Chapter 49
Chapter Forty-Nine
My shirt smelled like Hennessy.
She was drunk. Drunk off her ass, actually, growing more intoxicated by the minute as the slow progression of the liquor she’d ingested worked its way through her bloodstream. Hennessy—which one of those dumbass niggas downstairs gave her skinny self Hennessy?
“I don’t want to… don’t want to go inside… with you,” she complained in fragments as I shut the door behind us. It hadn’t been my intention to pull her into the second floor office, but one look over the state of her, and I had to make a quick decision.
I couldn’t let her leave—not like this.
Her balance was a little unstable, her steps uncertain as I ushered her to the couches in the center of the room.
The second floor office above Seven was a large space, furnished like a makeshift studio apartment for the sake of convenience.
When I was growing up, my father always used to tell me a real man is always prepared for any outcome.
Because of this, in just about every nightclub my family owned, an office that could double as a living space was never too far off.
Once Lauren was safely planted in a seat, I made my way to the other side of the room, my hands automatically moving to the buttons on my soiled shirt.
Peeling off the wet undershirt I had on as well, I opened the office’s closet door and grabbed a towel first, wiping off the cognac-scented droplets that remained on my skin.
As I wiped myself down, it didn’t escape my notice that I couldn’t imagine myself tolerating this shit in any other situation.
Where did all this patience come from?
I pulled a clean white t-shirt over my head, looking over my shoulder in Lauren’s direction once I’d changed out of the dirtied clothes. Like a thief caught red-handed, her head snapped away, looking on elsewhere.
Before I said anything, I took a moment to look over her, making note of the things about her that weren’t the same anymore.
She’d lost a bit of weight, not just thin in the places where she used to be thicker, but all over.
The once sienna brown tone of her skin, which I looked for in every woman I looked twice at after her, took on a bronzer shade now, a sign that she probably spent most of her days indoors.
I noted the way that she kept her entire body turned away from where I stood, refusing to even breathe in my direction.
Her childish, drunk ass…
I cracked a smile. Despite the critical differences from the one I remembered, this was no doubt Lauren. In the flesh, for the first time in sixteen months. I leaned my shoulder against the closed closet door beside me, using this moment to silently look at her, take it all in.
She was still beautiful.
Despite the changes in her appearance, she was still beautiful.
Lauren wouldn’t look my way, her silence in the room somehow taking up space.
When her head ultimately drooped forward, I straightened up, walking to the refrigerator tucked away in another corner of the room.
Grabbing a bottle of cold water, I walked to the chair directly across from hers and took a seat.
“You should drink this water,” I suggested, pushing the bottle atop the coffee table between us. Lauren looked at the bottle, but not at me, ultimately deciding she didn’t want that either. “Drink the water.”
Unlike the first statement, that wasn’t a suggestion.
For the first time since entering the room, she met my eyes. Holding up her head with a bent arm along the couch’s armrest, she glared at me. The anger in her eyes was almost overpowering.
“Don’t tell… don’t tell me what to… what to do.”
“It’ll make the room stop spinning,” I offered.
“Oh, okay.” She reached for the bottle, not needing more convincing than that. In spite of myself, I was endeared by this, holding back a smile.
I felt fortunate for having found Lauren when I did. Some people would run into a woman in her condition, and try to take advantage of how cooperative drunkenness makes people. With me, she was safe. I hoped she knew that.
“I’m sorry,” Lauren apologized unexpectedly, passing a hand through her thick head of curls.
Memories of me waking up in a bed with my face buried under all that hair flashed through my mind.
If I focused a little harder, I could clearly remember the vanilla scent that once floated off of her.
“For throwing up…” she hiccupped “…on you.”
“It’s just a shirt,” I brushed it off.
“I’ll pay you money,” she whispered a promise. “Dry cleaning. For dry cleaning.”
I raised my brows at the offer, hoping there was no way she thought I would take her money. “Don’t worry about it.”
She tiredly nodded, glancing at me quickly before looking back down at the water bottle she’d yet to open.
Her eyes were lined with dark make up, a look on her I wasn’t used to.
On her body was a tight, strapless black dress, seemingly made with as little fabric as possible.
