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“Options.” Nolan lets out a humorless laugh that is so loud it almost sounds demented. “We don’t have any fucking options.”
“Except we do.” I take a second to grab my wallet off the table before I stride for the door. “Don’t breathe a word of this to anyone else until I get back.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I snap awake suddenly enough that it hurts, feeling like I only fell asleep five minutes ago. The bright stream of sunlight coming through the window makes a mockery of that notion.
My brain rattles in my skull like a zoo animal battering the bars of its cage. I’ve never had a hangover like this before.
I also don’t usually make a habit of drinking malt liquor.
Raised voices filter through the door from the main room. That has to be what woke me. A quick glance at Felicia’s neatly made bed confirms I’m alone in the room, so the time has to be even later than it feels like it is. That, or one of them let the maids in to clean and I slept right through it. Felicia makes her bed neatly enough that it’s impossible to tell the difference.
“Shut up,” I shout and shove a pillow over my head.
The door opens moments before I hear Anya’s voice in an elaborate sing-song cadence.
“Wake up, sleeping bitchy.”
“It’s too early,” I groan.
“Dude, it’s after ten.”
“Case in point.” I throw a pillow towards the door and miss her by a mile. “Let me sleep.”
“Get up. We’re all going to brunch.”
“Anya…” I don’t toss the other pillow because then I wouldn’t have one, but it’s still really tempting. “I love you to death but you need to fuck off before I murder you.”
“Ah, I love you too.” She infuses her voice with a creepy amount of sweetness before snapping back into drill sergeant mode. “The girls are waiting for us. Let’s go.”
The girls? Oh, hell no. “I’d rather die in a pool of vomit.”
“Sounds like that might be a distinct possibility. How much did you drink last night?”
“More than enough.”
“Just so we’re clear, I’m going to keep standing here until you get up. I’m sure the dulcet tones of my voice will be enough to lull you back to sleep.”
I could kill her, but that would require getting up. Disposing of a body in a hotel room is probably more trouble than it’s worth. “I’ll meet you down there.”
“Liar.”
“For Christ’s sake…”
“They have a buffet,” she sings. “Best French toast in the city and bottomless mimosas.”
Because the thing I really need is more alcohol. Still, the mimosas are bottomless. “If I go, will you stop singing?”
“Probably. The likelihood increases if you can be ready in under five minutes.”
She belts out a few bars of Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles, and that’s enough to send me over the edge. Luckily for her, a breakfast buffet is the only hangover cure that I actually believe in. But if the French toast isn’t better than sex, I’m flipping a table.
Anya doesn’t leave as I pour myself out of bed. My knees hit the floor first and I have to stay there with my hands on the carpet for a second, just to make sure I don’t pass out. The room slowly spins around me as Anya and five girls who look just like her watch me with the same expression of amused pity. I’m pretty sure a tiny road crew is jack hammering the connections between neurons in my brain. My whole body feels like a construction zone after every worker came in drunk.
“You look like crap,” she comments.
“And you’re all compliments this morning,” I groan as I search the floor for the shirt I wore yesterday. If I get in the shower, I’m not coming out again for the rest of the day. No sense in dirtying another set of clothes. “You should be nicer to me. I might be dying.”
