All I Want. Nicole Helm
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nodded, watching him head back up to the bar. She had no idea why she was attracted to him. The square jaw? The brown eyes with flecks of lighter brown and maybe gold? Or maybe the way he smiled without showing any teeth, like he was always holding back, which made her want to make him not hold back.
Or maybe she was just lonely and any guy would do. With alcohol thickening in her limbs, she didn’t care about the answer.
He returned with two drinks instead of four this time, which was good. She was going to need to call a cab to get home regardless, but anything beyond one more drink might lead to passing out.
Or other really bad choices.
“All right, you have your drink, tell me your sob story,” she demanded. Maybe whatever his lame crisis was would make her feel better about hers.
“That company, that job, it was everything I’d worked for. One more promotion and I would have been exactly where I wanted to be to start focusing on my personal life. You know, the wife-and-kids thing. Now I have to start all over, and I’m thirty-five. I’ve worked my whole life...for nothing.”
Even though it wasn’t as bad as losing her grandmother and being kicked out of her last chance to say goodbye, Meg did feel sorry for him. Because for all the ways he surprised her by not falling into type, he’d obviously wrapped his identity in his job, and he’d lost it.
She understood that. She’d wrapped her identity in being a screwup. She’d never lived up to her parents’ exacting standards, so why not thumb her nose at said standards at every turn? That had been the hardest part of getting clean, finding her real self, not how other people viewed her. “We’re pathetic.”
“So. Much.”
She looked around the smoky bar. It was getting late and a lot of the sturdier crew had disappeared a while ago. “You got money for cab fare?”
“Um. Sure. If we can catch New Benton’s one and only cabdriver.”
“I’m sure we can flag Dan down. Eventually. Let’s go,” she said, grabbing his hand. “I want to show you my goats.”
And that was only a little bit of euphemism.
CHARLIE WOKE UP praying to every available god that he would not throw up. Or maybe he was praying that his head wasn’t going to roll off his shoulders and then throw up.
Why did it smell like...he didn’t know, but not his apartment, not the farm, not any smell he was familiar with? Kind of flowery, but not quite floral.
What had he done last night?
Gearing up for the onslaught of pain, he slowly squinted his eyes in a semiopen position. Then, despite the headache slicing through his skull, he opened his eyes completely, because he had no idea where he was.
Something moved next to him. He jerked, cursed at the sloshing of his stomach, eyes involuntarily closing again. He took a deep breath and let it out, willing the nausea away. And then opened his eyes to the woman next to him. In what he assumed to be her bed...
Goat Girl. That colorful arm of hers a shock of memory. The bar. The cab. They’d...
He rubbed his hands over his face, trying to remember, but everything was so blurry.
Goats. He remembered goats. Feeding them?
Christ.
He took another deep breath and tried to focus. The important thing, the most important thing, was that he still had pants on. And Goat Girl still wore the black dress she’d been wearing at the bar.
So, hopefully, whatever idiocy their drunken selves had been up to, it wasn’t sex. Because surely if they’d had a drunk hookup, he’d (a) remember, and (b) not have pants on. Surely.
“Damn.”
He dropped his hands, glanced sheepishly at... God, he didn’t even know her name, did he? Had he asked and forgotten? Surely they’d at least exchanged names?
But you didn’t have sex, so it’s fine. It’s totally fine.
Tell that to all the panic hanging out with all the ill-advised liquor in his bloodstream.
Her blue eyes met his gaze tentatively. She shook her head and covered her face with her hands, repeating the F-word approximately ten times.
“Please tell me you’re not swearing because you remember something I don’t.”
She peeked at him through her fingers. “What do you remember?”
“The bar. The cab ride. Goats. I remember goats.”
“I remember kissing.”
“In the cab?”
She nodded.
Yeah, he kind of remembered that. Kissing and laughing in the back of old Dan Riley’s cab. He really hoped that didn’t get back to his mother. Making out with some tattooed goat farmer in a cab.
Actually Mom would probably get a kick out of it. Dad, not so much. And Dell or, possibly worse, his little sister? He’d never hear the end of it.
“There was some...bra removal on my couch and subsequent...touching,” she added, her face all wrinkled up.
“But...actual...” He made useless hand gestures, not at all sure why he couldn’t spit out the very simple word.
“Sex? I don’t remember any. Do you?”
He shook his head, too hard, and had to take another few deep breaths to settle his stomach.
“Okay, and you have pants on. And I...” She patted herself down. “No bra, but underwear intact. Surely if we were so drunk we don’t remember, we wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to put our clothes back on.”
“Agreed.”
She let out a long breath. “So we didn’t. And...” She pressed a palm to her forehead. “God, I need some water and a time machine.”
“I need to get home.”
“Right. Yeah. Totally.”
He gingerly slid off the bed, then stopped in his tracks. Ohhhhhhh, shit. “Um, I don’t suppose you keep condom wrappers on the floor for fun?”
Their gazes met from opposite sides of the bed. She looked about as crestfallen as he felt. She skirted the bed, then started swearing again.
“On the bright side, we used a condom?” Which was not much of a bright side. He certainly didn’t pride himself on drunken sex he couldn’t remember with women whose names he didn’t know.
It was sleazy. Irresponsible. So not him.
“You’re right. If we used a condom and don’t remember it and...stuff, then, really, it’s like it never happened. Right?”
“Right.”
Right. They would just pretend it never happened.
“I should probably find my shirt, then.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
* * *
SHE WAS PRETTY. Even the morning after a bender, her skin a little pale and her hair all rumpled, she was pretty. What he could remember of their night had been, well, maybe not fun, but easy. Companionable.
But she wasn’t his type. Not even a little bit. Tattoos. Goat farming. He was getting to be the age where he couldn’t casually date anymore. He needed to find the right woman to settle down with.
There was nothing about this woman that fit his idea of that. Nothing. So he took his shirt from her outstretched hand and pulled it over his head. “I should go.”
She nodded, then put her palm to her