My eyes traveled down the natural curves of her frame, something weight loss could never completely change.
She was smaller, but that memorable shape of hers was still there.
Yeah, it was a good thing I found her when I did.
“How many shots did you take?”
Lauren rested her head on the couch’s arm rest, drawing up her eyes to look at me when she replied, “Eight.”
“Goddamn.” Six shots of Hennessy was enough to debilitate some grown men I knew. I could only imagine the havoc eight was wreaking on her. The state she was in was not going to die down any time soon.
“Is that…is that a lot?” she asked in response to my outburst. Lauren looked dizzy, her breathing a little shallow as she did everything she could to maintain a semblance of control.
I didn’t have to ask to know that she was slipping.
She was getting to that zone where being drunk was no longer fun, but an ordeal.
I moved from my seat across from her, taking the open seat at her side.
“Come on,” I took her by the arm, taking the unopened water bottle from between her fingers and pulling her closer.
Her hair pressed onto my chest, and just as I remembered, she smelled like vanilla, thrusting me into memories of holding her this close last summer.
Uncapping the cool bottle, I wrapped an arm around her back, and brought the bottle to her lips. “Drink.”
“I’m not…thirsty,” she complained, pushing the bottle away weakly. If she had a problem with being in my arms right now, she didn’t have the fight to protest it. “Not thirsty.”
“Just drink half, then,” I encouraged from behind her head.
“Don’t force…” she hiccupped “…me.”
I let out a sigh, trying not to get frustrated.
“Are you mad?” She turned her head to get a look at me.
She was drunk, so she likely didn’t even realize how close to my face she was, her lips literal inches from mine.
I replied to her question with a shake of my head.
In truth, I didn’t know what I was feeling right now.
From finding Lauren at the other end of that door to now, I hadn’t exactly had time for reflection.
I was operating on a form of instinct-driven autopilot.
Lauren wasn’t okay, so—naturally—I had to take care of her.
It had been like this since the night we first met, and even after a sixteen-month stop in contact, this was still the case. There was no time to think about our history, or what any of this meant. I just knew she was here—and that she needed me.
“You’re touching me,” she seemed to finally notice, her eyes traveling along the arm I had wrapped around her. “Why are you touching…?”
“Lauren, I need you to—”
“I don’t…belong to you,” she interrupted, wanting to make sure I knew. The words rolled off my shoulders, not touching me in the way she intended them to. “I’m not… I’m not for everybody.”
My brows came together, confused. “What?”
She shook her head, irritation crossing her expression at my not understanding, trying again to explain some other way. “I’m not dirty.”
“Who said you were?”
“Everyone,” she whispered after what felt like an hour-long silence. “With their eyes. The way they… the way that they look at me.”
Her voice sounded so defeated.
Something in my chest twisted, understanding. “Lauren, you’re not—”
She cut me off, pushing her hands against my shirt to create some distance. “I don’t need you to…”
When she didn’t finish her sentence, I set the bottle of water in my hand on the coffee table.
“Your fault,” she mumbled, inching further away to the farthest corner of the couch we sat on, slipping out of my hold. “It’s your fault that they… that they look at me like I’m dirty. Why they think they can touch me…”
“What do you mean?”
“You,” she whined, her voice cracking. “You made me… like this.”
“Like what?”
Her hand came up to catch the couple of tears that slipped out from her eyes.
“Tainted goods. Trash. Dirty. Whore. Slut… Worthless,” she listed off the names like they were words imposed on her every day. And from the way that she cried, these likely were names she heard daily. In a way that only Lauren would ever know how to do, my heart broke.
It wasn’t hard to understand.
I caught on with what she was trying to tell me immediately. Our relationship, as public as it was last summer, had left her branded in her world of bougie elitism.
Her involvement with me made her an outsider in the only world she’d ever known.
I moved to close the distance between us that she’d made, scooping her back up into my arms. She tensed up for a split second, and I waited for her to push me away.
Instead, she let out a sigh, planting her face into the crook of my neck, her body shaking with silent sobs.
I could feel her tears dropping hot against the bare skin of my neck, searing into me like acid.
“Did you come here by yourself?” I spoke quietly.