Sway (5 page)

I want to wake her up and tell her so, plus I’m suddenly flattened with a need to see the eyes of the girl who has the world’s best taste. But I don’t. I’d scare her anyway, since other than her drug-induced come-on that she’ll never even remember, she has no idea who I am. Probably best to leave it that way.

With a regret I haven’t felt since being hauled away in handcuffs, I return the album to the shelf. It slips easily back into place, as though it was never disturbed at all. Another pang of disappointment runs through me at leaving it behind, but I’m not a thief anymore. I said goodbye to that life years ago with no regrets, and until now, I haven’t once been tempted to revisit it. Rising from the bookcase, I make another pass around the room. Kathryn might need to find her purse, so I prop it on the floor against her bedroom door. Hopefully she won’t trip on it in the morning, but her morning-after hangover issues aren’t my problem.

I flip off the only light I turned on and head for the door. I’m halfway outside when a moan sounds from her bedroom. I blow out some air at the sound and roll my eyes heavenward.
Why? Just…Why?
It takes me only a second to contemplate what to do, another to drop my keys and wallet on the middle sofa cushion. Shoving my hands in my pocket, I wander toward her door as another moan hits, stronger this time. Silence comes next, followed by the unmistakable sound of retching. I don’t need to see it to know it’s bad. I don’t need to walk in her room all the way to know it stinks. I don’t need to see her face to know I can’t leave. I don’t need to hear her voice to know she needs help.

“Please help me,” she cries. I doubt she even knows she’s talking.

I was wrong about my life sucking earlier this evening.

Compared to now, the first time she puked was a great big bowl of cherries.

Kate

“Hurt”

—Nine Inch Nails

W
hen I crack one eye open and see a sliver of daylight, I have three semi-coherent thoughts. First, my mouth tastes like rotten maraschino cherries, and I don’t remember eating any. Second, there’s something dry and crusty plastered to my cheek, and I’m afraid to explore that information further. Third, I want to die. If only the zombie apocalypse would happen right here, right now and zap me of all memory and normal brain function. Because the alternative is that my head explodes into a million factions of tissue and cells. Hot. Metallic. Lethal. I gingerly lie unmoving under the pillow and try not to breathe.

I’d pay money for one of those zombies to show up.

Money.

I frown, which also manages to hurt. But…where’s my purse? I search my memory, but I can’t remember bringing it home last night. And I need it, because the invitation came in the mail yesterday and it’s still tucked inside. I never opened it, and I can’t remember the time, place, or date for my father’s next speech. To call and ask would only get me a lecture about being irresponsible, self-indulgent, and scatterbrained. I could rattle off more labels from a lifetime of memories, but it pains me too much. If I could just remember what happened when I walked into the house—

Then it hits me.

How did I get home from the bar?

Against my better judgment—a judgment that has served me well since the time my mother announced I would compete in the Little Miss Oklahoma pageant and I put my nine-year-old foot down; good thing, too, since the girl who won that year is currently serving time for third-degree larceny. I lift the pillow a fraction of an inch and allow one eye to slit open. This looks like my room. I can see the muted outline of three crepe paper balls suspended from one corner of the ceiling. Without moving my head, I can make out what appears to be the gorgeous face of Chace Crawford gazing down at me from the life size
Gossip Girl
poster I bought last year at Wal-Mart. Childish, maybe, but I haven’t had a boyfriend in more than a year. A girl’s got to live vicariously through something, and I’d rather not live through my roommate, whose idea of a long-term relationship is three consecutive nights waking up in the same bed with the same guy. It’s disgusting, really. I can’t believe I let her talk me into—

Wait.

Lucy. She left the bar early, after she’d snagged her potential “boyfriend.” In fact, I seem to remember snagging one myself—a drop-dead gorgeous hunk of a man who flattered me mercilessly and flashed a roll of twenties to the waitress when he thought I wasn’t looking. Or maybe he knew I was. Something about the move seemed deliberate. Either way, it was impressive. Stunning. And more than a little sexy. I remember talking to him, I remember telling him it was my birthday, I remember his comment about making it a night I’d never forget, I remember…

My hand lands on the mattress as I struggle to sit up. I lift it. Bring it to my face. Try not to scream. And fall back on my pillow.

