Page 207 of Hot Mess
I studied Danica’s face… but she didn’t exactly freak out or get all judgy or anything. She just held my gaze, sipped her drink, and said, “Um. Okay… What’s ‘a bit of a three-way’?”
“Uh, it’s where I start making out with her while he watches, and then I go throw up and pass out and don’t seal the deal.”
Danica bit her lip—obviously trying not to laugh. At me.
Which was better than being repulsed, anyway.
I cleared my throat. “So… the next morning I wake up hungover, basically still drunk, I guess. I head up the lift for the first run of the day and as I’m getting off the chair, the edge of my board catches some ice and I go down, twisting my knee.”
“Ouch.”
“Seriously, it hurt like a bitch. If I hadn’t been so hungover, it probably never would’ve happened. The medics had to come and give me a ride down the mountain. They wrapped my knee, but I couldn’t board anymore. So now I’m back at the hotel, which is basically a ghost town because everyone’s on the slopes. And what is there to do but keep drinking, right?”
“Right…”
“Johnny O was the first one back off the hill—”
“Johnny…” she said. “Your rock star friend?”
“Yeah. I mean, we weren’t really friends. We’d met a few times, partied a bit. But he joins me in the bar. We have a shot together… then a few more shots. Then happy hour happens and everybody comes back from the hill and the party keeps rolling on. And I’m sure it wouldn’t shock you to hear that things got pretty out of hand after that.”
“And that’s when you hooked up with my sister,” Danica supplied. “It’s okay, Ashley. I mean, I already know that part.” I could tell, obviously, that she didn’t really wantallthe details.
But that really wasn’t where I was going with this.
Not yet, anyway.
“Yeah. But that wasn’t exactly what happened,” I said. “I actually tried to hook up with Johnny first.”
“Oh,” she said.
Then she went silent.
“You still want to hear the rest of this?” I asked her.
“I do.”
“It doesn’t weird you out?”
“Why would it weird me out?”
“I don’t know. Some people get weirded out.”
She blinked her soft blue eyes at me. “Tell me,” she said.
“Okay. You know I like guys. And girls. I’ve been with plenty of both. More girls than guys, but I’m not shy about sex.” I wasn’t. I wasn’t shy about talking about it, either. Though I often held back a lot of details about my sex life—with other people, even people I dated.
But something about Danica just made me trust that I could tell her… well, pretty much fucking anything.
Until this moment, I’d never toldanyoneabout what happened between me and Johnny O’Reilly that night.
And if I was totally wrong and I shouldn’t trust her? Better I find that out now, anyway… before I get any more carried away with the idea that maybe she reallywasmy dream girl or something.
“Thing is,” I told her, “my radar for guys who want to fuck me is usually pretty bang on. That night, though, it was way the fuck off. Combination of being drunk off my ass and heartbroken, I guess.” I tried to read her face, get a gauge on where she was at with all this. She was listening intently to everything I said, her pretty eyebrows drawn together, like she was trying to envision it all. Like she was trying tofeeleverything I felt that night, actually. But she didn’t look upset. “You’re really not put off by this?”
She shook her head. “Go on. Please.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you were put off,” I told her. “I’ve had girls put off by it before.” I rubbed my hand over my face. Getting nervous, maybe, that we’d gotten this far, and every step further we took, I just risked more. I justliked hermore. “Summer was one of them,” I explained. “Two guys being together isn’t a problem for her. But there was something aboutmethat didn’t work for her.”
