Be Good A New Adult Romance (RE12)(4)

Brett seemed to be looking right through me. I found it hard to swallow and I could feel my heart racing. How did this man manage to make me feel so many things I hadn’t felt in years?

“How much do you remember?” he pressed.

“Nothing,” I shouted. “Is that what you want me to say? Is that what you want to hear? That I don’t remember a God damn thing. There. I said it. Are you happy now?”

“No,” he said solemnly.

The look on Brett’s face was beyond hurt, beyond pain. It was complete and utter disgust. He shook his head as if he could shake everything that happened between us away. Or maybe he was trying to shake me away? He reached down, grabbed my stuff from the floor and handed it to me.

“Maybe you’re right.” His expression was pained. “Maybe it is time for you to go.”

I didn’t even glance back as I ran down the hallway.

I just about made it to my room before I started crying again. I flopped on the unused bed, buried my head in the oversized pillow and sobbed. I had cried more in one day being with Brett than I had in the last ten years.

When my tear ducts ran completely dry (at least I hoped they had), I took an extremely hot shower. The water soothed my raw nerves a bit but I just couldn’t scrub myself enough to feel clean.

I never felt bad about hooking up with someone but what I did to Brett made me feel dirty. I wished I could have remembered just one thing about being with him but I truly didn’t and it made me feel awful. It was strange to think that all those years he felt like he didn’t deserve to be with me and now I was the one who felt like I didn’t deserve to be with him.

After I dressed and packed and was ready to leave, I noticed a note had been slid under my door. It was a piece of hotel notepaper folded in half. It had my name written on the front. When I opened the note, it said, “I’m so sorry.”

That’s it. Just: I’m so sorry. I assumed it was from Brett but I couldn’t be sure because he hadn’t even signed his name. I placed the note in the front pocket of my jeans and headed to the lobby.

I checked out of my room and dragged my suitcase out to my Kia Soul. As I was placing my bag in the back, I heard a voice call my name.

I turned and saw one of the other bridesmaids, Tiffany, headed in my direction.

“A bunch of us are staying for brunch if you want to join us. I tried to find you last night to tell you but you must have gone to bed early.”

Something like that, I thought. “Sure, why not.” It wasn’t like I had anything better to do. I was one of the few people in our social circle who had grown up in the Phoenix area, gone to college in town and stayed in town after graduation. I lived on the other side of the Valley, about 30 minutes from the hotel. The only reasons I had booked a room was because I knew I would be drunk by the end of the night (I had to take advantage of the open bar) and the wedding rate was cheap. It was also a plus that I didn’t have to spend the night with my freaky roommate and her evil cat.

“We’ve got a large table reserved in the restaurant. You can’t miss it.” She hurried away to catch another guy I sort of recognized from the wedding, who was a few cars down from mine. He was also putting his suitcase in his trunk.

I locked my car and headed into the restaurant. It was eleven o’clock. Kind of in between breakfast and lunch, so the place was pretty empty. There was a large table set up in the back for about twenty people. I guessed it was set up for us. There was only one person seated at the end of the table and when I got closer, I gasped when I saw it was Brett.

He nearly leapt out of the seat when he saw me. “Anna,” he gulped. Then his eyes narrowed. “You’re wearing my shirt.”

He caught me. I had put his shirt back on after my shower. Somehow, it had made me feel better.

“Do you want it back?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Right now?”

He was still nodding. I couldn’t tell if the nodding was just because he was still in shock from seeing me again or if he really wanted his shirt back. It wouldn’t have been the first time I was half naked in public, so I started to take the shirt off.

“No,” he yelled. “I don’t want the shirt back. That’s not what I meant.”

I wondered what he did mean.

“I like seeing you in my clothes.” The way he said it made me wonder if he knew what had actually come out of his mouth and it wasn’t something he thought.

“I like Pearl Jam,” I said because I couldn’t think of anything else.

“Did you get my note?”

