“How much you had to drink, man?” Mac asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “A few shots. Ten. Maybe twenty.”
“Which one was it? Ten or twenty?” Mac sounded alarmed.
“You know he stole another one of my girlfriends back in high school.”
“What?”
“Fairgood. I should’ve punched him back then. Back when I could still see.” An idea suddenly occurred to him and he grabbed on to Mac’s arm. “You know what? Let’s go up to his room and beat the shit out of him. Together.”
“Uh, I don’t think so.”
“C’mon, Mac, for old times sake. Football player to football player. We can’t let the nerds win.”
“Sorry, man, my fighting days are over.” Mac tugged on his shoulders. “Let’s see if you can make it out to my car.”
Beau knocked Mac’s hands away. “Didn’t I fire you?”
“Yeah, but I’m doing this as a favor for Josie. A real big favor,” the older man muttered under his breath before trying to help him out of his seat again.
But Beau shook him off. “I don’t need your help anyway, ” he said, standing up by himself. “I’ll find Fairgood. Finish this fight and get a cab to take me home.”
And he would have, too, if the bourbon hadn’t caught up with him two steps into his mission. He staggered, felt his eyelids droop, and that was the last thing he remembered before waking up with a headache—one so powerful, he would have described it as blinding if he weren’t already blind.
“The hell…” he muttered, sitting up on his elbows.
Despite the lack of visual information, he immediately recognized that he was someplace different. The room just didn’t smell like his did. He groped around and his hands made contact with a smooth, satiny material. Also, this bedcover wasn’t the ridged one Josie had gotten for their bed.
Their bed. When had he started thinking of it as their bed, and where was Josie—
Memories from last night flooded over him, intensifying the headache. He sat up fully then, grabbing his head on both sides.
“Mr. Prescott? You all right?”
It was Mac.
“Mr. Prescott was my father, and I’m nothing like him,” Beau answered, thinking of Josie’s words to him last night. He then pushed through the headache and asked, “Where’s Josie? I’ve got to talk to her.”
“I don’t know, sir. She didn’t answer her phone when I tried calling her after you passed out—”
“I passed out?”
“Yeah, you’re in a hotel room right now. The manager said your family was old friends of the owner.”
Beau nodded. It had been so long since he’d been out and about in Birmingham, he’d almost forgotten how many connections the Prescotts had.
He swung his feet over the side of the bed, ignoring the resulting hammer pounding inside his head, and flung himself out of the bed.
“Mr. Prescott, what are you doing?”
“I told you not to call me ‘Mr. Prescott.’” He had to find Josie. He had to—
He tripped over something bulky and unyielding. Then he cursed a blue streak when he landed, legs and arms akimbo on the floor. “What the fuck?” he yelled. “What the hell was that?”
“I think they’re called ottomans.”
“What’s it doing there in the middle of the room?”
“That’s where most folks keep ottomans, in the middle of the room.”
“Not at my house.”
“No, but that’s because, Josie…” Mac suddenly trailed off, as if saying Josie’s name out loud was verboten.
But Beau sat up and said. “Josie, what?”
“She told me not to tell you.”
“And you’re going to stick to that promise, because Josie was the one paying your salary? Oh, wait a minute. She wasn’t.”
Still, Mac sounded all kinds of hesitant when he said, “She did a few things over the last week to make you more comfortable at the house is all.”
“A few things like what?”
“You know, just a few things: pushed all the furniture up against the walls, replaced some of the bigger pieces with smaller ones so you wouldn’t stub your toes; put down carpet runners so it’d be easier for you get from place to place; put different air fresheners in different rooms, so you’d be able to smell which room was which; had all the hardwood floors carpeted when we were at our appointment in Birmingham; placed a white noise machine in your bathroom, so you’d instinctively know which way to go when you had to—well go; and put decorative gripping down in the tub, so you wouldn’t slip.”
Beau sat there frozen, his mouth hanging open.
Then Mac snapped his fingers. “Oh, and she also put magnet closures on all the drawers and cabinets, so you’d never walk into them. I think that’s all.”
“You still don’t deserve me,” he heard Josie say again.
And that’s when it hit him. Really hit him. Losing Josie to Colin Fairgood wasn’t bad. It was worse than that. In fact, it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Even worse than his blindness. Because Josie was the best thing that had ever happened to him. And all he had ever been was an ass to her, and now she was gone.
“Mac you’re married to somebody blind, right? All this stuff Josie did for me... did you do the same for your wife?”
“Truth be told, Josie gave me a few ideas,” Mac admitted.
“She wouldn’t have done all that if she didn’t care about me, would she?”
“No, sir, I don’t think she would have.”
“And I drove her away.”
Beau fell back on the floor.
“Sir, are you all right?” Mac asked above him.
“No,” Beau answered, his voice terse. A clear and bright image of Josie crying in his arms the day before came back to him. How could he have let himself get out of control like that? How could he have pulled all that shit last night? How could he have been so blind in every sense of the word?
Josie had been right. About him. About everything. He didn’t blame her for going off with Fairgood, because he’d made one thing more than clear last night. He still didn’t come anywhere close to deserving her.
He set his jaw. “Mac,” he said. “I’ll take that help up now.”
Mac must have been standing above him the whole time, because he grabbed his arm and helped him stand up. And by the time he made it to his feet, the pounding headache was gone, almost as if it had been waiting for him to come to his senses before it let up.