Vann and I hanging out at to the bar, laughing, talking, teasing.
Vann and I dancing.
Wyatt giving Vann and I shots of tequila.
Toasting the happy couple with more drinks.
More dancing. With Vann.
Vann. Oh my god, Vann. That’s who I was with now. That’s whose apartment I was in. That’s whose arm was wrapped around my middle.
I slid to my stomach, grabbing a few inches of space between us and buried my face in the pillow.
Bad idea! It smelled like him.
Struggling to remember the dirtier details of the night, I found that I couldn’t put them in the right order or give them any clarity. They were a mess of muddled memories. His hands around my waist, pulling me against his naked body. Tripping over my shorts as I tried to step out of them. My shoe abandoned in the hallway. Gasping for breath. In the best way. But that was the only, paper-thin memory I could grasp. The rest all flitted away, dried leaves in a brisk breeze.
Fuck.
I had to get out of here.
Good thing I was a total pro at the morning after—even if I was a little rusty after six years of celibacy. My hangover pressed down on my limbs, making them weak and heavy. Still, I managed to push into a partial plank and slip over the side of the bed without making a sound.
Of course, if Vann were to wake up, I would look like a hungover ninja with yesterday’s makeup streaked all over my face.
Probably not the vision of loveliness he would be expecting.
Popping my head up, I looked for my cellphone on the nightstand, but it was nowhere to be seen. Crap.
I had a vague memory of using an Uber to get here. No worries, I could Uber home. I was an Uber pro.
Assuming I could find my phone.
To be honest, this was not the first time I’d army-crawled through a man’s bedroom before the sun came up. I had a few wild years under my belt. Er, maybe more than a few.
Culinary school might as well have been a nunnery. I gave it all up. The boys. The partying. The binge drinking. The drugs. Especially the drugs. The random hookups with assholes.
The accepting drinks from assholes when origins were unknown.
Dropping my head to the wood flooring, I took a minute to collect myself. I hated thinking back on those days. I hated remembering the girl I used to be and the mistakes I made.
I had been a total and complete fool. And a mess. The worst part, was that when it all came crashing down, I wasn’t even surprised. By that point it had felt inevitable.
My therapist assured me that it wasn’t my fault. And that blaming myself for what happened was natural. But it also felt logical. If I put myself in stupid situations weren’t stupid things bound to happen?
A wave of nausea washed over me. I swallowed quickly, the reverse action to puking. I’d read once that it was supposed to stop the mouth-tingling feeling and calm your stomach when in danger of retching.
Five full minutes of struggling to swallow with a mouth that felt stuffed with cotton balls, the sickening feeling passed. God, was I really here again? In this same, alcohol-soaked-morning-after hell?
I had promised myself, on my twenty-first birthday, that enough was enough. It was time to get my life together. It was time to never wake up with fear again. It was time to move on from all those things in my past that had fucked me up, and use them to make me into something great.
Which I mostly had.
Until tonight, when I’d jumped off the cliff of sanity and sobriety into the backsliding pits of party girl hell all over again.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved to hang out with my friends and drink and have a good time. But I also liked to stay in complete control.
And nowhere in my game plan for a new and improved life had I included sleeping with my friend’s brother.
