couldn’t resist her any more. I told her all about it, the day, the night, the awful morning. She leaned on the counter and patted my hand awkwardly; Sage didn’t do sympathy well. When I finished, her face was stern.

“I did warn you about him. All the same, I’m tempted to call up Erzulie and hunt him down.”

“What for? Don’t do that.”

“I won’t, but only because I don’t want your heart to be broken any more than it already has been.”

Heart. Broken. Yes, that made sense. It would explain the weird, empty feeling in my breast. But I said,

“My heart’s not broken.”

“Child, any fool could see you’re smitten with that man. And Mama Sage ain’t no fool.”

Losing control of my quivering lip, I lowered my face in my hands, bitter sobs wrenching my whole body. Sage was right. I hadn’t wanted to look at it. I hadn’t wanted to let myself know.

Sometime in the last three days, I’d fallen in love with Timber MacDuff.

Sage didn’t allow me much time for self-indulgence. Long before I had cried myself out, she reached over the counter, took me by the shoulders and shook me. I tried not to think of the way Timber had shaken me to keep me still under his ministrations.

“Enough. You stop it, now.”

Choking back more tears, I horked up a huge glob of snot, which I swallowed. That had some bad associations, too.

Sage handed me a wad of tissues from the box under the counter. “Blow.”

I blew my nose and wiped my eyes, sniffling.

“I’m okay,” I lied. She saw right through me.

“No you ain’t. And I am not about to let you sit here alone listening to sappy break-up music all day.”

“How well you know me.” I managed to twist my lip in a dry, dispirited way.

“Uh-huh.” She took the crumpled tissues from my hand and scrubbed my face. “Girl, you look like trash. Worse than what the cat dragged in. Go wash your face and brush your hair. Have you eaten?”

“What do you think? I’d just puke.”

Sage gave me her patented disapproving glare. But she knew all about my nervous stomach, so she didn’t press the issue.

“Wash,” she ordered again.

I went to the downstairs bathroom to comply. After one glance, I avoided the mirror. If I’d looked bad before, now my swollen, red-rimmed eyes and gummy lashes made me positively hag-like. The cold washcloth against my flushed skin felt good, though. Ignoring the towel, I let my face dry on its own while I hunted up a brush.

His fingers had been so deft as they’d undone my long braid, so strong as they buried themselves in handfuls of my hair. He’d told me he loved the look of it spread out on the pillow.

I would not cry anymore. Sage wouldn’t allow it.

When I emerged from the bathroom, my friend measured me with a critical eye.

“Okay. Now get in the car. I’m taking you to the clinic.”

“I don’t want to go to the clinic.” I attempted a mutinous glare.

“Don’t start with me. Do you want to have a little reminder running around in nine months? Do you want to be a single mother?”

I could at least answer the second question honestly.

“No.”

“Then you get your ass out to the car.”

Forty minutes later I left the urgent care clinic with a prescription for Plan B.

“Are you going to watch me take it? Maybe hold my nose until I swallow?” I wasn’t truly mad at Sage. I was mad at myself.

“No, Girlfriend. You’re still too upset and you’d probably bring it right back up. Just remember to take it in the next five days.”

“I will! Gods!” I threw myself back into Sage’s car. “May I go home now?”

Sage buckled her seatbelt. “Maybe after this you’ll remember to be careful.”

“Will you leave it? The Pill makes me sick, you know that. And I don’t have enough sex to justify keeping a box of condoms in the nightstand.” I knew she was picking at me on purpose, to make me angry. Because being angry was better than dissolving into a puddle.

“Well, Honey, that’s your choice.”

She must have decided she could trust me not to hang around moping and listening to sappy music all day, because she drove me home without further attacks on my dignity. When we pulled up in front of Beljoxa’s Eye, she gave me an unaccustomed hug. She did care deeply about me.

“You take care, now.”

“I will.”

I wanted to slam the car door, but I refrained.

As I unlocked the front door to the shop, a party of giggling tourists came up the walk, heading for the store.

“Excuse me,” one of them said, breathless with anticipation. “Is this where we can find the Tarot reader?”

I fixed each of them in turn with a menacing glare. Out on a lark, the lot of them. None of them needed me. And I didn’t need their stupid money.

“Go away,” I snarled. “I’m closed.”

I did slam the door, then. Right in their horrified faces.

For the rest of the day, I did what I always did when I got pissed off enough: I cleaned. Sure, I’d tidied up just that morning. I’d had to. But it had been a very long time since I’d overhauled the shop, so I put on a CD of obnoxious Punk rock and went to work with a will. Everything had to be changed; I couldn’t stand to see it all as it had been…before. I hauled the pedestal for the rune display into a different place and put the jewelry case where the rune display had been. I moved the card rack to the corner by the kitchen and put the Tarot shelf in its place nearer the door. I manhandled the entire counter, cash register and all, the whole way across the main showroom. I hunted up new posters from storage and hung them in place of the old ones. In the book room, I took down every single volume and dusted it individually. I shampooed the carpets.