Bad Wedding: A Bad Boy Romance (2 page)

M
egan

“
N
o
, no,
no.
”

I turned the key in the ignition again, listening to the engine puff helplessly. This car. This goddamned car.
My
goddamned car. It wasn’t going to start again.

I was in the back alley behind my apartment, in the tiny parking space I was allotted, at ten forty-five on Sunday morning. I was due at work at eleven.

I scrambled for my purse on the passenger seat and pulled out my cell phone. I dialed as I got out of the car, giving the driver’s door an extra kick. I had a fifty-fifty chance that my dad would answer; his schedule was unpredictable. But this time, he answered on the third ring.

“Dad,” I said, rounding my building and heading for the sidewalk, “can I borrow your car?”

“I would, honey,” my dad said, “but I lent it to Mrs. Feely so she could go to the doctor’s.”

I stopped on the sidewalk and looked down the street. My dad rented an old house only a block away, and I could see his driveway from where I stood. It was empty. “When, exactly, did you lend your car to Mrs. Feely?” I asked him.

“Oh, Jeez,” Dad said. “Two or three weeks ago, I guess.”

“Dad—”

“I know, I know,” Dad said. “I should get it back. I lost track.”

I gritted my teeth. My father rarely used his car, because he worked around the corner from his place at the little shop he owned, selling patchouli, incense, mood stones, imported African masks—a sort of yuppie/hippie combo. Which pretty much described my father. Hence the fact that he hadn’t noticed his car was missing for weeks. “Dad,” I said to him, “I could have used it. I have to get to work.”

“It’s Sunday morning,” my dad said, offended. He wasn’t religious, he just liked to sleep in. “Who the heck works on Sunday morning?”

“Well, when you need to go to the drugstore on Sunday morning, someone has to be there to take your money.”

“That’s inhumane.”

I sighed. The drugstore was just the latest in my long, long series of jobs, most of which I’d been fired from. That was Dad’s influence:
No one owns you,
he’d always taught me.
If you don’t like a situation, you just walk away.
I’d walked away from more crappy jobs than I could count. And I’d been fired. Often. If I didn’t get to work, I would be fired again today.

You’re twenty-three, Megan,
a voice inside my head said,
and what are you doing with your life?

Shut up,
I told it.

“Okay,” I said to my father. “I have to go. I’m calling a cab.”

“Get one of those Uber things,” my dad said. “Fight the Man.”

I hung up, gritting my teeth. I didn’t want to fight the Man today, I just wanted to get to work on time. Why, though? The job as a clerk at Drug-Rite was as boring and dead-end as every other job I’d had. Why did it matter if I got fired from this one?

I got an Uber—fuck it, it was faster—and got to Drug-Rite at two minutes to eleven, hurrying through the door and pulling my clerk’s apron from my bag. “I’m here, I’m here,” I said.

Doug, the assistant manager who was the only other employee in the store this morning, gave me a frown. He was thirty, a wispy guy with brown hair and a stature shorter and slimmer than mine. I’m not a big girl, but I could have sat on him and squashed him flat. “You’re late,” he said.

“I’m not,” I argued. “I’m
almost
late. That’s different.”

“Megan,” he said.

“I’m on time,” I insisted, looping the clerk’s apron over my neck. “Almost late counts as on time.”

“Fine. We got a shipment of gum. Go get it from the back.”

As I filled the little boxes of different brands of gum along the front counter, I wondered again why the hell I even cared. Was it this job? No, it wasn’t. Was it the money? I needed to live, of course–I had moved out on my own, even if it was a rental apartment only a block from my dad’s place—but I did freelance work coding websites on the side, which made me more money than this did. If I wanted to make a real go of being a coder, I could quit and build a career.

But I really, really didn’t want to sit at home in my apartment all day, staring at a computer screen. The thought of doing that for the rest of my life made me queasy. So maybe I wanted to keep this job for the social benefits? I glanced at Doug, who was ringing up a lady’s tampons at the counter, and thought again.

Maybe, I thought, I was just sick of being fired.

Most people saw being fired as the ultimate humiliation, a sign of failure. Not me. My dad had taught me that being fired was, in some ways, a badge of honor almost as impressive as quitting. It meant you were going your own path, bucking the system, being yourself. But I was starting to wonder about that, because lately it had begun to feel like failure.

