Unfiltered & Undressed (The Unfiltered Series) (11 page)

Heidi barked with laughter, a sound that resonated through the bar and grated on my nerves. “I like her. She’s got spunk.”

Biting back a scathing remark, I tried to reason with Lauren instead. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Maybe I should get your friend now.” I started to wave, meaning to get the blonde girl’s attention—Emerson something-or-other. But Zane saw me instead.

Lauren’s gaze found me then with almost laser-like precision as she tried to burn a hole right through me with that stare, and for a second I thought I might’ve been wrong, that she was totally fine. “Mind your own business,” she slurred, and before I could talk her out of it, she picked up her second shot and downed it.

This one went down even rougher than the first one had. She had to swallow several times, and I didn’t think all of the swallows were Jager.

“Do you need to go to the restroom?” I asked, almost certain where this was headed.

“Why can’t you just stay away from me? I can’t believe I ever thought I liked you. I can’t believe I let you kiss me.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Zane freeze where he was. I couldn’t say I wasn’t a little satisfied he’d just heard that. But Lauren wasn’t finished just yet, not by a long shot, and I had a feeling she’d be regretting a hell of a lot come morning. “What are you looking at?” she asked, turning on Zane now. “I told you I was fine. I don’t need you to come over here and rescue me.” She waved him away. “I got this.”

Zane did what any self-respecting guy would do and backed away.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t going anywhere. Clearly, I was a glutton for punishment, and Lauren was more than happy to dish it out. “You’re just like all the rest of ’em—a first class prick. I should’ve never…” She swallowed again. “… trusted you.”

Her friend was coming now, the tall blonde girl. Hopefully Lauren would listen to her since she wasn’t listening to me.

But before she reached us, Lauren got up from her stool. She swayed and tried to catch the bar, but when she missed it, I caught her instead. “Lauren, come on. Let’s get you someplace…”

That’s when she bent forward and lost it…all over the floor, all over her shoes…and all over mine.

LAUREN

I leaned back against the cool metal of the stall while Emerson applied a wet paper towel compress against my cheek and forehead, the way a good girlfriend should, in the aftermath of what I’d just done. “How bad was it?” I moaned. My head was still spinning as I tried to make sense of it all.

“You puked. Like, everywhere.”

“Yeah, I gathered that much, Em. I meant the rest of it.”

Emerson sat back on her heels and contemplated me. She reached out and swiped at my smudged mascara. “I only caught the tail end of what went on out there, but it was pretty bad.” Her sympathetic face said it all: I’d made a mess of everything.

“Zane?”

She let out a breath. “Pretty bent. Last I heard, when I was helping you get in here, Lucas was trying to convince him to wait for us.”

I thought about the last time I’d seen him, the shocked look on his face when I’d all but blamed Will for making me kiss him. How in the world had I let myself get so out of control,
so wasted
?

Zane wasn’t entirely innocent. He’d been the one handing me beer after beer while we played pool, but it wasn’t like I hadn’t accepted them. I knew what I was doing. I’d wanted to get drunk; that was my entire reason for coming out tonight—to obliterate Will from my memory. Even if only for the night.

Instead, Will had managed to crash my little pity party and ruin everything.

I groaned, burying my face in my hands while Emerson left the stall to get a fresh wad of paper towels. The ones she came back with were cold and damp and felt like heaven against my burning cheeks.

“How come you didn’t tell me?” When I looked up, her probing gaze was on me. “About Will…and the kiss?”

I slumped even harder against the metal wall, opening my mouth. But when I tried to think of the right thing to say, nothing seemed to fit. Why
hadn’t
I told her? Because the kiss meant nothing? Because I had no intention of letting it happen again? Because Will already had a girlfriend?

Yes. It was all of those things, and none all at once. I was more confused than ever when it came to Will. “I don’t know, Em. I just…I wasn’t sure what to say.”

Emerson went perfectly still, the wad of paper towels crumpled in her hand. “Oh my God. Oh. My. God,” she repeated, her voice was filled with awe. “You like him.” She wasn’t asking. She said it like it was a statement of fact.

