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“No,” Kin snapped back. “I’m holding on to it. You’ll want it in the morning.” There was a brief pause below, then Kin called back up to me. “Go to bed, Lucy. You need to sleep it off.”
“I’m good here,” I assured her and lifted the crystal skull to take another swallow.
The heat that followed this time didn’t set nearly as comforting. I got to my feet slowly and headed for the door. The guest room didn’t have a connecting bathroom so I had to use the one in Kin’s room. Stumbling through the bedroom, I fumbled with the locked door, holding back the bile that was trying to crawl up my throat.
With a triumphant cry I opened the door.
Opening my mouth had been a mistake. My stomach roiled and I couldn’t hold back the vomit any longer. Bending in half, I let nature work its magic and threw up right there.
Tequila hurt much worse coming back up than going down, especially if all you’ve eaten that day was an apple and a few breadsticks.
“Fuck,” I heard an all-too-familiar voice groan seconds before a warm, dark hand was pulling my hair away from my face. “How much did you drink?”
I was too busy throwing up to answer Harris. Another round gushed up and my eyes cracked open enough that I could see I’d blown chunks all over Harris’s shoes. If I hadn’t felt like death right then, I probably would have laughed.
You break my heart, I ruin your shoes. That makes us even, right?
“Lu…”
The pain I heard in his voice told me that I hadn’t just said that in my head, but out loud—and he’d heard me.
Fuck.
A few minutes passed where he just stood there holding my hair back while I was bent over, praying Death would be kind and just end me. When it appeared I was done—for the moment at least—Harris lifted me into his arms and carried me into Kin’s bedroom. Kicking the door closed behind him, he stopped long enough to lock it and then carried me into the bathroom.
He sat me on the closed toilet seat and opened the linen closet. Seconds later he put a washcloth under the sink’s tap and got it wet with cool water before using it to wipe my face.
It was too much. Between the stress of the day, the pain that had been building inside of me for so many months now, and the alcohol, I couldn’t hold back the tears a second longer. They poured over my lashes before I even realized I was crying, a sob choking me as I tried to pull away from his gentle touch.
“It’s okay, Lucy. I’ll take care of you, sweetness.” He spoke to me like he was talking to a scared animal, and maybe I was right then.
There was no denying I was scared. I was scared to let him get too close. Scared that one word from him would send me over the edge into the dark abyss I’d been fighting so hard to stay out of. Scared that I would always love him and I’d be alone for the rest of my life.
I was scared of all of those things, but what really terrified me was that he would never love me again.
Harris
Each tear that fell from Lucy’s dark eyes was like a stab directly to my heart.
From the moment I walked into Kin and Angie’s apartment I’d been trying to find a way into the guest room to talk to Lucy. At first I’d waited, hoping that she would want to come out and be around the people who had shown up to party with her. She hadn’t and I’d started tossing back one beer after another. On beer number six I’d started knocking on the bedroom door. She hadn’t answered it and she sure as hell hadn’t come to the door when I’d called out to her, so I’d sent a text.
The text was the beer talking. I hadn’t let myself text or call Lucy in months, but then I’d been sober. Tonight, I was bordering on drunk and I had zero willpower to stay away. Especially after seeing her eyes during her graduation ceremony. Even more so after the way she had reacted to being close to me in the picture Kin had set up afterward.
She had let Caleb Jacobson touch her, let him play around and even flirt with her. Yet the second I’d touched her she’d gone as stiff as a board. It was clear she was affected from being so close and hadn’t liked her reaction to me. It hadn’t all been anger, though. I’d seen the hurt and confusion in her brown eyes. I’d heard the pain in her voice as she’d viciously whispered ‘bite me’ and ‘fuck off’ when I’d stupidly said something about her and Caleb.
I’d planned on talking to her tonight. On trying to work this—whatever this was—out with her. It was obvious to me she hadn’t been able to move on any more than I had, and I was done fighting myself. I wanted her b
ack.
I fucking needed her back.
Now, with her face cleaned up, I had to get the rest of her clean too. She had vomit on her shirt and it smelled like a mixture of tequila and garlic butter mixed with gastric juices. She couldn’t sleep in that.
“Okay, sweetness. Let’s get these dirty things off you,” I murmured, trying to pretend I was taking care of Trinity and not the chick who got me hard by simply being in the same room with me.
Mentally warning my dick to be good, I started pulling her shirt over her head. Still silently crying, Lucy let me take her shirt off. Like any breathing man alive, my gaze went straight to her bra-covered tits. Ah, fuck. She was wearing a crazy sexy Victoria’s Secret pushup bra that made her perfect tits look like they wanted to burst free from their confines.
Math. Long division. What was the square root of pie? I couldn’t remember and my brain didn’t care because it was too busy memorizing every inch of alabaster skin exposed to me right then. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