I do
not
remember throwing up.

Nor do I recall, no matter how much I search my fuzzy, comatose brain, how in the world I made it to my bed. My friends all left the bar before me, so who brought me here? Who let me in my house? Who left me in this bed to rot in a layer of vomit?

That last thought makes me mad.

With my head throbbing violently, I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the bed. The person probably dumped me and left the apartment with a great, big laugh. I press my hands to my head and shuffle toward the bedroom door, stopping for a moment when the room begins to sway. It’s irrational, I know, but I need to find out if everything is still here. What if he stole something? What if he’s a murderer…or worse?

I’m not sure what I expect when I throw open the door and stumble into the hallway, but the person I see sprawled on the sofa definitely isn’t it.

Caleb

“Ain’t She Sweet”

—The Beatles

W
aking up in a strange place requires a weird kind of detachment, one that takes much less time to develop than you might think. Unless you’ve had your own pillow on your own bed in your own room for any stretch of your life, waking up lying across someone else’s bed doesn’t come as a surprise.

But when it’s been awhile, when you finally have place to call home after years and years of wishing, waking up in a strange room—especially one that smells like vomit while being ironically filled with pink—can come as a shock. A setback. A spotlight accenting your worst failure.

Funny how quickly the past revisits itself.

My eyes blink open, though I’ve barely been asleep for two hours. I know this because the clock on the DVD player shines seven fifteen, and I didn’t make it to the sofa until after five. Sleep isn’t normally a problem for me—at home, eight to ten hours is a normal stretch. But then I’m not at home. I’m at a strange girl’s house. And I mean strange in the literal sense. In the past four hours, she’s kissed me once, tried to slap me twice, yelled at me more times than I can count, and has thrown up on me at least double that. Until two hours ago, I spent the entire night cleaning up her puke. Off her, off her bed, off me. I was covered in so much filth from the waist down that I couldn’t leave. There are a lot of things I’m willing to do—I’ve been to Skid Row, prisons, countless homeless shelters—but sitting my soggy butt in my next-to-new SUV last night wasn’t one of them.

My gut clenches at the thought, and that’s when I remember. Looking down at the thing I snatched off her hanger and slipped on a couple hours ago, I groan. It’s tight, ugly, makes even
me
question my manhood, and I’ve got to get it off before—

“Who the heck are you? And why are you wearing my robe!” A female voice I’ve never heard before unless you count wailing and retching comes from the hallway, and my head spins to find her. She’s fisting an iron candlestick in classic
Clue
style—
the drunk birthday girl did it with the candlestick in the hallway
—and looks ready to pounce. This would be a great time to die, but of course I’m not that lucky. I sit up slowly, fighting an unusual wave of embarrassment. It takes a lot to humble me. Just as quickly, my embarrassment fades into irritation. Who’s she mad at? After what she put me through all night, she owes me big time. I give her my best don’t-mess-with-me glare and settle my wrists on my knees.

“I’m wearing it because cross-dressing is my thing, and sneaking into women’s houses on Friday night turns me on.” Like the jerk I’m being right then, I slowly look her up and down.

For a second she looks scared. But then the fear fades, and her anger returns. With her matted hair and vomit-stained dress that used to be black but now looks like a weird shade of gray and brown tie dye—disgusting—she looks half insane. When she speaks again, she sounds it, too.

“Get your eyes off me. And get out of my house.”

Now I’m mad, and since my track record is way more violent than hers, I’m pretty sure I’m better at it.

“Get out of your house? I’d love to get out of your house!” I toss my hands in the air and stand, aware that the raised volume of my voice will feel like knives to her hungover head. The fact that I’m still wearing a pink robe with ruffles at the sleeves only feeds my anger. “In fact, I wanted to leave five hours ago. But every time I moved toward the door, you started throwing up again. Did you know that when you throw up, you cry? And your nose runs like a water fountain targeting only my shirt? And you beg for strange men to stay and help you? And you whine for your mommy over and over and over? But of course you have a security code on your phone, which makes it really hard for a guy like me to find her number!” At her stricken expression, I do what a true gentleman would do. I keep going. “Know what else? I’ve changed your sheets twice. Not easy to do when you can’t find the extra sheets and dead, drunk weight is lying in the middle of the flippin’ bed!”

