Chapter 12
Poppy’s brain began the morning’s torturous roll call before her eyes had so much as parted.
First came the headache, an electrical storm of oscillating pain behind her temples.
Next, the furry cotton of her tongue, as if a tribe of Q-tips had chosen her mouth as their ancestral burial ground.
Third, and most urgent, was the acute pang of hunger that radiated through her core, so sharp and all-consuming it nearly eclipsed the other maladies.
It wasn’t fair, if she was going to feel like death, couldn’t she at least have the decency to lose her appetite?
None of it would have been remarkable except for the exquisite aromas that gathered at the doorway of her consciousness like a SWAT team of temptation.
Coffee. Bacon. Something sweet and sugary that might have been pancakes, or French toast, or an entire bakery.
Poppy burrowed her face deeper into her pillow, desperate to stay in the oblivion of not-yet-awake, but her stomach rebelled with a noise like someone rolling a bowling ball down a gravel driveway.
When she finally forced her eyes open, she was at first convinced she’d died and woken up in a diner in heaven, the smells were that delicious.
That theory was disproved by how shitty she felt.
Her head pounded the way it only ever did when she spent the evening entertaining a certain gentleman named Don Julio.
She winced at the sunlight stabbing her irises as it sliced through the slit of her curtains, then it all came back to her.
The wedding. The six glasses of champagne.
Five tequila shots. The bouquet toss. The photos.
The dance. AJ giving her a ride home. The talking.
The best sex of her life. Him taking a shower.
Her sitting on the couch eating a cookie to wait for him.
That was it. That’s the last memory she had.
Either AJ had stayed the night, or someone broke in and had cooked her breakfast. She hoped it was option A.
Next to her, she ran her hand on the sheets, and they were cool. If he’d stayed overnight, would he have slept on the couch? She grabbed the pillow and sniffed it. It smelled like him.
Shit. That meant he probably had slept with her in bed, and she had no memory of it because she’d passed out.
She squeezed her eyes shut, replaying every mortifying possibility.
Had she said something idiotic before she blacked out?
Had she drooled on him? Had she snored? Had he watched her sleep, silently judging her collection of 80s Funko Pops, which included The Golden Girls, Punky Brewster, E.T.
, Ferris Bueller, Samantha and Jake Ryan from Sixteen Candles, Rainbow Brite, Indiana Jones, and more displayed on her dresser?
She pulled the blankets back, slid her legs off the side of the bed, and pushed up to a seated position. When she did, she noticed the time on the clock. It was six thirty a.m. She had to be at work at seven.
“Fuck,” she cursed beneath her breath.
Her stomach revolted as she stood, and her legs wobbled and threatened to give out on her, but she persisted, pushing past her nausea and noodle knees.
After grabbing a clean pair of scrubs and underwear, she walked out to find AJ standing at her stove with his back to her, spatula in hand, quietly executing the kind of breakfast choreography Poppy had only ever seen on Food Network.
He’d changed into his own jeans, faded in all the right places and a T-shirt that pulled tight across his broad shoulders, the line of his spine visible beneath the cotton.
His hair was still damp from the shower.
There was something heartbreakingly domestic about the sight, like he belonged there, in her tiny, colorful bungalow, making breakfast as if this was the most natural thing in the world.
The sight made her mouth water even more than the delicious-smelling food.
She couldn’t believe she actually had an appetite for either AJ or his food considering she felt like she belonged on The Walking Dead, but she did. If she wasn’t running late for work, she would have happily indulged in both.
“Morning.” Her voice came out sounding much hoarser than she’d ever heard it before. She sounded like Chandler’s dad in Friends, played by the amazing actress Kathleen Turner.
AJ glanced over his shoulder, and she was struck that overnight he’d gone up on the sexy scale by at least ten points.
“I made breakfast,” he pointed out the obvious.
“That’s amazing. I’m actually running late for work, but, um, I will definitely take it to go.
” She tried to pivot back to the bathroom, but her mind wouldn’t let it go.
The loose edges of the night needed to be tied down, or she’d trip on them for the next week. “So… did you spend the night? Here?”
He didn’t respond immediately. As she waited, her heart pounded wildly in her chest.
“Yes.”
