9. Keeley #2
It’s sort of a relief that he doesn’t remember either.
As appalling as much of what I’ve done over the past few years is, to have this monumental night be almost entirely a blank slate rankles.
My father and stepmother constantly assume the worst and, in this, I’m forced to agree. “So I guess you were drunk too.”
A hint of a flush graces his cheeks. “You can’t possibly imagine I’d have chosen to do something like that sober?”
No, I guess not. While a fuck-up of this magnitude is just a day in the life for Keeley Connolly—I’m honestly shocked I hadn’t gotten drunk-married in Vegas already —for Graham Tate, it was an appalling, life-shattering error.
Temporary insanity he’ll now be stained by for the rest of his days.
It’s hard not to feel a bit guilty for dragging him into my crazy.
“Look,” I say, exhausted. “I have to work in the morning. Can we discuss this later?”
“My mom’s armed their security system by now. I’ll need to sleep here.”
“ Here ? No. Get a hotel. Or go stay with Gemma and Ben.”
“Keeley, for fuck’s sake…Gemma and Ben are asleep, and I don’t feel like finding a hotel at one in the morning. You must have a guest room.”
“Sorry, Lord McRichPants. There is no guest room available. You can take the couch.”
He pushes a hand through his hair. “That’s a loveseat, and I’m six-four. We’ve shared a bed before, apparently. It won’t kill us to do it again.”
“My room isn’t…fit for company.”
He glances around him. “Believe me, my expectations were already low.”
Ugh . I guess I deserved that. “Fine, whatever, but no judgement.”
I walk to my bedroom, which looks even worse than I remember, and I remembered it looking pretty terrible. The bed is unmade, and atop it rests several days’ worth of clothes, plus a wet towel, a half-eaten bag of popcorn, a makeup mirror I haven’t hung up, and my beloved Birkin bag.
He arches one perfect brow, that tiny flare of his nostrils accompanying it. “You’re sure you’re actually a doctor?” he asks, looking around. “Because you live like a teenage girl who just profited from a sex tape with Kanye.”
“I’m going to take that as a compliment.”
“I assure you it wasn’t one. I mean, are you letting circus folk use your bedroom as a staging area? I don’t even understand how one tiny person could make a mess of this size.”
How the hell did I sleep with this man? How the hell did I convince myself to marry him? God knows he couldn’t have been the one who did the convincing…He can barely stand to look at me.
I carefully pick up the Birkin before sweeping everything else onto the floor. “Climb in, remain dressed , and go to sleep.”
“Where’s your bathroom?”
There is absolutely no way he’s seeing my bathroom if he’s this judgmental already. “Guest bath,” I say, pointing toward the door. “Off the closet.”
“Your closet has its own bathroom?”
I ignore the question, entering my bathroom and slamming the door behind me.
And then my jaw locks and I swallow against the tightness in my throat, because coming face to face with myself, and only seeing my mother reflected back at me, is not ideal at the moment.
She wanted so much for me and so much for herself.
I brace my hands on the vanity and try not to cry. “Keeley, you’ve really fucked up. You’ve fucked up so badly.”
Because look at this place . There’s half a donut on the sink. Last night’s pajamas are still on the bathroom floor, where I shed them this morning. I haven’t taken out the trash in two weeks and it’s beyond overflowing.
I can’t parent . I can’t even take care of myself, and it’s only now, when I finally have a witness to it all, that I see it clearly.
No wonder he’s horrified. I wouldn’t want me raising my kid either.
But I absolutely can’t fall apart right now, not with Graham Tate stomping around my apartment, looking for signs of weakness.
I wash my face and pull on last night’s pajamas, then emerge from the bathroom to find Graham sitting up in my bed, leaning against the headboard with a t-shirt on, arms folded. He looks like someone’s cranky dad.
A really hot cranky dad, I’ll admit.
Which is what he already is . The man I’m looking at right now with those drool-inducing arms is the father of my child. My husband .
I shake my head as I stand in the doorway, patting on my eye cream. “I feel like I’ve landed in some kind of bizarro alternate universe.”
“Me too,” he replies. “But that’s mostly about the state of your apartment.”
I ignore him, shutting off the bathroom light and crossing the room to my side of the bed.
“I can’t believe you’ve turned an entire bedroom into clothing storage,” he grouses. “Why do you even own that many clothes?”
I climb in, pulling the blankets up to my neck. “I need clothes. It’s part of my brand. Eventually I’ll save someone’s life and be propelled into reality show fame, and when that happens, there are going to be a lot of premieres and cocktail parties, and I’ll need clothes.”
He glances at me, brow furrowed. “Your 401k must be a disaster.”
“Joke’s on you. I don’t have a 401k.” I make a show of fluffing my pillows, placing them all the way over to the halfway point of the bed.
I swear to God if his body crosses the midline of this mattress, I’ll stab him in his sleep.
I keep a knife on my nightstand, so I wouldn’t even have to exert myself.
“You have no retirement,” he repeats. Now I know the one thing that can upset him more than impending fatherhood. “Jesus, are you serious? You should be contributing the maximum every year. I bet your company even matches it.”
