Chapter 20
COURTNEY
I was pretty sure God hated me.
There was no other reason to feel like I’d been run over by a truck only to have a cat take a shit in my mouth. I tried to lick my lips, because they were so dry, but my god-awful hungover death breath offended me as I opened my mouth. I groaned and the pillow beneath my head jiggled.
Wait.
That wasn’t right.
I touched my pillow with my hand and quickly realized it was a human body, and if I wasn’t mistaken a very manly human body. “No,” I whispered. I would never forgive myself, and Flynn would probably never forgive me either, for going home with another man.
Despite how much it hurt to see him so chummy with that woman in his office, after thinking about it, I had already come to the conclusion that there was most likely nothing going on between them. If there had been, his office door wouldn’t have been wide open, nor would his blinds. Did it bother me that another woman was so close to my husband and he looked happy to have her there in his space? Yes. Did that mean he was cheating on me? No.
While it was a sucky situation for me, waking up in bed with a man was way worse, especially since I was only in a bra and panties. At least I wasn’t totally nude. I wasn’t stupid though. There were exactly zero circumstances where a husband would be okay with his wife waking up in her undies while draped across a naked - or nearly naked - man.
I cracked my eye open and noticed a little scar right under the man’s nipple. I damn near heaved a sigh of relief. Flynn had that scar. It was his body I used as a pillow. I wanted to leap up and jump for joy that I hadn’t completely annihilated any chance of making my marriage work, but the minute I started to shift, my tummy rocked and rolled in the worst possible way.
I jumped up and stumble-ran to the bathroom just in time to try out for a lead role in The Exorcist. Whatever demon crawled in my body through the numerous shots I took the night before, wanted out in an explosive way.
My throat felt raw as tears tracked down my cheeks. Every time I thought there was no way there could possibly be anything else in my stomach, my body worked to prove me wrong. I was fairly certain that my organs were liquifying and purging because there was no other explanation for the volume of of vomit I spewed.
“Be gone, demon,” I whimpered as someone grabbed my hair and pulled it back into a half ponytail, half bun type thing.
“Demons, huh?” Flynn asked. There was no judgement in his tone as he stepped back to give me some space.
“Sorry. It was a rough night.”
“I know.”
“What do you mean, you know?”
“I’m the one who brought you home.” I turned my head to the side and looked at my gorgeous husband as he stood there in nothing but his boxer briefs and ran a washcloth under the faucet. “Got a call from you,” He stopped and thought about that for a minute. “Well, I think you started the call and got sidetracked, so this man picked up your phone and told me where I could find you.”
I crinkled my brow in confusion. “A man?”
Flynn brought the rag over to me and after I wiped my face clean with it, he rinsed it out and then ran it under cool water before he placed it on the back of my neck. “It will help,” He said to stop me from removing it. Then he told me all about the parts of my nights I hadn’t been coherent enough to remember.
“I could have been hurt.”
“Yeah, you could have, but I think everyone learned a lesson about that last night.”
“Are you sure Hadley was okay?” I didn’t know why I wanted to cry. Flynn had been placed in a bad situation the night before, or maybe earlier this morning. It sucked that he had to make the decision between staying with me or checking to be sure my friend was secure. I understood why I would be his priority, but it didn’t stop me from worrying about my bestie.
“I talked to her about an hour ago.”
“She was awake already?”
“Yes, she called me to make sure you were doing okay, since you weren’t answering her calls. She feels a good bit of guilt for leaving you alone to pass out with a stranger while she hooked up with his friend.”
“I’m a grown up. It’s not her job to babysit me,” I grumbled.
“Speaking of being a grown up,” My husband mentioned. “Please, don’t ever do that again. You were at a biker bar. If you hadn’t been sitting with the one decent guy in that bar, things could have turned out very differently, Court.”
I nodded, too afraid of my own overwhelming emotions to say anything in my defense. Truthfully, there was no defending the fact that I got that drunk in a place I wasn’t familiar with while surrounded by strangers. I don’t think I even registered that we were at a biker bar because my feelings after seeing my husband cozy with another woman blinded me to everything else.
“You wanna talk about why you were there in the first place?” Flynn asked.
“Not really,” I murmured.
“I think we should. It’s not doing us any good to keep going in this cone of silence the way we have been.”
“I’ve barely seen you,” I argued. “It’s hard to talk to someone who isn’t there.”
“You’re right. That was my fault. At first, I wanted to give you time to work through whatever you needed, but then I was afraid that in working through everything, you would decide to leave me.”
“We’re a mess.” I groaned when my stomach heaved again like I might throw up some more. Flynn took one look at me and backed toward the door.
“I’m going to grab some Ginger soda and crackers for you. Maybe it will help settle your stomach.” He was gone before I could argue that there was no way I would ever put food or liquid in my body again after puking up an entire ocean of alcohol a few minutes ago.
When my husband came back, he helped me to our bed and tucked me in before he handed me the soda and left the crackers on the bedside table.
“Why are you being so nice to me?”
“You’re my wife, Court, for better or worse, remember?”
“We both know this marriage is a sham.”
“It’s not a sham. Not to me, anyway.”
I patted the bed next to me and Flynn climbed in and got under the covers with me. “Can we stay here all day?”