“Did you go home, or to the resort and come back?”
“No. Why?”
“Your clothes,” she explained.
“I came straight from the airport to the wedding. I had my bag with me.”
“Oh. Right.” She nodded. “And you slept…?”
“In bed with you.” He said it with the same factual tone he might use to describe a traffic detour or the migration patterns of birds. Not defensive, not smug. Just a statement of fact.
She blinked. She’d had AJ Costas in her bed all night, and she had zero memory of it.
This had definitely been the epitome of what Steven Tyler was singing about in his 1998 classic “Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” but that’s exactly what had happened because she was a lightweight. She’d been betrayed by her own biology.
“Is that okay?” he questioned as the scrutiny of his gaze intensified.
“Oh, no, yes, I mean yes, no, of course it is. Yes.” She flashed him a grin meant to deflect, but his watchful stare was like an emotional magnifying glass, catching every shift in mood down to the thousandth micro-expression that crossed her face.
His eyes narrowed.
“It’s fine, I just… it’s just a classic case of FOMO.” She made light of her reaction, one that if she’d had coffee, hadn’t been in such a hurry, or didn’t have such a huge crush on the man currently occupying space in her kitchen, she would have never been vulnerable enough to expose.
AJ looked at her, not blankly, but with the clinical curiosity of a scientist encountering a previously undiscovered specimen. “FOMO?”
“Fear of missing out. But I guess in this case, it would be ROMO, regret of missing out.” She laughed, but the sound was thin. “It doesn’t matter. I’m , um, I’m gonna be late for work, I gotta shower.”
Poppy escaped into the bathroom, shutting the door with a whump that reverberated in her skull.
She leaned on the sink and braced herself with both hands, willing the porcelain to absorb her tremors.
When she lifted her head, the reflection looking back at her in the mirror was unkind.
There was a dent in her cheek from the pillow, a mascara smudge under her eye that looked like a bruise, and her hair had achieved lift-off in all conceivable directions.
AJ looked like he could have been posing for Men’s Health magazine, and she looked like a raccoon that had barely survived a wind tunnel. Cool, cool, cool.
There was no time for a pity party, so she reached for the shower knob and turned it on.
Water gushed out, forceful and steady. She blinked, then stuck her hand under the spray, expecting the familiar icy trickle that required a full ten minutes to coax into compliance. The water was already steaming.
How was that possible?
Had AJ fixed her shower?
No. That’s crazy. It must just be a fluke.
She grabbed her toothbrush from the sink, and as she squeezed on toothpaste, she realized that the tap wasn’t dripping. She turned the cold water on, then off. No drip. Then she repeated with the hot. Same result.
Had AJ fixed her sink?
Her phone lit up with a ten-minute warning, which she always set for herself because she was easily distracted.
Double shit. She didn’t have time for a pity party or for a Sherlock Holmes investigation of The Case of the Fixed Plumbing.
She took a quick shower and sadly had to sacrifice shaving her legs. She quickly dressed in light blue scrubs and styled her wet hair in two Dutch braids. It wasn’t her best look, she wished she had time for a blowout before facing AJ again, but it was what it was.
As she opened the bathroom door, she realized her hand was trembling. She was nervous to face him for their goodbye.
Would he ask for her phone number?
Would he want to see her again before he left town?
When was he leaving town?
So many questions, but one was at the forefront of her mind.
“Hey, did you fix my—?” Her question trailed off when she stepped out of the bathroom to find her seven-hundred-square-foot home empty.
There was an eerie quiet, so she knew she was alone, but just in case, she glanced in the bedroom to confirm that it was empty as well. It was. When she looked out her front window, she saw that AJ’s rented SUV was no longer parked outside.
AJ was gone.
He’d left without saying goodbye. A sick feeling rolled in her stomach that had nothing to do with the alcohol she’d consumed the night before.
It shouldn’t have stung. It’s not that she felt he owed her anything.
They hadn’t made any promises. In fact, she’d been nervous about what she’d say to him, so he was doing her a favor.
But the hollow in her chest was real, and it expanded with every second she stood there, alone in the echo of her own expectations.
Of course he’d left. That was the safest option. The only option, really. She barely knew the man, and he lived across the country. A clean break was the best.