Chapter 6
The house looks like a deleted scene from The Hangover.
Men. Why the hell do they have to be so… stupid?
Carefree?
Reckless?
It’s two in the morning! Karaoke ended ages ago, the bride has been asleep for hours, along with everyone in the house who’s over fifty. Well, except Uncle Henry, because, like I said before: Men!
The bridesmaids are sitting on the couch, quiet, civilized, laughing and carrying five different conversations at once, even drinking white wine instead of red so they won’t risk staining the carpet, while the idiots with dicks – yes, the idiots with dicks, because that’s the only way I can refer to them right now – are acting like animals in a zoo.
Actually, no. Zoo animals are far better behaved.
Tony and Brad have already broken two vases while sword-fighting with pool noodles, then stupid Jasper just pushed all the broken glass into a corner and everyone kept acting like nothing had happened.
And only an idiot would believe that would work, because it took less than five minutes for Andrew to step on a shard of glass, which of course meant I had to run and clean it up to avoid another accident, because yes, I’m the only sober person in this house.
So now Brad, who is not a doctor, nor anything even remotely close to healthcare, decided it would be a great idea to go look for the first-aid kit so they can decide what to do while blood spreads across the pearly velvet of the chaise lounge near the window.
At the first sign of blood, Connor starts vomiting into the fern pot in the corner of the living room.
For fuck’s sake!
I’m exhausted. I really want to sleep. But I can’t. Because I’m terrified that if I do that, they’ll burn the entire house down, and when Mila wakes up – assuming any of us wake up at all and don’t die first – a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions will have taken over this place.
Honestly? That was a very wise fear. Because about fifteen minutes after the women of the house went to bed, curiously right after Connor’s third round of vomiting got a little too close to them, Robbie decided he was hungry.
It’s 3:30 a.m. now. Uncle Henry is telling everyone about the day he was almost selected to compete on MasterChef, but one of the contestants got jealous of his recipe and turned off the stove while he wasn’t looking, so he ended up disqualified. His words.
Most likely? Uncle Henry was drunk and forgot to turn on the burner.
Uncle Henry is always drunk. But God forbid anyone says that to him. According to the guy, he’s been drinking every day since he turned 21 and still hasn’t become an alcoholic!
“What were you going to cook that day, Uncle Henry?” Brad, struck by yet another stupid idea, asks.
“My special flambéed shrimp!” Uncle Henry, struck by yet another stupid idea, answers.
“Well, we have shrimp!” Robbie says.
“And we have the flambé!” Jasper adds from his armchair, lifting a bottle of tequila in the air.
My eyes go wide.
Truly.
Honestly, I think he just likes setting things on fire so he can watch them burn.
Literally.
I rush toward the kitchen island, desperate to get there before anyone else. I throw myself in front of Uncle Henry before he can reach the cabinet with the pots.
“I don’t think this is a good idea!”
“The groom is hungry, my princess,” he says. Uncle Henry has this infuriating habit of calling everyone “my princess,” but I really don’t want to unpack that right now. There’s a lot more going on. “He wants to eat my flambéed shrimp, doesn’t he?”
“He sure does!” Robbie answers, speaking about himself in the third person.
“You’re drunk,” I tell Uncle Henry, because I’m convinced he’s not aware of it. No one here seems to be. “All of you are drunk. You absolutely should not be flambéing anything right now.”
“Oh, stop being a buzz kill, Julie!” Jasper says as he stands from the couch, tequila in hand, marching toward the kitchen to fight for the rights of the drunks.
Fuck.
His eyes find mine, and he gives me that crooked, wicked smile he usually aims at no one else but me, “We’re just having fun, my princess.”
“Don’t call me princess!” I shout instantly.
Uncle Henry is a sixty-year-old man who, as we’ve all established, has been drinking daily since he was twenty-one; I can let a lot slide with him.
I do not have the same patience with Jasper.
My moment of fury costs me dearly, because Uncle Henry slips past me toward the fridge.
“You’re serious?” I ask Jasper, already knowing it’ll be much harder to stop a man his size when I couldn’t even stop a short and heavy old man. I don’t even try.
“Let the man cook!” he complains. “Everyone’s hungry. What’s the worst that could happen?”
