But, just as suddenly as he’d had my shirt, he dropped it and once again turned his attention back to the cashier.Chapter 2
Drunk me has made a lot of friends that sober me has no idea who they are.
-Hastings to Suzanne
Hastings
My first thought upon entering the Walgreens wasn’t that I didn’t want to be there—for once.
Normally, my first thought upon entering a place that would possibly cause me to run into someone was—please, nobody look at me too hard.
But today, that wasn’t my first thought.
My first thought was, holy hell, that man is beautiful.
The ‘man’ was tall, around six-foot-four, muscular, tattooed, had an angular jaw that looked sexy as fuckin’ hell underneath the makings of a five o’clock shadow, and a fuckin’ dimple in his cheek.
I’d walked in with him at the same time, but while his attention had been on the ground as he’d eaten up the distance in the parking lot, mine had been on him.
I’d been so focused on him, in fact, that I’d practically categorized everything there was about him.
He had blonde hair, blue eyes—eyes that I could just barely make out from underneath the brim of a hat with a shamrock on it—and straight white teeth.
He was wearing a plain black polo shirt and black tactical pants with those combat boots that went up to about mid-calf. The uniform of the Kilgore Police Department.
He had a tattoo of a Texas flag on his left arm that went up almost to his elbow, and an American flag on his right that did much the same. Then, on his right bicep, was a very large cross with intricate patterns that disappeared underneath his collared shirt.
I was so busy watching him that I wasn’t paying attention to the rack that I’d somehow found myself in front of until I’d nearly run into it.
Then, before my eyes, all hell broke loose, and I found myself on the floor with my hands covering my face, as a man wielding a shotgun walked in and started waving it around.
The next five minutes were the worst of my life as I felt every piece of control that I’d ever strived for start to unravel before my very eyes.
My training? Gone.
My hard won control? Also gone.
The medication that I took to control it? It was like I’d never taken it in the first place.
With each beat of my heart, I could feel the daggers of despair start to slowly sink into my belly and pull upward.
Then, like a dam breaking, the chains snapped.
“Pew, pew, pew, pew!”
The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.
Luckily, I’d been able to say them quietly enough that the only person’s attention that I caught was the cop’s that was sitting on the ground next to me.
“Don’t fuckin’ move!”
I squeezed my eyes shut and counted to ten, hoping that if I didn’t see it happening, maybe it wasn’t real.
I counted to ten.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.
I wasn’t sure of how much time had passed when I opened my eyes, but when I did the cop was closer, and the scene was still playing out in front of me.
“Don’t fuckin’ move!”
The man that was robbing the pharmacy in front of us aimed his gun at the poor old lady on the floor again.
The one that looked like she’d broken her hip days ago. Or had a knee replacement.
Whatever she had wrong with her, it was utterly painful watching her crawl her way to the floor and try to stay still.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” the old lady said in a wobbly, feeble voice. “It just hurts.”
Something inside of my chest clenched and squeezed.
“I don’t fuckin’ care, bitch!”
“Hey, Alston,” his co-conspirator, the young-looking teen that looked like she was all of maybe fifteen, said. “I bet she has some good drugs. My grandma always has the best stuff. Check her purse.”
“That’s a good idea,” Alston, the robber, said. “Check her purse. Check all of their purses. And wallets. Get those, too.”
The girl didn’t look nearly as comfortable with her assigned task as she was at suggesting it.
“O-okay.”
That was when I realized that if I didn’t get rid of my gun and bullets, the girl going through the bags would surely find it.
Luckily, where it was positioned in comparison to my body, meant that I could pull the gun out and set it down on the ground in between me and the wall.
You know, if I wasn’t scared half out of my fuckin’ mind.
And, like an umbrella caving underneath eighty mile an hour winds, my mouth started to make itself known.
“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there!” I called.
I’m pretty sure if the cop could get away with kicking me, he would have.
I covered my face with my hand and moaned inwardly.
Outwardly, I said, “This is your brain. This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”