Indignation cut through the haze of alcohol. “Why? Because I’m not slutty enough? Because having the mother of your daughter in the same club makes hooking up with random skanks awkward for you? So sorry to kill your buzz, jerk-off, but I have just as much a right to be here as any—”
Garrett’s hand clapped over my mouth. “Fuck me, you’re even more annoying when you’re drunk.”
“I’m not annoying!” I shouted, but since his hand was blocking the words, it came out more like “mime mot mammowing.”
“If you’d tone down the crazy for two seconds and give me a chance to talk, I’d explain that wasn’t what I meant. You don’t belong here because you’re better than all those bitches inside.”
When all I did was stare—mainly because what he’d just said rendered me speechless—he finally removed his hand from my mouth. But instead of dropping it back to his side, his fingers grazed along my jaw before his palm cupped the side of my neck.
The unexpected touch caused my heart rate to spike, and the way his eyes darkened fried what few functioning brain cells I had left.
“How drunk are you right now?” he asked, his voice gravelly as he took a step closer.
“Uh….” What the hell was happening? I felt like I’d just entered the twilight zone. Everything felt backward. Down was up, left was right, and my hatred for Garrett Wilder suddenly took the back burner to my body’s nagging desire for him.
“Gwen,” he called, pulling me back into reality.
“Huh?”
“I asked how drunk you are right now.”
Everything was wrong. The way he was looking at me shouldn’t have caused goose bumps to break out across my skin. His touch shouldn’t make the flesh on my neck burn. This was bad, bad,bad.
“I don’t think—”
The door to the alley swung open, breaking through the foggy, disconcerting moment Garrett and I were having.
I jumped away right before I heard Corrine’s voice. “Thank God. There you are.”
I should have been thankful for the interruption, but for some insane reason all I felt was loss.
“Sorry, sir,” Ian said, trailing closely behind her. “She’s scarily good at giving the slip.”
“Hey! Hi! Hey! There you are,” I rambled in a high-pitched voice.
Corrie’s suspicious, squinty-eyed gaze bounced between Garrett and me. “What’s going on out here? What’s happening? What did I interrupt?”
“Whoa.” The laugh that bubbled up my throat sounded like a demented hyena. I held my hands up in surrender. “Calm down, crazy. Nothing’s happening. Just two people shooting the breeze.” God, tequila and I didnotmix well.
“Really? Then why are you being weird?”
More hyena laughter. “I’m not being weird!You’rebeing weird!”
Garrett came to stand next to me and whispered, “Tone it down,” before turning his attention back to Corrie. “I just needed to talk to her about Liddy.”
The skepticism on her face finally began to clear. “All right. Well, are you done, ’cause I’m ready to get out of here. Some drunk guy just asked how much I’d charge to let him lick my neck. I’m officially over this scene.”
“Yes!” I shouted with a little too much enthusiasm.I was feeling a bunch of things that I had no business feeling; the safest thing I could do was get far, far away from Garrett before I did something I’d regret come morning… again. “We should go. It’s getting late.”
The niggling sense of disappointment that twisted my belly into knots as I allowed Corrine to lead me away grew heavier when I chanced a peek at Garrett over my shoulder.
And the most disconcerting thing about the entire exchange was that I felt like I was running away from something big.
EIGHT
There wasa dark period during my pregnancy where the weight of all my loss and the path my life had taken began to weigh on me. I fell into a slump and spent a while feeling sorry for myself. It was an ugly sight to behold, mainly the fault of pregnancy hormones, and it took a while for me to pull myself out of it. Finally, after the months’ long pity party where I lamented the fact that returning to school to finish my degree wasn’t in the cards, I sucked it up, pulled up my big girl panties, and decided to try on my own. I had so many stories bouncing around in my head, and it was time for me to sit down and actually put words on paper. I found writing to be rather cathartic. I bled everything I was feeling onto those pages, my pain and anger and sorrow. Everything I’d kept bottled up poured out, and I was finally able to let some of it go.
With Liddy on a playdate with another little girl from her daycare class, and me having a rare day off with nothing to do, I decided the best way to fill my time was to work on the book I’d slowly been writing for the past three years. Between motherhood, work, and the usual chaos that came with everyday life, I rarely had time to work on making it good enough to send out, soI had to take every opportunity when it presented itself. I was going to finish my story if it killed me, and hopefully get my words out for everyone to read one day.
