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I walk to my bag and gather fresh clothes. I can feel her eyes on me the entire time.
“You can take a picture if you want,” I say without looking at her. “It’ll last longer.”
She scoffs, and my lips tip into a grin. But I lose the smile with her next words.
“I think you had enough pictures taken of you last night,” she retorts.
Curiosity gets the best of me as I lift my phone from the end table to see several missed messages from Mads and the PR team. Great.
Emerson rises from the couch and reaches out, wiggling her fingers at me. “Hand it over.”
I give her my phone, not in the mood to argue this morning. And I feel like she’d win if we did fight anyway. She has righteous anger on her side at the moment, and I’m tired. I never sleep well after a night of binge drinking. And apparently, I never learn my lesson either. She pushes a few buttons before handing it back.
“What did you do?” I ask while plugging it into the charger.
“I linked it with my phone so I can track you from now on.”
I smirk.
She glares, not finding even an ounce of humor in this situation.
“Look,” I say, running a hand through my wet hair. “I’m sorry about last night.”
“Are you sorry?” she asks through narrowed eyes. “Because I don’t think you’re sorry at all. I think you did it on purpose.”
And she’s right; I did. But she’s not done yet.
“What I can’t understand is why you want to sabotage yourself. Because you realize that’s what you’re doing, right? This doesn’t hurt me. It hurts you and your career.” She waves her hands around as she talks. “Sure, I lost a couple hours, traipsing around the city to find you, and stayed up most of the night to make sure you didn’t drown in your own vomit …”
“I don’t throw up when I drink.”
Apparently, that’s the wrong thing to say because her raspy voice rises a notch, along with her irritation.
“Well, maybe you should. Then, you wouldn’t have so much of that toxic poison floating around in your system the next day. You look like shit.” She mumbles the next words mostly to herself, but I hear her loud and clear. “If you always drink like this, you’re going to be in liver failure before you’re thirty.”
I don’t think I have a problem with alcohol, which is why I’ve never tempered my drinking. But even I can admit, I do things I probably wouldn’t do if I were sober. But I know I can quit indulging anytime I want. I’ve just never wanted to before. Maybe I don’t have a drinking problem, but I’m slowly realizing that drinking is causing me problems now.
“Would you put some clothes on, for crying out loud?” Her eyes are stuck on my chest, where a droplet of water is slowly making its way down my ribs. “I can’t concentrate with you standing there, half naked.”
I smirk despite knowing it’s going to make her angrier. And it does. She rolls her eyes and looks away—it takes effort though.
I walk to the bathroom with my clothes in hand. I can feel her eyes on my back. I drop the towel just before I turn the corner. I hear her gasp as she takes in my bare ass.
“You’re welcome,” I yell as the door closes behind me.
I smile at my reflection in the mirror as I picture her reaction in the other room. I think I can hear her mumbling profanity through the wall.
When I’m dressed, I come back out to see her seated at the small table next to the television. She’s eating a piece of bacon and has scrambled eggs loaded on a fork.
“Bacon, huh?” I say. “I guess I thought you’d go for the fruit. That you’d be vegan or a vegetarian or something.”
Her brow furrows. “Why would you think that?”
“I don’t know,” I say, shoving the dirty clothes from last night into a separate part of my luggage. “You’re an artist.”
“So,” she says defiantly, crunching on another big bite of bacon to make her point, “just because I paint doesn’t mean I don’t eat meat. That’s not stereotypical at all, hockey star.”
I chuckle and sit across from her. I select a plate stacked with pancakes, place a generous pat of butter on top, and then drown them in syrup. Emerson watches me.