Well, the worst that could happen actually happened half an hour later, when Uncle Henry flambéed his damn shrimp and the flames went straight into Connor’s face because he had his head stuck inside the pot.
Not that I haven’t dreamed about setting Connor’s face on fire myself, but one of his eyebrows is now completely charred, and Mila will absolutely panic when she finds out that’s how he’s going to look in the wedding photos.
You’d think something like that would at least scare those clowns into calming down, right? Wrong.
It only made them start yelling at each other, flexing their biceps and grunting like cavemen, then stripping and running outside to jump into the pool.
Well, not Jasper. Jasper is too cool for that.
Jasper is just the devil pouring alcohol down everyone’s throat and watching the madness unfold.
He doesn’t even blink when Robbie comes back inside dripping pool water all over the expensive furniture.
“For the love of God, stop with the tequila!” At this point, I don’t even care about my pride, I’m practically begging. “Someone is gonna end up dead tonight.”
And what does he do? Does he listen?
No. He pours himself another shot and downs it in one go, eyes fixed on mine. He doesn’t even blink as the pure alcohol tears down his throat.
How the hell is this man still standing?
How does he still look this flawless?
I reach out to grab the bottle on the counter – a desperate attempt, even though I know the house is fully stocked with alcohol for the whole week and it would take him, what, fifteen seconds to find another bottle? But hey, at least I’m trying!
But the bastard anticipates my move with ridiculous ease and snatches the bottle before I can reach it.
“Don’t you dare.”
Another flame shoots up from the stove, and the heat on my back is so intense I swear, for one second, I thought the dead person was gonna be me.
“Uncle Henry, for the love of God, be careful with that pan…” I turn the other way for one second, just one, having to divide my attention among the absurd number of disasters happening simultaneously.
“You know what? I just thought of a new game!” Jasper announces loudly. “Every time Julia ruins someone’s fun, everyone has to take a shot!”
Tony bursts into laughter. Uncle Henry claps, and the spatula he’s holding hits the floor, splattering sauce everywhere.
“Count me in!” Robbie, drunk and brave because Mila isn’t around, chimes in.
And his idiot best friend starts lining up shot glasses on the counter.
“You’re an irresponsible child,” I tell him as he fills the shots to the brim, the smell of strong liquor hitting my nose hard enough to make me gag.
“One!” he says, handing the first shot to Uncle Henry.
“The groom is standing in the middle of a room full of vomit and broken glass wearing nothing but boxers!”
“Two!” Jasper cheers, handing the next shot to Andrew. “Are you trying to get us drunk, my princess?”
“Don’t call me princess!” I shout again. And I don’t even know why I’m still trying.
“Dinner is ready!” Uncle Henry yells, and obviously no one is paying attention to anything I’m saying.
Or trying to say.
The cavemen are screaming again, slapping their bare bellies. The screams turn into howls and, at this point, I don’t know whether they’re starving babies or a pack of wolves.
“Great, they’re howling now,” I mutter, dripping with sarcasm.
Across the room, Robbie’s brother tries to chug a warm beer in one go and misses his own mouth. Now there’s beer all over the floor, but instead of mentioning that too, all I can do is sigh, too tired to do anything else.
Jasper sighs beside me, apparently even more impatient than I am.
“For the love of God, Julie,” he growls, voice rough. “Find something else to do. Go sacrifice a goat. Go summon some evil spirit in the forest. I don’t care.”
I inhale deeply, trying not to let it get to me (it absolutely gets to me) and trying to stay calm (I’m absolutely not calm).
I’m caught between downing the tequila myself and slipping into an alcohol-induced coma or burning this entire house down with Uncle Henry, but I promised my best friend I’d give her the best wedding of her life after ten years of dreaming about it, so unfortunately, that’s what I have to do now.
“I’m trying to be a responsible maid of honor here, you know?” I hiss through clenched teeth, making a colossal effort not to scream. “You should be doing the same if you had even one inch of respect in your body.”
“Unfortunately, all of my inches are very indecent and disrespectful, my princess.”
“Do not call me princess!” I shout for the millionth time today.
And suddenly, there’s a knife in my hand.
