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“Jordan? What are you doing here?”
I don’t need to open my eyes to know that’s Bridget’s voice. Wait, what is she doing in my room? I look over and see Bridget standing on the other side of the king-size bed. She’s wearing only my dress shirt, her bare legs peeking out beneath the hem.
Fuck, is this a dream again?
I’m still half asleep and half awake. My mind is desperately trying to put the pieces together of what happened last night and now.
The last thing I can remember clearly is sitting at the hotel bar staring at my phone. I’d come to Vegas for a work trip, but I’d already finished up my meetings for the day. I knew that Bridget and her friends were in town too, but they were here to celebrate her impending nuptials to my brother. Michael had instructed me to look out for her while I was here, but I wasn’t about to crash her bachelorette party.
She had just posted a picture on social media of the five of them standing in line outside Club Dominion on the Strip. She was smiling, but there was something off about it, like the usually bright light in her eyes had dimmed, and she was projecting a mask to assure everyone that she was okay. I'd seen that mask every time I've come face to face with her in the last year since planning the wedding. When I asked Michael about it, he thought I was crazy and told me everything was fine.
The bartender had just set down my Jack and Coke when my phone rang, and it was Michael. He started yelling something about how Bridget had found out. When I asked him to explain, he told me about how she had just found out that he’d been cheating on her. I completely lost it on him.
“Jordan!” Bridget yells again.
I blink, pulled from the memory back into the present. Sitting up only makes the room spin, and I have to take a moment to focus and wait for everything to settle back into place.
“Jord—”
“Please stop yelling,” I say, rubbing the heel of my palms into my eyes. “What is happening? Why are you in my suite?”
“Your suite?” she asks.
I open my eyes and look around. My suitcase is still sitting open on the chair where I left it when I got in yesterday.
“Yes,” I glance back at her. “My suite.”
Realization morphs her expression from angry to confused. She shakes her head like she, too, is trying to wipe away the cobwebs in her mind.
“Are you naked under that sheet?” She points to where I’m sitting on the bed. “Because if we—”
I lift the sheet and see that I’m still in my boxers, but that doesn’t completely confirm or deny that anything happened to us. It's not like she's fully dressed either, and it hits me like a ton of bricks, the vision of her in my shirt. I can’t lie and say that I haven’t fantasized about her dressed in only my shirt on several occasions, but that was just a fantasy. But she really is standing in front of me.
“I’m wearing my boxers.”
The little crease that appears between her eyes when she's upset or confused appears. I want to walk over to her and pull her into my arms and let her know that everything is okay, but I can't. On so many levels, I can't do that. First off, I can’t remember a lot of what happened last night. And second, what I do remember isn't going to bring her comfort at this moment. I don’t want to be the messenger and remind her that my jackass brother was cheating on her.
“I need to call Veronica,” she says.
Just the mention of Veronica’s name triggers a memory from last night. After hanging up on Michael, I left the hotel to find Bridget at the club, but by the time I got there, it was chaos. The club was being evacuated, and I could be wrong, but I thought I saw Veronica getting put into the backseat of a cop car.
“My phone’s dead,” she says, pulling it from her clutch that had been on the floor.
“Here,” I say, getting out of bed to find mine. “You can call her with mine.”
But when I pull the phone from my pants, I see that the phone screen is completely shattered. I try to turn it on, but it won’t start.
“Jordan,” Bridget says, walking over to me and seeing the broken phone in my hands. “What happened last night?”
2
BRIDGET
Jordan looks up at me, and I can see him struggling to find an answer. It’s clear to both of us that something happened, probably many things, but neither one of us has the answer.
He rubs his fingers over his stubbly jawline, and that's when I notice the hospital bracelet on his wrist.
“What’s that?” I grab his hand and hold it out for him to see.