“I think that would probably be best until you’re ready to try some real food.” I chuckled at his answer, but cut it short when it made me feel queasy. “Thank you for coming to get me and taking care of me.”
“It was my fault you were in that state to begin with.”
“Don’t,” I told him. “There’s no need to make excuses for what I did. You are right when you said it could have gone bad. I was so messed up emotionally that I didn’t even realize I was in a biker bar, and that was before the I ever drank the first shot.”
Flynn reached for his phone and queued up a video. “I wanted you to be able to see this.” I took it and saw what happened after I left his office the other day. I had to laugh at his cluelessness, but inside I secretly cheered Jeff on. He was a real girl’s guy.
“You should give Jeff a raise.”
“I’m sure he would appreciate that, considering I nearly fired him for insinuating things that weren’t true.”
“They looked true from where I was standing.”
“It has been brought to my attention that I may have also had a moment of cluelessness where my situation was concerned. I’ve worked with Kylie in the past and there has never been a time where I crossed a line with her. It’s been one of my rules since I took over my grandfather’s business when he passed. I don’t sleep with clients.” He coughed and then looked me in the eye. “And that was a rule before I was married. Afterward, the rule was amended to: ‘I don’t sleep with anyone but my wife’.”
I chuckled at that. “Good call, Mister.”
“I need you to know that I was never interested in her.”
“I had a moment of drunken clarity where I knew it wasn’t what it looked like, but it still hurt to see you carefree and laughing with someone else when I could barely catch a glimpse of you, let alone see you smile or laugh, or look happy to be near me.”
“Court,” Flynn whispered. “I have only seemed miserable because I couldn’t be around you lately. I promised to give you space until you sorted things and were ready to talk about what you wanted. I didn’t want to trample on that space, but it was killing me to keep my distance.”
“Let’s not do the space thing anymore,” I suggested.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
I was fine when I woke up, especially since Flynn once again acted as my pillow. I could get used to sleeping with him again, if I wasn’t careful. It took me a minute, in my sleepy state, to realize we had already decided to work on being a couple. With any luck, I would get used to it.
Flynn shifted beneath me and it dislodged me just enough from his chest that I had to adjust my position. Unfortunately, when I tried to do that, I was hit with an echo of the nausea I had the day before. I stayed still for a minute and willed it to pass, but then Flynn turned fully onto his side and bounced the bed just enough that I couldn’t hold back.
I jumped and ran to the bathroom in a panic and barely made it to the toilet before I threw up whatever was left on my stomach from dinner last night. It wasn’t much, mostly stomach bile, but that didn’t stop my body from heaving like it was purging hangover demons from my body again.
“What the hell?”I groaned miserably as a pair of hands worked to pull my hair back from me again.
“I hate to break it to you sweetheart, but hangovers don’t last two whole days.”
“Maybe I was never really hung over and I caught a stomach bug.”
“Oh, no, you were definitely hung over judging by how drunk you were the other night. You might be right about the stomach bug though.”
“I’m sorry”
“Why are you apologizing?”
“I’m apologizing in advance for when it’s you with your head in the toilet. I’ve wrapped myself around you both nights.”
“I don’t mind that one bit.”
“You will when you’re heaving your guts up because I got my disgusting cooties all over you.”
“Nothing about you is disgusting, not even your cooties.” When I threw him a dubious look, the jerk laughed at me. “We’re newlyweds, so everything is still in the ‘she’s so cute stage’.”
“Great, let me know when that changes, so I can keep my gross stuff to myself.”
He laughed again as he left the bathroom. “I’ll grab you a Ginger soda and some crackers to help settle your stomach.”
It was an echo of what he had said to me the day before, only it hit a little differently when I wasn’t hungover. “It can’t be…” I whispered to myself before I dragged my ass back to the bed in search of the phone I had on the charger. I dialed Hadley and as soon as she said, ‘Hello’, my words came spewing out at the same exorcist rate my vomit did.
“Do you remember when Sarah came down with something in our Junior year?”
“Yeah, it was pregnancy. She came down with pregnancy, Courtney.”
“Yeah, but before she knew that part, we thought she had the flu or food poisoning or something and the only thing that made her feel better was…”
“Ginger Ale and Saltine Crackers.” Hadley answered with a laugh. “I remember. What made you think of that?”
“That’s what Flynn got me for my hangover yesterday.”
“Aww that was sweet of him.”
“It’s also what he got me this morning for the tummy bug I must have because I threw up like I was hung over all over again.”
Hadley didn’t say a word as we both processed exactly what I was getting at. When she finally did speak, it was to ask the question I hadn’t been able to say out loud.
“Is it possible that you’re pregnant?”
“If I am, it was our wedding night, or I guess any time in that first week or so when we…” I cut myself off because I wasn’t one to talk about my intimate moments with my friend.
“Did you use protection?”
“All except for that first night.”
“Courtney!”
“It was my wedding night and neither of us were really thinking about safety.”
“Well, it sounds like you need a doctor’s appointment and a couple conversations with Flynn. Do you need me to run to the store and grab a couple tests for you in the meantime?”
“Would you?”
“That’s what BFFs are for.”
“I love you forever!”
She blew a kiss at me and hung up as I stared off into space and wondered what Flynn’s reaction would be.