Page 49 of Misguided
SEVENTEEN
Dog
My hot tacky body pulls me from sleep, the temperature uncomfortable as I roll to get out of bed and hit a wall? Takes me a solid minute to remember that no, I haven’t forgotten changing the layout of my room; I’m just not in it.
I push onto my elbows with a groan, flashes of last night coming in waves; strong and then weak, clear and then foamy. Makes it hard to remember what actually happened and what I dreamed.
One thing’s definitely real though, and that’s the angry looking woman at the foot of the bed.
Mel rests her back against the wall, legs kicked out over the bed horizontally. “Feel any better?”
“Should I?” Head pounds like the bass at a fucking rave, but other than that …
“Considering you eviscerated the contents of your stomach, then you shouldn’t be too bad.”
Oh, yeah. Oh …
“Sorry.” I wince, partially from shame, mostly from the pain the sliver of sunlight through the blinds causes.
“I’d say you’d learned your lesson, but somehow I don’t think you have.” She folds her arms. “Am I right?”
I’ve got nothing. She caught me licking the remnants of whatever the fuck the prospects gave me out of the dip of some woman’s pelvis. Another inch to the left and I would have been licking the outer folds of her cunt.
Pretty sure there’s no coming back from this.
Also pretty sure that fucking ache I get in my chest when I look at what I’ve lost glaring at me won’t go away either.
“Guess I better get some coffee and hit the road, huh?” I toss the covers back and find I’m at least still wearing my boxers.
“Clothes are over there.” Mel points to where they’re laid out freshly laundered on her set of drawers.
“When the hell did that get done?” I check the time on my phone, which sits on the nightstand. Sure enough, it’s barely after dawn.
“Couldn’t sleep,” is all she says.
I hesitate on the edge of the bed, my feet on the floor, as she slides off and walks to the closet. Her back is mostly turned as she picks out some fresh clothes for herself, but as I study the glimpses of her face that I can see, it’s pretty damn obvious the woman hasn’t had a wink of sleep.
And yet here I was, in her bed, sleeping soundly.
Dick. I don’t deserve her, this, any of it.
“Thanks, Mel.”
She shrugs, slinging a clean pair of black denim jeans over her arm. “I wouldn’t have achieved anything by lowering myself to your level, would I?”
Ouch. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means,” she says slowly, turning to face me. “I could have gone downstairs, found some random guy to suck off, and tried to hurt you like you hurt me, but the truth is” —she sucks her lips to her teeth with a hiss— “I don’t think you would have cared.”
My nostrils flare, the look I give her is so fucking pissed off it makes her frown and place a foot to the side, ready to bolt.
“What?” She shrugs again, making me want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until all the messed up shit in her head gets back to where it should be.
“Those lips of yours go anywhere near another man’s junk, I promise it won’t be pretty.”
I can’t even think straight when I look at her. All I see is the fuck-off eyes she’d be giving that asshole as she dropped to her knees. My fist curls, my forearm aching with the strain.
“My lips,” she snaps with a bit more sass than necessary, “can go wherever the fuck I please.” She frowns hard, doing that little head wiggle thing chicks do when they’re about to go off. “Why should the rules be different for me than they are for you?”