Page 50 of Hammered (Dad Bod Contracting 1)
Images from last night blast through me, each moment vivid—right up until the point that Jesse refused to have sex with me.
I remember getting angry, feeling rejected, and—
Now I know why I feel so crappy: I’m hungover. I barely remember coming up the stairs last night. Which means I was a lot more drunk than I’d thought.
And Jesse had been right. He’d done the most honorable, moral, decent, ethical thing possible, and I’d gotten mad at him for it. I know he’d wanted me—I’d felt the evidence of it.
I’d begged him. Thrown myself at him with all the desperation of a woman long-scorned.
And he’d still had the strength and honor to do the right thing.
If I’d had sex with him last night, I don’t think I’d regret it this morning, but I do think it wouldn’t have been what it could be and should be—exactly what he’d said.
I fall back asleep berating myself.
A couple hours later I wake up again. I still have a raging thirst and my head is still pounding, but I feel marginally better.
God, how did I do this almost every night of the week in college, and then still wake up for morning classes? It boggles my mind, now.
Slowly, painfully, I work myself upright, and then pause to let my head stop pounding before I get out of bed and remove my clothes and put on my pajamas.
I trudge listlessly downstairs, make coffee, and drink several glasses of water while the coffee is brewing. My stomach roils, but I know I need to eat, so I scramble some eggs and nuke some frozen sausages. It’s hard to get anything down at first, but after a few bites I become ravenous and devour it, washing it down with several cups of coffee. I take my last mug of coffee out onto my front porch.
As I open the front door it’s then that I remember that I have a new front porch to enjoy my coffee—thanks to Jesse. I see that his truck is gone; I remember him walking out and leaving his keys on my coffee table, so he must have come by earlier this morning when I was sleeping. Now I feel worse than ever.
My house faces east, so I get the morning sun over the tops of the houses across the street. My neighbor is trimming her shrubs. She waves, and I wave back. The movement hurts my head.
I think about Jesse as I sit down on the top step.
Did I ruin things with him? Probably. That’d be my luck.
I need to talk to him, fix things. Try to make amends, and hope that I didn’t totally mess everything up.
I need to get past the worst of the hangover though.
I go back inside and have to hunt for my phone—I find it wedged between the cushions of the couch. With another glass of water in hand, I call Audra.
“Hey,” she answers, on the second ring. “Don’t tell me—you need my advice again.”
I groan. “Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know.”
Audra laughs. “Well that covers all the possibilities.” She speaks again, but she’s shouting, and not at me. Her voice is muffled as if she’s half covered the microphone with her hand. “Keep your back straight, Sarah! Good! Now squat lower this time, as far as you can go. Good! Now push up—push the bar up with your whole body, not just your legs. Great! Two more.”
I moan. “Please don’t shout, Audra.”
She laughs again. “Aha—you got drunk last night, didn’t you?”
“Uh huh,” I murmur.
“And you had sloppy sex instead of earth-shaking sex, and now you’re mad at yourself?”
I whimper, a sound that was meant to be a laugh but didn’t quite make it all the way there. “Worse. Or better, I don’t know. He came over, installed a beautiful antique farmhouse sink for me, and then I made him dinner and we ate together. It was the best date I’ve ever had. We talked for hours, about literally everything. And we drank, like, three bottles of wine. And I threw myself at him.”
“Atta girl.”
“No, not atta girl. I was drunk, but much more than I realized.”
“So you feel like he took advantage of you?” she conjectures, anger starting to tinge her voice.
“No!” I protest. “He wouldn’t have sex with me. He stopped us—stopped me. Said he wouldn’t start something with me when we were both half-drunk. And I—I got mad. I was so horny, Audra, you don’t even know! But I didn’t realize how drunk I really was until I woke up this morning. He left mad last night because I was a bitch about it. And now I’m hungover and I’m scared I ruined things.”
“First, did he drive home?”
“Nuh-uh. He left his truck here and walked home.”
“Honestly, Imogen, I’m impressed. It takes a man with serious integrity and fortitude to turn down a girl who’s throwing herself at him when he’s as in the bag as she is. I think a lot of guys would have gone with it. It’s not like you were wasted and he was sober. It would have been informed consent, right?”