I shook my head, sitting up straighter now, and the sudden shift in position sent new waves of dizziness whirling through my head.

“Don’t try to deny it. I know you. You totally do.” She gave me a weird look, like she was seeing me in a whole new light. “I mean, I knew he liked you, it was so obvious. But you…you never like anyone.”

There was a knock on the bathroom door, and I jumped. And then it opened, and Will’s voice was there, echoing off the bathroom tiles. “Hello?”

I shot Emerson a stare meant to convey we should pretend we weren’t in there, but she countered me with a
you’re crazy
look of her own and ignored me and left the stall. “She’s doing better,” Em told him against my wishes.

I heard his footsteps and knew he was standing just on the other side of the metal door now.

“Lauren.” He wasn’t asking if I was in here, or if I was okay, but just hearing him say my name, just hearing his voice…

I felt sick all over again, and I wondered why he was even still here at all. Hadn’t I done enough damage? I didn’t dare glance down at his shoes to see how true that really was.

“Go away,” I croaked.

“You know I can’t do that,” he said.

I scoffed. “Of course you can. I mean it, leave me alone.”

There was a long silence.

Then, “I’m coming in.”

My heart slammed against my ribs. “No!” I jumped up to stop the door before it swung all the way open, realizing I hadn’t secured it when Emerson had gone out. But I was too late. The door opened and I found myself face-to-mascara-streaked-face with Will.

My humiliation was complete.

I didn’t have long to worry about how I’d disgraced myself, or consider how I looked now, because the moment I was on my feet, my vision tunneled in on itself. For the briefest second, I thought I’d just gotten up too fast, and it would pass. But before I realized what was happening, everything tilted sideways, and I was falling.

WILL

“You’re safe now.” Lauren’s silky brown hair tickled my chin as I whispered against the top of her head, and it was harder than it should have been to resist the urge to press my lips to her scalp. “I got you.” I tightened my grip on her as I kicked the bathroom door open and found myself inside the noisy bar once more.

That dick, Zane, was waiting there on the other side of the door, and got all in my face, even though he’d been too chicken shit to break the rules in the first place and venture into the girls’ bathroom so he could see for himself how Lauren was holding up. Didn’t say much for his character if you asked me, not that anyone was asking.

But now that I’d come out and was carrying her, here he was, acting like I was violating her just by having my hands on her.

“I’ll take her from here.” He held out his arms like he seriously thought I was just going to hand her over to him. Lauren’s blonde friend, Emerson, had given me the key to their place so I could take Lauren home and get her to bed, and that’s exactly what I planned to do.

I shoved past him. “No, you won’t. I’m taking her home. Feel free to call it a night.”

And that was it. No one else bothered to get in my way, not even that skank, Heidi, who’d laughed her head off when Lauren had puked after reading me the riot act. I knew that given half a chance, though, she’d still let me take her to a cheap motel and bang her, no strings attached.

By the time I got Lauren settled in the cab of my pickup, she was alert and watching me with those molten brown eyes of hers. “Thank you,” she said in a voice that was a million times less critical than the one she’d used when she’d been shouting at me from her barstool. “For…” She hesitated, shifting her eyes away from mine. “…back there, with Zane.”

I finished buckling her in, even though she probably could’ve done it for herself, and tried not to notice the way her nipples hardened when my chest brushed over hers. “I wondered if you were awake.”

She gave me a weak smile. “I was trying to decide which was worse, going home with you or staying there with him.”

I hid my smile, pretending to be offended. “Ouch.”

Half-heartedly, she rolled her eyes as I closed her door and hustled around to climb inside.

We were on the road before she spoke again. “I’m so embarrassed about your shoes.”

This time I didn’t bother hiding the smile. “You should be, that was disgusting.” But when I glanced her way, she didn’t look so good, leaning her forehead against the passenger side window the way she was. She looked like she might be sick again. “How you doin’ over there? You okay?” I didn’t wait for an answer. I pulled into the nearest gas station and left the engine running. “Be right back.”

When I came out, I offered her a box of soda crackers and a bottle of ginger ale. “Drink it—it’ll help settle your stomach.”

