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“I can’t believe he made plans to fuck that photographer right in front of your face!” Harlow shouted. Whereas I was an overly emotional drunk, Harlow was a loud drunk. I was pretty sure every single one of the bar patrons knew every sordid detail of what was going on with me and Rowan, starting from the night at the Neon Room, all the way up to my humiliation just hours ago. Add in Pepper being a giggling drunk and all three of us wereUrban Dictionary’sliving example of ‘White Girl Wasted’.
It wasn’t pretty.
Hysterical, yes. But not pretty.
“You know what you should do?” Pepper declared as I swayed from side to side in my chair. Damn thing was wobbly as hell. “You should have sex with someone else!”
There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I’d never be able to go through with Pepper’s suggestion, but I was ashamed to admit that, in my alcohol-addled brain, I considered it for a few seconds. That was, until some skeevy guy with a rapist goatee sidled up to our table with a creepy grin.
“Ew, gross! Not you!” I all but shouted, shoving at the man who’d obviously overheard Pepper’s idiotic suggestion. “Go away.”
Taking my not-so-subtle hint that there was no way on God’s green Earth he was getting his P anywhere near my V, he slinked away with a dejected expression on his pervy face. Reaching for my gin and tonic, I downed the last of it and slammed the glass on the table as Pepper and Harlow fell into peals of laughter. I didn’t hesitate in waving over a waitress for a refill.
“Why’s he have to be so friggin’ pretty?” I pouted, my southern accent becoming stronger the drunker I got. “Stupid Rowan with his stupid pretty hair and his stupid abs and his stupid perfect penis and delicious man buns.” I was so into my drunken rant that I hadn’t even realized what I let slip until my friends suddenly went silent.
After several seconds of silence, Harlow asked, “Uh, babe? How did you see his penis?”
Fuck my life.
Pepper giggled into her drink. “Man buns?”
“Oh, God,” I grumbled, dropping my forehead to the table and banging it against the wood a few times before Harlow slid a stack of napkins underneath to cushion the blows. “I walked in on him naked in the kitchen one morning,” I answered, still in my slumped position. “The image is burned into my brain.”
“And you got a good shot of his penis and… man buns?” Harlow asked, trying—and failing—to choke back a laugh.
“Yes,” I answered as I sat up straight, pulling off one of the napkins that had stuck to my forehead. “And it’s so hard to hate him when I know what he’s rockin’ in his jeans. And I really,reallywanna hate him.”
“Men suck,” Harlow voiced, holding her drink up in solidarity. It was at that moment I realized I hadn’t gotten that refill I desperately needed.
“Yes, they do,” Pepper added, clinking her glass against Harlow’s hard enough to spill most of its contents onto the table. “Locklaine men, in particular,” she continued, unfazed by her party foul.
Had I been in my right mind, I would have jumped on that breadcrumb, demanding she give us all the dirty details of what was going on between her and Griffin. At that moment, though, I was too focused on getting as liquored up as possible.
“Where the hell’s our waitress?” I asked no one in particular before finally spotting her across the crowded room. Waving—quite possibly flailing—my arms excitedly to get her attention, I yelled, “Hey! Can I get another drink?”
I could have been seeing things, especially considering everyone in the bar seemed to have a twin as the night progressed, but I could have sworn the waitress rolled her eyes before making her way over to us.Well, there goes her tip.
“Sorry, sweetheart. You’ve been cut off.”
“What? By who?” I demanded indignantly to the triplet waitresses standing in front of me—or were there four of them? It was so hard to tell with my chair being as wobbly as it was.
“Bartender’s orders. You three have had enough. You’re starting to make a scene.”
“Oh, that’s bullshit!” Harlow chimed in, downing the last of her drink before slamming the glass back down. Only she missed the table top by several inches, basically throwing the glass to the floor with a loud shatter that had the majority of the bar patrons glaring in our direction. She stared down at the broken glass with a surprised look on her face. “Whoops.”
“I’m gonna have to ask you ladies to leave,” the burly bouncer spoke up as he stopped at our table. His big, meaty arms were crossed over his chest in an intimidating stance that would have had me running scared had it not been for the fact that I was already fuming at the male population as a whole. And at that moment, the asshole with a Mr. Clean head was standing between me and my next gin and tonic.Eff that!
“Back off, cue ball,” I spit nastily, standing from my chair so we were chest to chest—well, chest to hips, actually, seeing as he towered over me by about a foot and a half. But I wasn’t backing down. I was pretty sure I could take him. “You don’t wanna piss me off. I’m two seconds away from getting a stepladder so I can kick your ass,” I said as I drilled my finger into his barrel chest.
“That’s it,” he grumbled, grabbing me by the arm and hauling me toward the door. “You’re outta here.”
I heard my friends shout in protest approximately three seconds before the shit hit the fan.
She was avoiding me again. And what pissed me off the most was I had no one to blame but myself. I’d lost count of the number of times I called her after nearly shoving that pushy photographer out the door. Each and every call went unanswered.
Finally, deciding to put my inability to sleep to good use, I sat behind my desk and attempted to write. Unfortunately, the story I was contracted to write wasn’t coming to me as easily as I’d hoped. The heroine was supposed to be broken and scarred, scared of her own shadow. But every time I sat down to write, a fire came out in her personality that wasn’t supposed to be there. A fire very similar to the one I saw in Navie’s denim colored eyes each time I looked at her.
Leaning back in frustration, I raked my hands through my hair, trying my damnedest to get into the headspace I needed to be in to write. Just as my fingers landed on the keys, my cell vibrated on the desk next to me, the shrill ring echoing through the room like a siren. Not giving two shits how desperate I sounded, I snatched up the phone up without so much as looking at the screen.