I’m breathing hard. And now that I’ve gotten it all out, I feel like crap.

When her lip quivers and she slides to floor, I feel worse. Like crap stuck to the bottom of a shoe. She buries her head in her hands. Her blonde hair that once felt so silky between my fingers is now the most disgusting mass of yuck I’ve ever seen, but I don’t have the heart to tell her.

“How I was drunk? I only had one beer, and I don’t even remember finishing it. I’ve never been drunk a day in my life. Last night was the first time I’d ever even been to a bar!” Despair makes her voice crack, and she sniffs behind her fingers. I lower myself to the edge of the sofa and prop my elbows on my knees, feeling the hardness of my anger dissolve beneath me. I never should have yelled at her. After the night she’d had—the girl could have been raped, for heaven’s sake—it was a worthless thing to do.

Scott’s mantra comes to my mind in a clarifying rush.
Acting on the moment might feel good at first, but guilt always follows right behind it.
He’s talking about sex, drugs, violence and a bunch of other shameful sins, and I’ve made fun of him a dozen times for saying it, but he’s right. It definitely applies here. Remorse weighs heavy on my shoulders, and I breathe a little prayer. I don’t think she’ll take this well.

“You weren’t drunk. You were drugged.”

Her head shoots up, pink tearstained cheeks puffed out in shock. “Drugged? By who?” But realization darkens her features the moment she asks. “The guy I was talking to? But how could he do it without me noticing? I never left the table.”

I tell her everything I know, from the moment I walked out of the bathroom to find her sloshing her drink, to her confusion, to the way her body slumped sideways onto the table. When I get to the part about the guy leading her out of the bar, about witnessing the little white pill spilling from his pocket and tumbling to the ground, she visibly pales. When I tell her about the fight, about dragging her limp form out of his car and collecting the purse he tossed out of his rapidly disappearing window, I start to look around for a bucket. If this girl loses it again, I’m going to be prepared. But she gains control of herself and starts asking more questions.

“But how could I not notice? Wouldn’t I have seen the pill in my glass? Wouldn’t I notice the taste?”

I shake my head. “All it takes is a second. If you turned your head to look for your friends or got so enthralled by what he was saying that you didn’t see his hand move toward your glass…” I shrug. “Plus, it doesn’t taste like anything. That’s why it’s so easy for people to do.”

Her eyes, now dry, narrow. It isn’t hard to guess what she’s thinking. “You seem to know an awful lot about it. Almost like you’ve used it before, yourself.”

I can’t help the indignant sniff that chases her accusation. “Let’s just say I’ve had…experience.”

She backs against the wall. “You know…” Her voice shakes as she says this, and once again she’s afraid of me. A few years ago this wouldn’t bother me. Now, I hate seeing the fear that was once so often lobbed my direction. “I don’t even know who you are. Have we met before? Are you a friend of Lucy’s or Ashley’s or…or…” She tilts her head to study me, staying silent for so long that I grow uncomfortable. I don’t remember my own mother looking at me like this, and just when I start to think about grabbing my clothes and getting the heck out of here, she speaks. “You’re the guy from the bar. The guy who spent most of the night staring at me.”

I don’t know what I expected to hear, but this isn’t it. I also don’t expect the relief that seems to radiate off her for no apparent reason. It embarrasses me again, but I don’t know why. “Don’t flatter yourself. I wasn’t staring.”

Oh, I stared. And she’d just called me out on it.

“Yes you were. Every time I glanced at the bar, you were looking right at me. It made me pretty uncomfortable, if you want the truth. I don’t enjoy being looked at like I’m someone’s next meal.”

Next meal?

Defensiveness. It’s my fallback. My life raft. “I was only staring because of that god-awful coat you were wearing. I’ve never seen anyone wear that color of pink on purpose. You looked like a giant bottle of Pepto Bismol. Like Reese Witherspoon in full
Legally Blonde
mode, completely out of place in that nightclub. So sue me if I couldn’t quit looking at you. Every guy in the bar was probably looking at you, because you stood out like a shiny pink bubble gum wrapper.”