30. Utah

CHAPTER THIRTY

utah

T hat half-hour drive between the bar and the house didn’t offer any help in sobering her up. I imagined her body used that thirty-minute span to digest the rest of the alcohol, because she actually seemed a little more drunk by the time I was pulling into the driveway at New Jersey’s. Memphis nearly fell straight to the ground when she tried to jump down from the truck. Why she thought it was necessary to jump in the first place, I wasn’t sure. She tripped on the single step at the door. She managed to walk right into the wall in the kitchen because, while she seemed to believe she was moving in a straight line toward the hallway, she was actually very much gliding at an angle. When she ran into that wall, she giggled at herself, turned her back to it and slid down it right to the floor. So, I stood there and laughed for a second, like an asshole.

I watched her eyes shift from the ceiling to the floor and then back to the ceiling. She put her hands on the floor on either side of her like she was trying to brace herself in case she fell…off the floor.

“Need some help?” I asked.

“I don’t think wild turkeys like me very much,” she said and started to lean forward like she wanted to stand again.

“ Wild Turkey doesn’t play fair,” I agreed.

“It doesn’t look like you got your ass kicked by any,” she said.

“Any what?”

“Wild turkeys.”

The laugh that came out of me at that.

“No, angel. I did not get my ass kicked by any wild turkeys . I also probably quadruple your body weight and have had the experience of drinking it before,” I said while crossing the room to offer her my hand. The girl missed when she reached for my hand the first time and that sent her into an absolute fit of drunken giggles. I was laughing right along with her a second later.

Because how could I not?

Even drunk out of her perfect little fucking mind after a night where she’d set out with the intention of turning me into a jealous maniac, I’d never seen anything cuter.

“Come on, sugar,” I said and knelt beside her to just put an arm around her waist to lift her back to her feet. Then I scooped my other arm under her knees and picked her the rest of the way up to carry her down the hall.

“You can’t keep calling me all these names,” she whispered, squirming around until she could squish the side of her face into my chest.

“Why?”

“It sounds like you like me when you do that. And I’ll start to believe it. And then I’ll do more things like tonight where I only make bad decisions that suggest I’m nowhere near as smart as I actually am. That’s embarrassing for both of us.”

“I’m not embarrassed.”

“We’ve already covered this,” she said. “That’s because you’re a dick.”

I stopped outside her door to try to figure out how to maneuver her so I could get it open without having to put her down.

“Can I stay with you tonight?”

Her eyes were already closed when I looked down at her face. There was a good chance she’d just pass out as soon as she was horizontal. I could make plenty of arguments for why I probably shouldn’t leave her unsupervised overnight while she was this drunk for the first time.

There was also the fucked up ogre portion of my brain that had a direct line of communication open with my dick at all times. That asshole was trying to tell me to turn and sprint right up those stairs with her still in my arms before she had a chance to change her mind.

I sighed. “Yes, angel. You can stay with me.”

I kicked my door the rest of the way open once I’d carried her up the stairs. I sat her on the edge of my bed and went across the room to turn the little desk lamp on just to give me enough light to get around the room without blinding her very drunken brain. Much to the delight of that ogre-driven part of me, Memphis had already removed her shirt by the time I’d turned back to face her. She was working on wiggling out of her jeans without standing up all the way off the edge of the bed to make sure she didn’t fall.

“Uh, Memphis. Maybe you—keep your?—”

Fuck. There were no complete thoughts.

Ogre brain was winning with his just let her take it off chants.

Thank God she stopped at just the shirt and the jeans.

“Fuck me all the way to fucking hell,” I mumbled when she turned to motherfucking crawl across my bed in nothing but a black lace thong and a bra that was a bright enough orange to match my truck.

The decent man in me stood perfectly still for a few seconds while Memphis collapsed on the far side of my bed and pulled my blanket all the way up to her nose. I dropped my head back to stare at the ceiling and put my hands on my hips to remind myself to just fucking breathe. If I just waited another twenty seconds, she’d be asleep. That would take away every urge to do something about her half-nakedness just existing in my bed. I collected her clothes and the phone that fell out of her pocket and laid it all on the nightstand next to my side of the bed. I changed into a pair of basketball shorts and just stood beside the bed for another minute or two, hoping I’d killed enough time for her to pass out.

I climbed into that bed like someone had placed a live landmine in it. I didn’t even dare try retrieving part of that blanket for myself. All of that had been in vain anyway. As soon as I was on my back, she rolled until she had both her hands on my arm to hold it against the front of her body while she squished her face into my shoulder. She managed to squirm even closer until the front of that fucking lace thong was against the back of my hand, and I was trying to imagine someone dumping an entire bucket of ice water directly on my nuts to keep myself from moving.

“Thank you,” she just barely whispered against my shoulder before she was right back to sleep.

I was not at all worthy of those words with the ogre thoughts that had rampaged their way right into what was normally the decent part of my brain.

I woke up to the sound of a phone vibrating. When I realized it was coming from Memphis’ phone on the nightstand, I closed my eyes to just go back to sleep. It went off again not long after that, but it sounded like the quick notifications of text messages, so I continued to ignore it.

