Chapter Two Adam
Before I’m even fully awake, I know I’ve fucked up. It’s a bone-deep feeling, accompanied by a blinding headache and the desire to pull the pillow over my face and will my body back to sleep. But that ship sails when the mattress dips and my eyes shoot open to find Eleanor beside me in bed.
She’s propped up on her elbows, clutching the crisp white sheet to her chest with one hand, staring at me like she’s seen a ghost.
I blink once, twice, trying to clear my cloudy vision. My eyelids are like sandpaper. It takes me a second to realize I slept in my contacts. “Eleanor?” My voice comes out low and gritty. “Why are you in my bed?”
“This is my bed,” she hisses. And… huh. Upon closer inspection, this does not appear to be my hotel room.
The color palette is blue and gold, whereas mine was beige and green.
The desk and nightstands are made of clear Lucite instead of wood, the overall aesthetic is much more modern, and the layout is completely different.
I don’t even think this room is in the same hotel as mine.
I sit up, ignoring the pulse of nausea that follows, and try to get my bearings.
Only I don’t get much of a chance, because next thing I know, Eleanor kicks me out of bed.
Literally. Her foot connects with my shoulder, and I hit the ground with a thud.
The sheet still tangled around one of my legs is tugged away, and I hear her scramble off the other side of the bed.
“… Sorry,” she says a moment later.
I groan. Then press the heels of my hands against my brow bones, hard. It feels like there’s shrapnel in my brain.
“Are you naked?”
My hands flop back down to my sides. I frown and lift my head enough to peek down my body and confirm that I am, in fact, wearing boxer briefs. As well as one sock. “No.” Alarm bells start to go off in my head. “Are you naked?”
“No,” she answers quickly, her tone almost offended.
The alarm bells won’t shut up, though. They’ve turned into more of a blaring siren. I roll onto my side, and with great effort manage to push up onto my hands and knees. I hear Eleanor moving, too, and we look at each other over the bed at the same time.
Christ, my eyeballs are fucking burning. I blink hard a few more times, bringing Eleanor into focus. Her hair is a mess and her mascara is smudged all over her eyes, but she’s still wearing her blouse from yesterday. That seems like a good sign.
“You don’t think we… I mean, we didn’t have sex. Right?”
I half expect her to laugh. To tell me there is no world in which she would ever sleep with me. Instead, Eleanor’s gaze drops down to the rumpled bed between us. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Wouldn’t you be able to tell?”
She cuts me a look. I can’t figure out if she’s annoyed or confused. “Excuse me?”
I’m still on my knees. I rock my weight from one to the other. “Women are supposed to be able to tell, I thought.”
“Who told you that?”
I shrug. “A friend.”
It was a girl I went to college with, who lived down the hall from me freshman year.
It came up after we’d gone to a party together, only to get blackout drunk and separated before the night was over.
Thankfully, it turned out her roommate had taken her home after she puked in the middle of a game of beer pong, but when I checked on her the morning after, I remember her saying she would have been able to feel if something had happened to her anyway.
At eighteen that seemed perfectly believable.
But I also used to believe running bottom-shelf vodka through a water filter would make it taste better. So.
Eleanor slowly shakes her head. “Okay, well, no. As amazing as my vagina is, it is not all-knowing.”
I lock my gaze onto her face, resist the urge to let it travel south.
She flatly holds my stare for a few beats, then pushes to her feet with a sigh.
She’s in her underwear, lacy and black. Her top isn’t quite long enough to completely cover her ass when she turns around.
I swallow and try not to creep on her as she moves around the room, checking the trash bin under the Lucite desk, then disappearing into the bathroom.
I’m about to ask what she’s doing when she comes back out and shakes her head again.
“Nothing happened. No used condom or wrapper, and I probably would know if we’d been stupid enough to fuck without one. We’re good.”
Thank the lord for that. Because if we were too wasted to remember how we wound up sleeping in the same bed, we were definitely too drunk to fully consent to anything else.
Though I’m fairly confident that after the amount I drank last night, my dick wouldn’t have worked even if we’d tried.
“Good. That’s good.”
“Agreed,” she says. And then the room is quiet, aside from the faint whir of the air-conditioning and muted traffic noises from however many floors down below, and though neither of us is naked, I am suddenly very aware that we’re not fully dressed either.
“I should find my pants.” I use the bed for leverage and push up to my feet.
