Chapter 3
Sabrina Sullivan, aka a woman who can’t stop piling on the regrets
I am going to hell.
Or maybe I’m already in hell.
Either way, the reward for ruining my best friend’s Hawaiian destination wedding should not have been the hottest one-night stand of my life.
Yet here we are, with me sneaking around a man’s hotel room, wallowing in guilt and trying to find my clothes in the dark without waking him up so I can go pay for my sins.
My sin .
Just one.
But it’s the only one that matters.
I probably shouldn’t have told Duke that I let my BFF sleep with a guy who murdered kittens.
But it was preferable to the truth.
You know that video rapidly going viral on social media of that hot mess of a wedding this afternoon where the bride stopped everything right before the vows to confront the groom about letting her adult entertainment star brother go to jail for something the groom did a decade ago?
I was the maid of honor. Might’ve seen me in that video too.
And I could’ve prevented the very worst moment of Emma’s life if I’d told her about the jail thing years ago, but I didn’t, because I forgot the first rule of gossip, which is that sometimes, there’s no right answer to sharing a secret, only the less-wrong answer .
He'll figure it out eventually. Pretty sure you can’t log on to the internet right now without seeing Emma’s wedding video.
Duke will likely think Chandler murders kittens.
That, I don’t care about.
What I do care about?
Emma will probably never talk to me again.
And I don’t blame her.
There’s no amount of she knew who Chandler was and she chose to love him and wanted to marry him anyway that can make me feel better.
I should’ve told her.
He might be my cousin, and until yesterday when he unexpectedly sold it, he was technically my boss at our family’s café—which is one more thing I need to process emotionally and deal with when I get home—but Emma is my sister in my heart, and I shouldn’t have assumed she knew what he did to her brother, especially when I was nearly certain she also didn’t know he was having money problems.
We don’t have secrets , she always told us.
She didn’t keep secrets.
But he did.
And I knew it.
Oh, good. There’s my bra. Still can’t find my panties, but at least I have my bra. I shove it in my pocket and crawl closer to the bed, feeling for both my underwear and my second boot.
It has to be here.
Unless Duke hid it and is planning on keeping it because he has some kind of Cinderella fetish.
Or unless he’s holding it for ransom to make sure I don’t spill any of his secrets.
Not that he seems to have any beyond the fact that he has a Latin phrase scrolled along his broad ribs, had a bad day yesterday for reasons he didn’t disclose, and didn’t want to give me his real name.
And if I wasn’t suspicious Duke wasn’t his real name, the fact that I called him that and he looked around like he was expecting to see someone else instead of answering me after we left the bar, and then the way his cheeks went pink when he caught himself and stumbled through replying was all the proof I needed.
Definitely not a secret though?
He’s hot. His dark hair is thick and unexpectedly soft.
When he grins, his blue eyes crinkle at the edges, there’s the barest hint of a dimple that pops out in his left cheek, and the whole world stops spinning.
When he watches you, you feel like he wants to know everything there is to know about you.
He’s effortlessly charming with an irresistible sense of humor.
And most important of all for someone like me who has zero interest, ever , in pursuing long-term relationships but loves to enjoy a short-term fling here and there, the woman at the bar was right.
He has very long thumbs.
And everything you’d assume that goes with long thumbs.
Bonus?
He doesn’t take his equipment for granted, and he doesn’t let its size do all the work.
Java have mercy.
I did not deserve what that man did to my body last night, and I’ll be feeling it for days .
“Ah, you’re doing the sneak-out-before-he-wakes-up thing,” he murmurs from the edge of the bed entirely too close to my ear.
I shriek and fall back on my ass.
Dammit .
I was breathing too loud.
“No, no. I was going for ice.” I am such a liar.
Until yesterday, I was merely a gossip. But for the past ten hours or so, anytime I’ve looked at Duke, the only thing I can do is stretch the truth.
The thing about studying humankind and their relationships and weaknesses and vulnerabilities your entire life, about learning every secret you can learn and realizing the implications of those secrets, is that you learn when to divulge things and when to keep your truth close to the vest.
I need to leave this room.
I need him to not follow me.
And that’s for both of our sakes.