She uncapped the bottle and took a small sip, watching me suspiciously. “Why are you doing this?” She took another swallow, bigger this time.

Her question surprised me, but mostly because I didn’t have a quick answer for it. It wouldn’t have been that big a deal to just leave her there. Hell, I probably should have—Zane and Emerson would’ve made sure she made it home just as safely as I could. Honestly, from the way I felt about her, as twisted up as she made me, probably more so.

I never knew if I wanted to throttle her or rip her clothes off.

I mean, yeah, I
definitely
wanted to rip her clothes off. It was the throttling part I was unsure about. But when I’d walked into the bar tonight, I’d seen Zane give me a look that said the two of them were a done deal. That, at least in his mind, she was already his and I was too late. Well, just the possibility he was right had been too much and I’d gone off the rails.

I had no idea if she felt the same way about him, but it hadn’t mattered. I’d decided to prod her, both of them, to see where they stood.

I grinned at her, because the fact she was in the cab of my truck now was answer enough. “Because I had to.” It was the only answer that made sense to me.

She frowned, and I wondered why I couldn’t just say what I meant. Why I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I knew I wanted to figure out if there was something happening here, between us. And that, for the first time in my life, I was willing to take a chance on someone other than myself, and it scared the shit out of me.

Maybe that was
why
I couldn’t seem to say the right thing—because it mattered too damn much.

I put the truck in reverse while she nibbled on the crackers, her head sagging against the window once again. When we reached the winding curves of the coast highway on our way back to her place, I felt her insistent grip on my arm. “
Pull over
,” she gulped.

“You gonna be sick?” It was a stupid question, but it was all I could think of.

“Only if I have to keep smelling this dress.” Her face was screwed up in a mix of anguish and disgust, and she was ripping at the yellow fabric. It was the first time I realized she hadn’t just gotten sick on my shoes. Her friend had cleaned her up the best she could, but it wasn’t good enough. “Do you have anything I can put on?” she practically begged, and I had to tear my eyes away because she already had the dress halfway over her head.

I leaned over the back of the bench seat to search for something, but there was just a bunch of crap back there. “Here,” I said, tugging at the hem of my shirt and dragging it over my head. “Put this on.”

She didn’t have to be asked twice, and even though I’d only pulled off to the side of the two-lane coast highway and anyone driving past could see her, she completely stripped out of the offending dress.

I assumed it was all the booze, because she had zero inhibitions, and I told myself I shouldn’t look because all she was wearing now were a tiny pair of lacy panties, but, Jesus Christ, how could I not? In the pale light coming from the faraway streetlight, her breasts were exactly as perfect as I remembered them, and her nipples were hard and dark and just begging me to touch them. I squirmed in my seat, unable, even if I’d wanted to, to stop staring. I had flashes of reaching around her slender waist with both hands, and running my mouth everywhere over flawless skin. Of tasting her silken flesh.

She worked fast, so I did too, burning the image of her exquisite body into my mind’s eye, because I planned to use that memory for as long as I could.

She shrugged into my black shirt, which hung well past her waist and covered up those delicate panties of hers. Breathing a sigh of relief, she slumped into the seat, letting her head drop back.

“Better?” I tried to laugh, even though I was in my own version of agony now.

“You have no idea.”

I took the wadded up dress and threw it on the floor, so the smell wouldn’t bother her, and wondered when I’d become such a mother hen. First Tess and now Lauren. If I wasn’t careful I’d grow a set of tits and start trying to nurse puppies or something. These goddamned girls were making me soft. A year ago I wouldn’t have given two shits about whether some chick drank too much and called me a prick. Hell, it had happened, more often than not, and I’d probably just laughed about it.

But when Lauren said it, it meant something. Not because she was right, which she totally was—that part I didn’t care about. I cared because
she
did, even if she said she didn’t.

I wanted her to think differently of me.

I opened my mouth. I needed to tell her as much, so there’d be no more confusion.

She stopped me, her voice haggard around the edges. “I wish you wouldn’t be so nice.”