Splinters of You (Retired Sinners MC #1) - Anne Malcom Page 0,109

brow. “I think it is.” She looked around. “I’m guessing you’re not writing.”

Though it caused more pain than it should’ve, considering the amount of booze in my system, I held my cast up as answer.

“Ah, if we were in an age that required typewriters, or worst, longhand, that might work. As it is, we have all sorts of technology. Most of which I don’t approve of, since it makes the masses dumb and unable to function in social settings. But you, it will help you finish that book. Might help your liver too.”

I scowled at her. Mostly because she was right.

“An artist that doesn’t create is a menace to society,” she said, unworried by my smile. “And a menace you have been. First and foremost, to yourself, which is what happens even if you are creating. But I think that’s the side effect of being you. But beyond that, it moves. Spews outward and your menace behavior spreads like a virus. You insult innocent bookstore owners with nothing but a love of the written word and a kind soul. You wreck a perfectly good hairstyle. You make a pretty decent barkeep fall in love with you merely for your own amusement.

“You make another, arguably less decent, man fall in love with you, this time for your own torture. You jerk an old lady out of her perfectly ordered version of grief and self-pity and force her to recognize things that she didn’t want to. You solve a murder. Kind of. Then, you go and almost get yourself killed by a biker gang. I would say that is menace-like behavior. We’re all tired. You probably won’t survive much more of this. And yes, your life may be falling apart, ever so slightly, but what better time to create another life, create something, even if you’re just going to watch it fall apart again?”

Chapter 22

“I wasn’t one person. I was many. Splinters of what I could’ve been. Mangled. Cut down like an old oak tree, now waiting to embed tiny pieces of myself into whoever I could. I didn’t want anyone to escape me. I wanted them to have to absorb me, what I’d done into their souls forever. Splinters of me.”

I wasn’t practiced at missing someone.

Sure, I missed my father. But I had somehow managed to compartmentalize that. Him. I’d decided he was gone, that it was something I couldn’t change. That was just another part of the tapestry of my trauma. More material for my books. I did not let myself miss him.

It was easy to escape that. A parent is meant to be outgrown. To disappear into the sidelines of your life, to be picked up on birthdays, holidays, or if you needed money.

That’s what I told myself.

It worked well enough.

But Saint, he was not a man to be put on the sidelines. He was not something I’d outgrow. He had roots in me. I had scars from him. If I stopped missing him, I stopped breathing.

Since I was no longer toying with death and it seemed to be less focused on me, I had to accept the fact that I missed him. That it was my weakness.

But I could not let it consume me.

So, I set to work.

Granted, it wasn’t easy to write an entire book with a shattered hand and a broken heart, but technology had progressed enough so I only needed one hand to write, and didn’t have to use any if I didn’t want to.

Which I didn’t.

My pills were not endless, and thanks to this country’s number of people addicted to opiates, Carrie was not feeling friendly about doling out more when I asked. Recovery without drugs was not a great time. Wine only touched the edges and I didn’t want to avoid opiate addiction for alcoholism, so I was limiting myself to a bottle a day.

Okay, sometimes two, but I was pretty sure Hemingway said it was allowed, if not necessary, to write while drunk.

Even if I wasn’t technically writing, I was dictating.

At first, it was odd, speaking my story out loud.

Interviewers’ favorite questions after seeing the author was a thirty-year-old woman who was conventionally attractive and looked more like a trophy wife than a female Stephen King. And yes, someone had said that exact thing to me before.

Hence their questions, asking me how I could conjure such things.

My response was a variation of the following. “Conjuring horrors is something pretty much anyone can do. It’s figuring out how to see them on a