Then I have to take a moment to breathe through my mouth before I’m capable of casting a look around.
The pants and my shirt turn up near the foot of the bed.
My other sock proves more difficult to locate, and I’m frankly too hungover to bother with it. I sit on the end of the bed and dress.
If Eleanor and I had slept together last night, this would be the part where I’d suggest getting breakfast. But as we’ve established, that did not happen.
Of course it didn’t. She may not have outright laughed in my face at the idea, but evidence suggests I am not Eleanor Thompson’s type.
Which is fine, because Eleanor isn’t my type either.
I mean, sure, back when we were interns together I thought she was cute.
I remember we liked a lot of the same artists—how she’d take her headphones off to talk to someone and I’d hear Alabama Shakes or Lorde blasting out of them.
Once upon a time I might’ve even considered asking her out for a drink. But that was like seven years ago.
My eyes shift to the nightstand and I snag an empty bottle of booze from it. I inspect the label and hold it up for Eleanor to see. “This is Lagavulin 25.”
She rubs the space between her brows. “That’s scotch, right?”
“That’s a twelve-hundred-dollar bottle of scotch,” I say, a bit awed. I splurged on a glass of it once before, but never owned an entire bottle.
“Fuck me,” Eleanor mumbles. “Who paid for that?”
I pull the cork and sniff it out of instinct, not taking into consideration my raging hangover and the fact that any alcohol—even the good shit—smells abhorrent to me right now. I fight off a gag and put the cap back on.
“No clue,” I tell her. “Guess last night got away from us.”
“Apparently.” I look over my shoulder to find her buttoning the fly on a pair of denim cutoffs. Her neck’s bent, her hair a curtain of tangled brown waves that hides her face from view.
I focus on doing up the buttons on my shirt. I’m about to ask if she remembers what happened after Dempsey and Chris turned in, because I for one do not, but the question dies on my tongue when I catch sight of the ring on my finger.
“The fuck?” I frown at my left hand for a long moment, confused. And possibly still a little bit drunk. Because even as my pulse starts to roar in my ears, I don’t immediately connect the dots.
Then I’m on my feet so fast I have to bend back over, close my eyes, and plant my hands on my knees to avoid throwing up. Absurdly, despite being a twenty-eight-year-old grown-ass man, the first coherent thought I have is: My mom is going to kill me.
“You okay over there?”
I shake my head. Take a breath and—slowly—straighten. “Let me see your hand.”
Eleanor makes a face and holds out her right hand, palm up.
“Other hand.”
She huffs, then lifts her left hand, spotting the matching platinum band at the same time I do.
“Gah!” Eleanor covers her mouth with both hands, then wrenches her left one away, stretching her arm out like the ring is carrying an infectious disease. “What is that?”
“I think,” I begin slowly as I wade through my hangover-muddled memories, “that we might have gotten married last night.”
“No,” she says flatly. She shakes her head and crosses the room to grab her phone off the nightstand. She breathes fast as she unlocks it and taps with her thumbs for a few seconds, then freezes. “Noooo!”
I wince. “So, yes?”
Her whole body deflates, arms falling and head hanging back in defeat.
She sighs and holds the phone out so I can see the screen.
Which has a picture of us, very obviously wasted, in front of a brightly lit chapel.
I’m holding Eleanor bridal-style, her arms looped around my neck with one of her legs kicked out, a pose that feels pretty damning in this context.
My stomach sinks, heavy with guilt. It’s not like I forced her into this.
I don’t think I could make Eleanor do anything.
But historically Eleanor has always seemed indifferent toward me.
Then I signed Maya, and am here to sign another act she wants on her roster, so I’m thinking indifference might be too generous a term for how she feels about me now.
Compared to the short-lived attraction I had toward her in the early days of us interning together, and the fact that I have no fucking filter when I’m lit, I have to wonder if this whole mess might’ve been my idea.
“How did we even get that drunk?” she whines. “I was careful, and I drank a glass of water with my wine at dinner—”
“Well, it was probably the edibles that did you in.”
“… What?”
“The pizza,” I say slowly.
“You’re telling me I ate pizza with weed in it?” she asks, just this side of shrill.
“Yes? Chris took us to a cannabis lounge.” Which was very clearly branded as such. The menu even stated how much THC was in every serving. “How did you miss the giant neon sign shaped like a pot leaf above the door?”