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If I’d been sober, there was a high possibility that I never would’ve made the trek.
As it turned out, drunk Poppy had questionable decision-making skills.
Which is how I ended up getting relationship advice from my twice divorced Uber driver while she safely transported me to the home of my longtime crush, who’d never given me a single moment of indication he wanted me. There was one moment, right before she turned onto the road that led to his house, when I tried to read the list again but couldn’t see my chicken scratch handwriting. I shrugged, wadding it into a ball and shoving it in my purse.
It would befine.
“You figure out what you’re gonna say to him?” Patrice asked. She had frizzy red hair and the raspy voice of someone who smokedmanycigarettes in her life, but damn if she wasn’t good for a drunk pep talk. Fifteen minutes in her car and I felt like I could take over the world.
I nodded, my head still very filled with wine, so all my movements felt slow. “Yeah. Maybe. I think so?”
She laughed. “Just rip your top off and kiss him. That always worked for me.”
My laughter came out with the slightest edge of hysteria, but I wasn’t sure she heard it. Mainly because the only thing currently filling my head was, how the hell did I get here? List or no list, this was almost undoubtedly certifiable.
It’s not necessarily the kind of story that painted me in a good, flattering light, but I couldn’t do much about that.
I should probably start with how I ended up drunk in the first place.
There’s a special kind of intoxication one wants to achieve at the end of a spectacularly bad date. I hadn’t experienced it often, and I was thankful for that, but this bad date? Not enough bottles of wine in the fridge at home.
On a normal night, a couple of glasses was good enough for me. If I really wanted to feel that fuzzy, floaty feeling, I’d go for the harder stuff, but it had been a long time since anything had happened to make me crave that.
Apparently, it took one handsy finance guy with an ego the size of a small planet and a rejection complex. When I politely yanked his hand off my leg, I told him I’d stab him with my steak knife it he tried feeling me up again. Dude wasn’t a fan of that.
He left me with a lesson in the creative use of swear words, the expensive bill, as well as a sneaking suspicion that there were no solid relationship prospects for a hundred square miles. I finished my giant glass of wine, then his, before heading home.
I’d met nice men. Kind and funny and sweet. I’d met a few asshole men, like the handsy dude who was fortunate enough to keep his fingers. And I’d met a few others who honestly defied categorization.
Months of going on dates to uproot Jax from my head, and what did I have to show for it?
Abso-fricken-lutely nothing.
The guys were never quite right, and as I yanked the first bottle out of the fridge at home—thank the Lord for a screw top because I was not sober to wrangling a corkscrew—I knew why.
I didn’t want to think about why they weren’t right or enough or why a date or two never quite progressed pastmore. The first drink I took was straight from the mouth of the bottle because trying to find a cup felt like a ridiculous waste of time and energy.
The house itself was empty when I arrived—which I was prepared for—and my trusty roommate was gone for the night. As referenced in the list, the roommate was my mother, newly widowed within the past few months. I’d stayed home longer than I ever intended so that I could be there while my dad was sick and then in the aftermath of losing him. It wasn’t like I was embarrassed to be in my mid-twenties and still living at home, but I had a sneaking suspicion that it didn’t really help my love life either.
I had a good job working for our family’s construction company, and between my mom and my sisters, I could legitimately count my family as my best friends. It was a good life.
I should be happy. Happy-ish, at least.
But I wasn’t.
I missed my dad, gone only for a few months, and in the wake of that gnawing, empty hole in my chest, I just wantedsomething. But I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, pinpoint exactly what that was. And being alone tonight wasn’t helping.
I was never the impulsive one. At least not with my own life. I had plans. Good plans. Organized, color-coded plans.
And tonight, I was just building to a killer hangover and another disappointing night.
Usually, the empty house didn’t bother me. I could crank the music she hated, I could waltz around naked if I wanted to (I didn’t because honestly, whowantedto walk around naked, but that was beside the point). But tonight, as I plopped on the couch and took another healthy swig of the wine, the quiet pressed in on me like a vise. Like someone invisible turned a giant metal crank and walls closed in, inch by inch by inch, until the air felt thin and my rib cage was tight.
If I closed my eyes, the room might spin just a little bit, but if I breathed beyond that, I knew what I’d see. I’d see the reason that all these dates felt like a giant waste of time, why no one gave me butterflies or goose bumps or fantasies of more.
What a glutton for punishment I was, because closing my eyes is exactly what I did. Sure, there was spinning of the walls, and as soon as it settled, there he was.
Jax Cartwright, the bane of my existence the past ten years and the only man who’d ever made my head go twisty turny in the way that no bottle of wine ever would.