Suddenly, that hand is swinging with surprising speed toward a pretty, infuriating, troublemaking face I’d very much like to destroy at this point.
It’s obviously not a real weapon. It’s a butter knife. The one he was using to cut the limes. Rounded tip. An insult to actual knives, yet it’s all I have to commit my homicide at the moment.
But I don’t get the chance, because suddenly a hand clamps around my wrist, holding my arm in midair, and another hand shoves me back against the cold marble countertop, pinning me so tightly I can’t move a single inch.
How?
How the hell does he still have reflexes left after that much tequila?
“Cool it off, woman!” he barks, the words coming out mixed into a low, rough growl of outrage.
And just because he says that, my hand tries the motion again, but Jasper simply tightens his grip and nothing happens.
So here I am, frozen, my arm raised, hand over my head, clutching the butter knife with nothing but a pair of dark eyes locked intensely on mine.
And making my cheeks burn like the flames of hell.
I glance back. For much longer than I should. One second. Two. I can feel his heartbeat pulsing through the fingertips digging into my skin. Or maybe it’s mine.
He drank like a fucking pirate, and yet, up close, the son of a bitch still smells like a fresh ocean breeze.
Ocean breeze and sin.
I swallow. Hard. First because I have no idea what to do now. Obviously I can’t hit him. Obviously I’m holding a knife I can’t even use. The only thing I manage is to match his stare with all the hardness I can muster, but my jaw is tight, and I probably look like an angry, pouty little kid.
We’re so close I can feel his breath on my face. The heat rolling off his body. From the Caribbean weather, from the tequila… from the fire burning in those dark eyes.
He looks too turned on to fight, but way too pissed to do something else.
“This is the part where you either kiss me or stab me, Julia,” he says, voice low, rough, tense for the first time since this whole disaster in the living room began. “Honestly? I’d rather you stab me. Right in the balls. Repeatedly.”
“Don’t tempt me!” I spit the words with disgust.
“To do which one?” Jasper asks.
That’s exactly when a chorus of shouts erupts around the room.
It starts with a Uuuuh! because Jasper and I are still staring each other down, neither of us ready to back out anytime soon. So it may have started with the Uuuuh, but it ends with a synchronized chant of Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! that the dickheads begin shouting in unison.
My arm starts to lose strength, and Jasper releases my waist so he can lift his right arm and pry the knife from my hand he’s still holding with his left.
He tosses it into the sink, and it clatters loudly against the metal. Only after that, he fully lets me go, and I yank my arm away from him in a sharp jerk.
“You need therapy,” he says, his voice sliding back into its usual blasé tone, though his expression makes it clear he’s furious.
Did I overreact? Maybe. Do I regret it? Not even a little.
He can go fuck himself.
“The next time you call me princess, I’m not just stabbing your balls, Jasper! I’ll make damn sure to cut off every miserable indecent inch you claim to have!”
Another wave of Uuuuh’s fills the room. Everyone seems to be enjoying the chaos now. Jasper’s the only one who’s annoyed now that the chaos finally involves him.
It was so funny when it was everyone else slipping in puke, wasn’t it, you asshole?
“Okay!” he grumbles. “Jesus Christ!”
Instead of the shot glasses, he opens a cabinet and starts pulling out plates, arranging them on the kitchen island.
“Robbie, you better get over here and eat something before your fiancée’s deranged friend tries to murder someone else.”
“Julie can stab me whenever she wants!” Connor yells from across the room.
“Shut up, Connor,” Jasper mutters.
But I’m still pissed enough to shout back at him, too.
“Don’t worry! Just puke inside the house again and I’ll make it happen, you filthy pig!”
The group of dickhead idiots bursts into roaring laughter. Jasper doesn’t laugh. I already told you, Jasper Hassmann is way too cool and way too elegant for that sort of thing. Instead, he just finds my eyes with his.
He keeps staring when he shakes his head slowly in disbelief and murmurs, low enough so no one else hears, a barely-there smile on his lips, “You’re crazy.”
His voice is low and rough and sends shivers down my whole body. And maybe I am crazy. Because the only thing worse than hating Jasper Hassmann is realizing I might not hate hearing those kind of things coming out of his mouth if we were both wearing way less clothes than we are right now.