I hummed to myself while ripping open plastic bags of all sorts of things. Flavoring packets for water bottles. More small things of toothpaste. Toothbrushes. Little shampoos and conditioners. I went overboard, shopping in town. There would easily be enough for three baggies a person with how much I stuffed into these things.
Good.
The homeless were left behind way too often.
From out of nowhere, however, my door slammed open. It crashed into the wall with a thud, and I yelped as my hands startled. A poof of packets went up all around me, dropping down onto the bed and on top of my head as I whipped my wide gaze toward the door.
“The fuck gives, K?—”
But when I saw Brutus standing there, his nostrils flared, his eyes casing all up and down my body, my frustration was replaced with a heat I couldn’t disregard.
“Bee,” I said, my voice a bit breathless.
His eyes connected with mine before he stepped in and closed the door behind him. He rushed toward me, dropping to his knees by the bed. His hands flew to my body, running up anddown my arms. My legs. Cupping my face. Like he was checking me out to make sure I was still breathing.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I had to swallow down my heart. “Yeah, I’m okay. Did you think something was wrong?”
He shook his head as he got up and quickly perched on the edge of the bed. “I don’t know. I thought?—”
I waited for him to complete his thought. But when he didn’t? “You… what?”
He shook his head softly, like he tried to discard what raced through his head. And that was when his attention fell to the area around me on my bed.
“What are you making?”
“Oh!” I chirped before going back to what I was doing. “Making little baggies for the homeless. I promised them some goodies after the information they gave me.”
“What?”
“The homeless.”
“No, I heard that. What information?”
“Oh, one of the women saw the kidnapping of the girl King and them are looking for.”
“Wait, she did? What did she say?”
I smiled over at him. “Patience. Let me get these put together, and then we can talk.”
He crawled onto the bed, the frame creaking beneath his weight, before he sat cross-legged and motioned with his fingers. “Let me help. Tell me what we’re doing.”
I sure as hell wasn’t going to deny the help or his presence. “All right, so. Each baggie gets one thing each. We start there, and then whatever extra we have, it gets divvied evenly. And if we don’t have enough to put one in each, we keep those as extras for other baggies in the future.”
“So, you’ve done this before.”
“Oh, I do it all the time. Whenever my brother needs to deal with the homeless population in any way, he comes to me. They seem to be a little more easygoing around me than him and the crew.”
“Fair.”
“So,” I said as I picked up a baggie, “I’ll start with the water bottles. I’ll get a baggie, like this. I’ll put a water filtration bottle in it like this, and then I’ll hand it to you and you put one of each from those five bags around you into this one. Got it?”
He nodded as he reached for the baggie that already had a filtration water bottle in it. “Got it.”
“Good. Let’s get to it.”
We didn’t talk for a while. We just passed the baggies back and forth, filling them with the necessities and foodstuffs I picked up. King and the guys always had a surplus of MREs they let me utilize. Why the hell they still ordered and ate those things was beyond me. But they always let me take a few whenever I made my baggies. Each bag got three of those motherfuckers, along with a small bag of hard candies, four protein bars, and three packets of Jell-O along with two unopened water bottles.