I don’t think he’d stalk me all the way to the airport and board my plane with me, but I do think he’s this close to wearing me down and getting my phone number, and I need to leave before I break and give in.
Of all the things I thought I’d find last night, a friend was not one of them.
“I can get ice,” he says. “Come back to bed.”
“I’m already half dressed. Call it my first good deed of today.”
“If my time-telling skills are correct, you already did me two good deeds since midnight.”
Heat courses through my body and makes my cheeks flush. “I enjoyed those good deeds more than you did, so they don’t count.”
“Doubt it.”
“Completely positive.”
“How about we each take one then, and we’ve both done a good deed for the day.”
This is exactly the problem.
He’s fascinating and charismatic mixed with the slightest hint of awkward that makes him so real , and the combination makes him a million times more tempting than he should be. I can think of four people back home I’d introduce him to if they didn’t care that I’d slept with him first.
Except for the first time in years , the idea of introducing a guy that I had a short fling with to a friend actually makes me ragey.
I need to go.
This hot Hawaiian one-night stand with a nice guy after a bad day is screwing with my emotions. “Deal,” I say, rather than arguing as I keep scrounging for my boot.
“You’re not ghosting me, are you?” he says.
“I’m getting ice .” I’m ghosting him. But the longer I search for my boot, the more likely he is to figure that out.
I can go barefoot to the ice machine near the elevator.
“If you want to get up though, you should run a bath. My life won’t be complete if I don’t see what you can do in that bathtub before I go home. ”
And once again, the reward for becoming a liar should not have been the best sex of my life.
Guilt gathers so hot and heavy around me, it’s a wonder it doesn’t take physical shape and beat me with my missing boot.
“Go home?” I see the outline of his head lift in the dim light of the moon peeking in from around the curtains. “You go home today?”
“Yep.” Finally . Something that’s the truth.
“To Jawbone?”
“Yes.” Oops. Lies again. “Jawbone.”
So original, Sabrina . Why didn’t I tell him I was from Springfield ? There are Springfields in practically every state. But there’s only one Snaggletooth Creek, or one Tooth, as we locals tend to call it, and the Tooth isn’t big.
Jawbone was the first thing that popped into my brain.
“Where you’ve completely forgotten that your Aunt Applebee and your Uncle Five Guys are secretly having an open marriage because they can’t stand each other or their dear child Little McDonald?”
I wince.
Regretful Sabrina is talkative Sabrina .
I don’t live with regrets often, which is my only excuse for not realizing once I started downloading all of my gossip on him, I wouldn’t stop.
He knows about stolen mail. He knows about awkward blind dates. He knows about secret babies. He knows about family feuds.
He might not have the right names and a few details may have been changed here and there, but he knows.
The man laughed so hard when I told him about the long-standing disagreement between the Dodgers and the Seahawks over oil rights—actually a feud between the Harpers and the Bryants about a creek on a property line—that I told him more.
And more.
And more.
All to hear him laugh and assure me that he’d store my gossip safely so I didn’t have to.
I wish telling him truly had left me without the memories too.
“Where’s the ice bucket?” I ask him. Have to make this believable.
“Tea stand, maybe?”
Tea stand . I’d call it the coffee stand. And why does calling it the tea stand make him even more adorable?
“Right. Got it.”
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I wish I could be ice enough for you so you’d come right back to bed.”
See?
He’s so funny . Who says stuff like that? “I’ll just be a minute.”
“I could give you an orgasm in a minute if you want to come back to bed before you get that ice.”
My overworked vagina clenches.
She believes him.
“I’m high-maintenance. I demand a bathtub orgasm next. After ice.”
And now my vagina has declared me the enemy.
Rightfully so.
She knows I’m lying.
After last night, the word orgasm should be what makes me say fuck it all and dive back into bed with him. Skip the plane ride home. Ignore the ugly reality waiting for me with Emma being mad and the café being sold and my entire future completely uncertain.
Who wouldn’t want to have another several hours of holy orgasms instead?
But it’s not the orgasms that have me desperately wanting to strip off the clothes that I don’t think I put on straight to climb back into bed with him.
It’s the simple kindness in his small gesture of patting the bed. “Let me get the ice.”
I don’t deserve that kindness.
Not when I know my best friend is hurting and it’s my fault.