“Ugh. You sound just like Mark.” I flip off the light and lie down beside this massive almost-stranger I’m stuck with for the night.
Movies make this situation look sexy, but in truth it’s just weird .
His side of the bed is for outfits I chose not to wear and for the makeup mirror I haven’t found time to hang, not for other humans.
“Who’s Mark ?” His voice is icy.
I’m startled out of my reverie. “A friend.”
“What kind of friend?”
Dread slowly crawls into my stomach. This is what I’m in for.
For the next eighteen years, it’s going to be my childhood all over again: Your mother left you with a sitter to go out?
With whom? She isn’t allowed to introduce you to someone without informing me first. Who the hell is Daniel?
Does this quote-unquote neighbor sleep over?
I’m not going down this road with him. I’m just not fucking doing it.
“Let me make something crystal clear,” I hiss. “We might be having a kid together, but that doesn’t mean you have some kind of dominion over me. I don’t owe you explanations about anything unrelated to the pregnancy.”
He tenses beside me—I assume because he wants to argue. “For our kid’s sake,” he finally says, “we should probably at least be civil to each other.”
Yeah, that’s what my dad used to say, too, when he wasn’t getting his way.
My alarm goes off in the morning and I’m assaulted by the sight of skin.
So much male skin .
Graham took his t-shirt off sometime during the night, violating a rule he agreed to six hours earlier, which doesn’t bode well for sharing a child.
And the man sleeps like the dead. I cough and shove him, but he doesn’t budge.
With a sigh, I go into the bathroom, twisting my hair on top of my head before taking the world’s fastest shower.
When I walk out, wrapped only in a towel, he wakes, and the first thing he does is look me over, from head to toe—the way he might if we’d just slept together and he was thinking about doing it again.
For the briefest second, there’s a pulse between my legs, a muscle clenching low in my abdomen.
I clutch the towel around me tighter. “You need to get out.”
He raises a brow, pushing himself up and leaning against the headboard. I’d forgotten about his fantastic abs. “You’re a ray of sunshine in the morning, aren’t you?”
“I’m a ray of sunshine the whole goddamn day,” I huff, “but I don’t need a naked stranger lounging in my bed when I get up.”
“Turning over a new leaf then, are we?” A smug smile lifts his mouth. “I was implying you do this a lot, in case that wasn’t clear.”
My eyes narrow. “It’s a shame you hadn’t done it more . Maybe you’d have known how to put on a condom.”
A quiet light flickers in his eyes as if he’s remembering something about that night. Nights. That traitorous muscle in my gut clenches once more.
“Leave,” I demand as I march into my closet.
Inside, I manage to find a skirt that still fits, along with a cardigan just baggy enough to disguise the whole mess. And when I enter the kitchen, he’s sitting at the counter. Apparently, he didn’t understand what I meant by “leave.”
I pop a bagel in the toaster and act like he isn’t there.
“Is that your breakfast?” he asks.
“This is for Mark. I don’t eat breakfast.”
His eyes darken. “Mark, your friend ? You make his breakfast?”
I could tell him, once again, that it’s none of his fucking business. I only answer because the truth will bother him more. “He sleeps outside the building. I’ve told him he can come make it himself, but he never takes me up on it.”
Graham grips the counter and breathes slowly, in and out of his nostrils. “So let me get this straight: the guy advising you about your finances is homeless , and you’ve offered him access to your apartment.”
“You shouldn’t judge people based on their occupation.”
“I’m not judging him on his occupation, Keeley,” he replies, mouth ajar.
“He doesn’t have one. Do you have any idea what parenting even requires?
You need to have money. You need to have some food in your refrigerator.
You need to not offer random homeless men the run of your apartment.
And I really hope to God you’re not still drinking. ”
Jesus, of course I’m not drinking. Did he miss the part where I said I was a doctor?
Has it escaped his attention that if I’m living in this very nice—albeit messy— apartment I must be doing something right?
I’m also taking vitamins and choking down green juice and salad every day, but I’m not going to waste time defending myself.
And since he’s going to think the worst of me no matter what, I might as well have some fun with it.
“We’ll see about the drinking,” I chirp. “All bets are off when I go to Coachella. I get so thirsty.”
“You’re not seriously going to Coachella…with all the pot fumes and cigarette smoke you’ll breathe in? What if you accidentally take an elbow to the stomach, or get trampled?”
I return the cream cheese to the fridge. “FYI, getting trampled would kind of be an issue, pregnant or not, medically speaking.”
He ignores this, suddenly focused on the purse I’ve slung over the chair beside him. “If you’re actually a doctor, why do you have a closet like a Kardashian? And how the hell did you buy an Hermes bag on a resident’s salary?”
“It was a gift.”
He stiffens. “Anything that expensive is an ‘arrangement’, not a ‘gift.’”
I slam the knife down on the counter. “What, precisely , is that supposed to mean?”
He doesn’t answer because we both know exactly what he was trying to imply.
I nod at the door. “Time for you to leave, Graham.”
He hesitates before he rises from his chair. “I’ll call you.”
“Don’t feel compelled,” I reply, as the door shuts behind him.