It started raining outside, the water coming down in sheets, and Doug and I changed places, me taking the cash and him wandering the aisles, stocking and neatening the shelves. We were steadily busy, people coming in for their allergy meds or their hangover ibuprofen, their itch creams or their Sunday morning Pepto. I watched the clock. Maybe Holly, my best friend, would be around later for a coffee when I got off. If she wasn’t busy with her boyfriend, Dean. I’d known Dean in high school, and he was ridiculously hot, in a bad-boy way. Because Holly was a smart girl, she was busy with him a lot
.

And then I came back to reality and looked up at the next person in line, and my day went right down the toilet.

It was Jason Carsleigh.

That tall, hot body. Those sleek, thick muscles. Those brown eyes, under gorgeous slashes of brows, framed by dark lashes. Those high cheekbones, that soft dark brown hair, that perfect mouth. He was wearing worn jeans and a hoodie with the hood pulled up, rainwater dripping from the edges, and even from over the counter I could smell him, rainwater and last night’s cologne and some kind of dirty boy-musk. My spine went to goo and my knees clenched. Jason always did this to me.
Always.

He was my friend Holly’s brother, and her boyfriend Dean’s best friend. He and Dean had been the most talked-about guys at Eden High, where they’d been one year ahead of me. Dean, the bad boy. Jason, the good boy. Unlikely best friends. Everyone had known who they were. Now we were years out of high school, and because I’d struck up a friendship with Holly, I couldn’t quite avoid Jason. Though I did everything in my power to try.

Because I hated him.

Jason fucking Carsleigh.

He looked at me and his eyes went wide for a brief instant. Then they went wary. Jason knew I didn’t like him—he knew it perfectly well, since I’d made it clear. What he didn’t know was why.

Because he
didn’t fucking remember.

“Hey, Megan,” he said, his voice a little throaty. He hadn’t shaved this morning, and a perfect shadow of stubble showed on his perfect jaw. I didn’t think he’d showered; in fact, he looked a little rough. As if he’d been up late last night, and now he was hung over. It made me hate him that he could be hung over and hot at the same time. It made me hate him that he’d spent last night having fun, maybe in bed with some girl. I assumed he remembered his night with
her.

That thought just made me angrier. I didn’t greet him back, just looked down at what he was here to pay for, and then I paused in surprise.

“Midol?” I said to him, raising an eyebrow.

He didn’t blush or shift uncomfortably, just stared at me. “Megan,” he said again. “Ring it through.”

It made no sense. Why was he buying Midol? I knew from Holly that Jason and his fiancée, Charlotte Davenport, had broken up. They’d been together for four years, while Jason was deployed in the Marines, but it had fallen apart after he’d come home. So he wasn’t buying Midol for Charlotte. The idea of Charlotte, the world’s most perfect blonde, needing Midol, or having bodily functions at all, was absurd anyway. She probably eased her menstrual cramps with the feathers of angel wings.

Since the breakup, Jason hadn’t dated anyone else. That I knew of. Then why the hell was he buying Midol?

He was looking impatient and annoyed, and that just made me contrary, so I picked up the Midol box and scanned it. Then I looked at the computer screen. “The price isn’t coming up right,” I said sweetly to Jason.

He figured it out almost immediately—I’d give him that. Even tired and hung over, he figured it out. He closed his eyes, as if he had a pounding headache, as I picked up the intercom phone and pressed the ON button.

“Price check,” I said into the intercom, hearing my voice reverberate through the store. There were shoppers in the aisles and at least four people in line behind Jason. “Price check on Midol. I repeat, Midol. Cash one.”

Jason’s eyes were still closed, as if he was wishing he were somewhere else right now. “Megan,” he said again, his jaw clenched, “is this really necessary?”

“I’m afraid it is,” I said to him. “You have to pay the right price, Jason. It’s important.”

Doug appeared from around the end of the aisle. “Megan, that price check,” he called over the heads of everyone in line. “Is it regular strength Midol or extra strength Midol?”

I made a show of lifting the box and checking it. “Extra strength, Doug,” I called back, my voice carrying. “Extra strength Midol.”

“Sure thing,” Doug said, disappearing back down the aisle.

