Chapter 2 Chapter Two
CANDY’S POV
After the most restless, nightmarish night of my life, I woke up this morning with a blank memory of it, a furiously pounding head and body aches for fucking souvenirs. Drinking to oblivion is honestly not what it’s cracked up to be. It doesn’t bring you the promised bliss of forgetting your problems, no, it takes you instead to the bowl of your toilet four times in one night even when you have nothing else left in your gut to throw up.
Laying still in the bed that does feel like mine but smelled nothing like it, I scan my room with my eyes and for some reason, it looks familiar but in a very different way.
Something is off.
I force the upper half of my body up from the bed in a feeble attempt to wake my body, relearning how to hold myself upright without feeling like death chewed me over and spat me out. I sigh with a little content as the cool morning breeze finds its way to my bare skin in a soft caress as the cover I’d been hiding under falls to my waist……
Wait what!?
Why the fuck am I naked?
Oh God no, please no……
Tell me it’s my mind messing with me and I didn’t end up drunk in someone else’s room, gotten naked and done things I won’t be proud to find out this morning. But the more I think about it, the more likely it starts to seem because I know for sure I didn’t get myself like this. I’ve hated sleeping in the nude for as long as I can remember and I surely didn’t have enough motor skill in the state I was last night to achieve the feat without help.
The more I look around the room, the more I know for sure it’s definitely not mine.
Fuck, what have I done!?
As if to cement my theory, the door of the room comes open and I’ve never had my hands move as fast as they did to the sheets pooled at my waist to cover up my nudity and shame as the possible owner of the room saunters in, dominating the space.
A man.
Of course it’s a man.
And he probably saw more than my naked torso last night in my drunken haze but it’d kill me to have him take parting mental shots of it now before kicking me out. Not that any of it is extraordinary or that memorable, I’ve been told it’s not, but it’s mine to save, my last shred of dignity hangs on it.
The man, who is now standing just a couple feet from the end of the bed, glances at my deathly grip on the sheets, a slight smirk touching his lips.
Yeah, smirk all you want mister but you won’t be seeing this again, Not if I can help it.
“Figured out you were fighting for the wrong room last night yet?” He asks casually, going to the desk in the corner of his room to drop the things he had in his arms.
“You can stop looking like the sacrificial virgin, we didn’t have sex.”
Relief washes over me in waves at his confession, my inner panic calming a bit, well enough to deafen my mind to his bluntness.
“W-what happened, please? How,” I glance distastefully at myself, “did I end up here.”
He laughs to himself as he rests the back of his thighs against the desk, his eyes doing more of the talking than his mouth.
Whatever I did, I’m guessing it was terrible.
“What happened?” He repeats, chuckling.
“Well, besides fighting me for my room, throwing up all over us both and keeping us basically glued to the bowl of the toilet all night so you could continue from where you stopped? Not much, I guess.”
A hot wave of embarrassment burns through me, turning my face and neck into a shade I’m sure matches a freshly ripened tomato, his small laugh and the pieces of the puzzle that was last night coming back to me intensifying it.
Suits me for heavy drinking alone.
“I’ll call security if you don’t leave my door the fuck alone.” I’d said that…….to him.
I remember him now, mountain man.
Well, fuck me dead.
“I’m so so sorry. I can’t find the words to tell you how sorry I really am. I had a rough night.” I ramble, flushing even harder with crippling embarrassment.
“All water under the bridge. How are you feeling now?”
“Like I need to give your room back?” I joke, getting off the bed and swaddling myself with the sheets I still won’t let go of. I pick looking like Casper over prancing around in my birthday suit.
He nods in response, a hint of a smile playing at the corner of his lips still. On the upside, he’s not royally pissed about the whole situation, just very amused by my woes. And he’s not an asshole.
He watches from his spot as I waddle like a penguin around his room looking for my belongings. Resignedly, he gets off the desk, bringing me my freshly washed clothes wrapped in the hotel’s branded suit bag, my purse and then one of the bags he came in with earlier.
“There’s Aspirin for the headache, latte and cinnamon rolls if you can keep that down.”
I mutter my thanks leaving the room with that last shred of dignity I was hogging onto earlier slain at his feet.
A bath and breakfast and maybe a moment to sulk in my own bed should cure both my sore body and my frazzled brain, I think as I search for my key card in my purse. Thankfully I find it nestled in there, it’d have been an even bigger show to have me waddle downstairs right now to the lobby to ask for a new key card covered in nothing but my neighbor’s sheet.
Shoving my door open before anyone else sees me like this, I crawl into the bathroom for a long, hot shower, letting the stinging spray of water wash away all my shame and pain and the dueling emotions I’ve fought so hard to keep at bay. Time heals all wounds they say, but no one ever says how long that is exactly.
I’m due for some healing but apparently a week isn’t enough time.
I feel slightly better after my bath, the aspirin taking care of most of my headache. By the time I have the breakfast my kind mountain man who doesn’t look so mountain-y now that I’m sober had gotten me, I feel a whole lot better. Food is comfort.
Now, in better senses, I guess I have an apology to go render and a friend to make.