The next time her phone woke me up, it was from a phone call. There was a tiny hint of sunlight coming in around the curtains and I wondered if maybe it was New Jersey. He’d be in chaos mode by now if she’d missed that check-in time with him. My brain hadn’t come to life enough to tell me that it was way too early in the morning for that to be the case. Memphis started to squirm around at the noise that time too. At some point over the night, she’d shifted from just holding my arm against her. She’d worked her way under that arm. She was lying mostly on top of me now, at an angle where her head was across my chest, her chest was on my stomach, and her legs somehow took up the entire other half of the bed.

I reached for her phone to hit the lock button on the side to silence that call. It was from a number that wasn’t saved in her phone. As were the earlier text messages. I stared at her screen for a few minutes before it dawned on me that she’d given her number to that fucking guy in the bar in her drunkenness. It only took me another few seconds before I’d swept the hair off her face and held her phone in front of her to unlock it.

Not my proudest moment.

But far from the worst thing I’d ever done.

I opened the camera on her phone and hit the button for the front camera, so I was looking at my own face. Then I held it up so I could see Memphis sprawled across my bare chest. I held my free hand above her face to block it and to raise my middle finger at the camera and made sure my own smug ass smirk was still in the screen too before I took that picture.

I opened the text messages from that bar asshole.

Unknown

Just wanted to make sure you made it home alright, pretty girl. You acted like you weren’t comfortable with that guy who made you leave.

?

I rolled my eyes at the screen before I typed out a response on her behalf.

Memphis

She’s in good hands. Lose this number.

And I sent him our picture.

I suddenly wished I’d waited another few minutes to take that picture because Memphis squirmed the rest of the way against my body right after that. Her arm went all the way across my waist and a very long, thin leg landed directly between both of mine.

Some grumbly animal noise came out of me at the feel of so much of her skin against mine. The hand that she had across my body started to shift and moved across the waistband of my shorts. I snatched her wrist up as quickly as I could move and held it off my body.

“Angel.”

I couldn’t see her face very well with the way she was lying on me, but her body started to squirm before she groaned. Then she froze completely. I assumed because she opened her eyes and realized she was on top of a half-naked man.

“You’re welcome to stay right there as long as you like, Memphis. I’m happy to just lie here all day, but if you keep using this hand that way, some things are going to happen inside my shorts, and I feel like you’re probably not going to be up for finishing what you’d be starting.”

She launched herself away from me after that. She nearly fell right off the bed while she scurried to the edge furthest away from me. As soon as she was still, she looked down the front of herself and I watched her panic while she tried to figure out how to cover every inch of her skin that was on display with only two tiny hands. I forced myself not to laugh because she was noticeably very uncomfortable. I got up to grab the flannel that hung from the back of my desk chair. I took it to where she was still trying to force herself to disappear into thin air at the edge of the bed and stood behind her to wrap the flannel around her. I kissed the top of her head, and she looked up at me over her shoulder while she tried to pull my shirt around her as tight as she could get it.

And she sucked all the air right out of the room.

She was terribly hungover—that much was obvious. She definitely didn’t feel well. She looked wildly confused and even a little frightened. There was absolutely no chance that she was going to want sex right now. Every piece of my brain knew that, but making my dick understand that was a different battle.

She was fucking remarkable like this. She was usually put together so well, so in control of everything. But right now, her hair was everywhere. The makeup that had been so flawlessly applied last night was smeared and smudged. We hadn’t actually done a damn thing in this bed, and she looked like she’d spent the entire night with her face in my pillow while I rammed my way right into her soul by way of her pussy. My dick was beyond pissed that he hadn’t been the cause of this look and he wanted very much to remedy that. Immediately.

“You don’t have to look at me like that, sweetheart.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Like you’re afraid of me just because you don’t remember what happened last night.”

When she shifted so she could face me and scoot back to put a little distance between us, I put my knee up on the bed and leaned toward her to prevent it.

“I won’t hurt you,” I said and put my hands on either side of her face while she panicked about how close I was. “Not until you ask me to, angel.”

I expected her to slap me. Or, at the very least, drop all the way back onto that bed to try to roll away and then run for it. Instead, when I pressed my mouth to hers, she raised up to her knees to kiss me right back harder. I pulled back just to look at her again and her eyes fell down to where her fingers were digging into my chest. She smirked, tried real fucking hard not to giggle, and then pressed into my skin to rake her nails down the front of my chest the rest of the way.

“So, these are—um. These are nice,” she said and looked back up at my face. “Utah, did—did we—last night?—”

“You professed your undying and all-consuming love for me before you asked me to marry you.”

She stared at me like a single sentence had never confused her more in her entire life.

“Well, you called me a dick a couple times and kissed me, so I dry humped you against my truck for a few minutes. But you know, basically the same thing.”

She laughed and dropped her head down until her forehead was against my chest.

“We didn’t have sex. You wanted it. You wanted me. You begged. I turned you down. Several times,” I said and put my arms around her to squeeze her the rest of the way against me.

“You really are a dick,” she said and giggled again. “Listen, I don’t want you to think this is any indication of how I feel about the images that you just put in my mind, but I very much need to go throw up like right now.”

I let go of her and got right the fuck out of her way for her to escape and run for the bathroom down the hall. I took the opportunity of her absence to get dressed myself.