“Oh, my fucking God,” Jason said softly.

“I know. I’m sorry,” I said insincerely. “This will only take a minute. Then you can take your Midol, and your cramps will go away.”

He lifted a hand—one big, long-fingered, well-formed, pure-sex hand—and scraped it slowly over his face. I could hear the rasp of his stubble, the sound reverberating straight between my legs. Damn him.

“It’s for my mother,” he said.

Oh. Right. He’d moved back in to his mother’s house after the breakup with Charlotte. I hadn’t thought of that. How old was Mrs. Carsleigh? Still young enough to need Midol, obviously. Which meant that Jason, at twenty-four, was still a guy who would get out of bed hung over on a rainy Sunday to buy his mother some Midol.

Fuck.

Doug came back and gave me the price. The computer had it right, of course. So I rang it through and took Jason’s money without another word. It didn’t matter that I’d been a bit of a bitch to him while he was doing something nice. It didn’t matter. He deserved it. I told myself that as I yanked the money out of his hand and dumped out his change. As I snapped the box of Midol into a bag and shoved it at him.
Fuck you, Jason Carsleigh. Fuck you
.

He took his change and paused, as if considering saying something. “Jesus you’re pissed at me,” he said. “I wish I knew why.”

He turned and walked away, his tall, muscled body moving easily in his sweatshirt and worn jeans.

I watched him walk away, my stomach sinking.

I wish I knew why.

I did a quick calculation of the dates, and I realized with a sudden shock that I had hated him for just under five years. Five
years.
More than a fifth of my life. The idea felt like a slap to the face, and my anger drained out of me like a deflated balloon. Jason was right; this was exhausting. I wasn’t the kind of girl who hated people for five years. In fact, I didn’t hate anyone—Jason was the only one. He was the only person on the planet who made me this certifiably insane.

And suddenly, I wanted him to understand the reason. I didn’t want to keep it to myself anymore, like a closely held secret. I wanted him to know. I wanted it to matter.

Doug was a few feet away, straightening a shelf of breath mints and lip glosses, and I turned to him. “I’m taking a break.”

He looked at me and frowned. The old man waiting to pay for his Eno frowned, too. “It’s not time for your break,” Doug said.

There was an arcane system dictating who took breaks when that I had never bothered to understand, but Doug knew it by heart. “I’m taking it now,” I said, untying my apron and sliding the loop up over my head.

“Fine,” Doug huffed, not wanting to make a scene in front of the Eno man. “But you can’t take your break at one forty-five.”

I dropped the apron. Jason was getting away with every second wasted here. “Whatever. I’ll be right back.”

I stepped out the front door. Drug-Rite was in a strip mall, and past the concrete overhang I could see that it was still raining hard. Jason was walking along the walkway, heading toward his car, which was parked in front of the pet food store four doors down.

“Jason,” I said, trotting after him.

He went tense; I could see it in the line of his shoulders beneath the sweatshirt. He still had his hood up, and when he turned and looked at me, his eyes were guarded, his mouth set. “Yeah?” he said.

I had to swallow my fear for a second. It wasn’t just that standing face to face like this, without a counter between us, I was aware of how much taller than me he was. It wasn’t just that he was gorgeous, or that he’d been a god in high school. It wasn’t just that he made me aware of the dampness between my legs as I stood there looking at him.

It was that, once upon a time, I had seen Jason Carsleigh naked.
All the way
naked. And every time I looked at him now I kept seeing it, over and over, like some crazy oversexed version of erotic PTSD. The ridges of his stomach. The dark tufts of hair under his arms. The lines of muscles along his thighs. The easy curve of his lower back. His cock. All of it.
All
of it.

The blank look on his face told me he wasn’t faking. He didn’t remember.

“The year after high school,” I blurted at him. “Penny Smith threw a party at her dad’s house.”

His dark brown eyes watched me, something ticking behind them. But he didn’t speak.

“You were there,” I said. “With Dean. He was doing shots in the kitchen. You were in the basement rec room, going through Penny’s dad’s movie collection and drinking vodka.”

The lines of Jason’s face changed subtly. His eyes went wider. His jaw went harder. He blinked once, and I watched the memories come up behind his pupils. “Wait,” he said softly.