I pulled it from my jean’s pocket and held it up.

“Good.”

Before I could say another word, Jason Richards, one of the groomsmen, came up behind Brett and messed up his hair. “Hey, Clown Hair,” he joked. “Did you have fun last night?”

Brett’s eyes darted to me quickly then he looked up at Jason. “Yeah, I did.”

I eyed Jason. “I don’t know why you still call him that. He obviously doesn’t have clown hair anymore.”

Jason glanced at me and his baby blue eyes lit up. “Hey, Beautiful. Now why didn’t I see you last night?” He gave me the once-over. “Looking hot as ever, Babe.”

Jason was hot, too, and I had hooked up with him a few times while we were in college, even though he had a pretty steady girlfriend. In the times he and his girlfriend were off Jason and I got together. I thought someone told me they were on again. It never stopped him from flirting though.

When I glanced at Brett, he was staring at me, his expression unreadable. He was just looking at me, like he was trying to put puzzle pieces together and figure me out. He could try for an eternity and he would probably never completely fit all my crazy pieces together.

I felt someone grab my arm. It was Tiffany. “I’m glad you came.” She dragged me to the other side of the table. “Did you hear that Rachelle spent the night in Mitch’s room? What a little wedding slut,” she said as we both took seats. If she only knew…

Tiffany had been talking my ear off telling me gossip about nearly every person we had graduated with and what they had been doing in the year since graduation when I suddenly felt the desire to look at my watch. It was close to one o’clock. I looked down at the other end of the table and noticed that it was clearing out. Brett’s seat was empty.

He was gone.

And he hadn’t even said goodbye.





Two


When I walked into my apartment, one of my wishes came true, my freaky roommate was nowhere to be seen. I breathed a small sigh of relief as I threw my suitcase into my bedroom.

But when I went to fire up my laptop, her evil cat was nesting on top of it. Ugh. How many times did I have to tell her to keep that vile thing out of my bedroom?

I never wanted a roommate. After sharing a dorm room with Miss Perfect my last two years of college (I had to beg my parents to let me move out because they lived so close to campus), I had enough of roommates. Unfortunately, my job as a paralegal at my brother’s law firm didn’t earn me enough to pay all of my bills on my own. Of course, my brother thought he was doing me a big favor when he suggested I move in with his law partner’s sister, Winter Raven. That’s her legal name. She told me she had her named changed the day she turned 18. She said Winter Raven was a better fit for her spiritual destiny. It sounded like a load of horseshit to me. I have no idea what her birth name was and never cared enough to ask. I called her the freak because that’s what she was, and I stayed away from her and her freak friends as much as possible. They called themselves Wiccans and often stayed out all night when there was a full moon. She never wore anything but black and her hair was dyed jet black to match. She also had a lot of tats and piercings. She worked at some kind of New Age bookstore. I’m sure it was because that was the only place that would hire her looking like she just stepped out of an Anne Rice convention. Did I happen to mention Flaw 92? I’m apparently very judgmental.

Of course, Winter’s evil cat was all black, too. I wondered if the freak knew what a walking cliché she was. I shooed her evil cat from my laptop and she hissed at me on her way out of my bedroom. I always kept my bedroom door locked at night so the evil cat couldn’t murder me in my sleep. I heard stories about cats lying on people and suffocating them in the middle of the night. I knew her evil cat was definitely capable of such malice.

I fired up my laptop and hopped over to Facebook. As I suspected, I had already been tagged on hundreds of photos from the wedding. I wanted to carefully inspect every photo to see if it would bring back any memories of the events of the evening.

Okay, I was also dying to see if Brett was on Facebook. Not that I knew what I was going to do if I found him online. Would I actually friend him? I thought about it. Was I hoping for something more between us? I had never hoped for “something more” with a one-night stand. Hell, I never even thought about most guys I slept with after I snuck out in the morning. I wasn’t sure what made Brett so different but I couldn’t get thoughts of him out of my head.