Worry teeters on the precipice of my hyperactive mind. “I’m so sorry. Oh my God. I can’t believe I just did that,” I cry, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “I’ll buy you a new shirt, I promise—”
Concern rings in his voice. “Aeris, it’s okay. Now, I’m going to repeat what I asked you, okay?”
Once the nausea starts to subside and the dizziness becomes manageable, I nod obediently.
“Are you feeling fine, or do you need me to carry you the rest of the way?”
“I can walk.”
“Okay,” Hayes says, his fingers still placating me with their gentle eddying on my back.
Once we make it to my doorstep, Hayes idles behind me, like he’s a vampire that needs to be invited inside.
With the door still open, I gesture for him to come inside.
He doesn’t move.
“You can come in,” I tell him in case he needs some kind of verbal confirmation.
“You don’t know me. I’m not going to come inside your house.”
I place two hands on my hips. “Are you a serial killer?”
“No, but…”
“Then you have my permission to come inside.”
He opens his mouth to argue, but I cut him off before he can get trapped in that pretty head of his.
“I’m not sending you all the way home like that. At least clean up, okay? Then you can be on your merry way.”
I have a feeling that Hayes is a naturally stubborn person, but lucky for me, he stops resisting. I throw his dirty shirt in the laundry, quickly brush my teeth, then I open my shower up to him.
I forfeit a sigh, flopping onto my back on my bed.
This was not how I pictured the night ending. I wouldn’t have been against a little light groping and a sloppy makeout sesh. I also wouldn’t have resisted a terrible one-night stand that I’d inevitably have to buy Plan B for in the morning. But this…this is scraping the bottom of the barrel. This is something my dignity will never recover from. Would it be rude of me to sneak out of my own house? I need to get a passport, change my name, dye my hair, and relocate to Mexico as soon as humanly possible.
And to make matters worse, I can’t seem to get out of my form-fitting clothes. Why are trivial tasks so much harder when you’re drunk? I hate it.
I shimmy my hips without fully sitting up, trying to do some kind of hop-jump combination to get my jeans to release my legs from their denim prisons. My pants are clinging to me like Saran wrap, and the more I struggle, the more my frustration ratchets. Amidst the battle, I’ve lost a heel, and the other one is moments from rocketing off to the other side of my room.
I feel something fuzzy slither around my leg, and I look down through graying vision to pinpoint my tuxedo cat, Crunchwrap, nuzzling against me. And yes, she’s named after the Crunchwrap Supreme from Taco Bell.
I abandon my mission of freeing my lady bits, picking Crunch up and holding her Lion King-style over top of me.
“I messed up tonight, girl. Big time.” Heat prickles the back of my neck, hot tears loom in my eyes, and regret begins to snowball through me.
“If Roden saw me now, he’d be so disappointed.” I blink away the moisture on my lower lash line that’s threatening to leave streaky evidence through my foundation.
Crunch stares at me with her demonic, yellow eyes, blinking slowly like she can secretly understand every word I’m saying. I’m holding her under her armpits so the top half of her looks a little smushed, and she usually hates being held this way—with her arms sticking straight out—but she isn’t hissing or batting at me. Cats are attuned to their owner’s emotions, right? God, this must be her way of pitying me.
“This guy I met, Hayes, he seems like a great guy. But I can’t let him in—not that I think I stand a chance with him after tonight,” I explain, a single tear slipping from the threshold of my weary eyes. My heart aches like it’s been wrung out to dry, and there’s this unsettled flicker in my belly that I know isn’t from the alcohol.
Crunch meows at me, turning her head to lick at the scruff of her neck.
“He’s beautiful. He really is. Oh, God. And I think I made a comment about his penis,” I mumble. “Like, yeah, I joked that it was small, but it looks a lot bigger than average.”
“You think I’m beautiful?” I hear Hayes say from the bathroom doorway, and I shriek, flinging my cat to the floor.
I’m not sure why I was expecting him to magically come out clothed, but the only thing he’s wearing is a towel slung low on his hips.
Hayes is a statue carved from the finest of marble. His lack of pants makes for a very clear show of the hard V-line he has, no doubt leading to a mouthwatering sight at the apex of his bulging thighs.
The taut ripples of his abs glisten from leftover water, and I can’t tear my eyes away from the corded ropes of muscle that band themselves around his arms. His bicep looks to be the equivalent size of my head. My head. I don’t think his hand would strain to wrap fully around my neck.
He’s barrel-chested, and there’s tiny, illegible scripture scrawled above his left pectoral. I don’t see any other tattoos marring his skin—until he gives me a brief flash of his back. And wow, what a back it is. All winding ridges and dips, accompanied by a thinly drawn tree that scales the length of his spine.
It must have hurt like hell to get a tattoo straight on the bone. If Hayes deals with pain so well, I wonder where he exceeds in other departments. And don’t get me started on his ass. All I can make out are two soft dimples resting right above the juiciest globes I’ve ever seen.
His hair is unkempt and waterlogged, and I get this urge to drag my nails along his scalp. There’s a teasing crinkle below his aquamarine eyes as he waits for me to herd all my runaway thoughts and form a coherent sentence.
A hot, white flash of embarrassment careens through me. “How much of that did you hear?” I hyperventilate.
Laughter thunders in his chest. “Just the part about my apparently bigger-than-average dick.”
Heat crawls into my cheeks and turns the tips of my ears red. “Please ignore me. I’m heavily intoxicated right now. I don’t mean a word I’m saying,” I say, albeit the conviction sounds weak.
His eyebrows jump to his hairline. “So you don’t think I have a bigger-than-average dick?”
The gears in my mind turn, my brain finally able to function at least enough to hold my tongue.
“I…didn’t not say that.”
His stare is stormy and intense, and his tongue peeks through his lips to periodically hydrate them. I wouldn’t mind denting the lower one with my teeth. Jesus, I need to be spayed.
“You’re adorable when you blush, you know that?” A flirtatious lilt skirts along his tone.
Of course his comment makes me blush even harder.
I’ve never been good with accepting compliments, so I decide to change the subject as discreetly as possible. “Your, uh, clothes have about two hours before they’ll be done,” I inform him.
“Thank you again for letting me borrow your washer and dryer.” There’s a genuineness that hangs off every word he says—something that’s been foreign to me in all my twenty-three years of existing on this godforsaken planet.