Total pages in book: 54
Estimated words: 53034 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 265(@200wpm)___ 212(@250wpm)___ 177(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 53034 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 265(@200wpm)___ 212(@250wpm)___ 177(@300wpm)
“Don’t touch me!” She shakes him off. “I wasn’t ready. To be done, I mean. It’s Kyle, you guys! Kyle wanted me to spank him so he could come when he was drunk. But Lucien—he’s nothing like Kyle. He gives and gives. I mean, I fucking love him. It’s like ... no one’s ever actually had me. Not the way he does.”
I stop at the edge of the dance floor. Coach is there, too. Audra is crying into her hands at the head table.
“Anyway, here’s to a lifetime of spanking him, Audra!” Talia raises an invisible glass in the air. “Unless he cheats on you, too. Or maybe you’ll cheat on him? I don’t know. Either way, you deserve each other!”
Coach puts an arm around her shoulders, easing her away from the dance floor.
“What? You didn’t like my toast?” she says.
The room is completely silent, other than the sound of Audra’s wailing, everyone looking at Talia. The expressions of pity and disbelief make me fucking furious.
“She’s drunk,” a woman at the table next to me says, sneering.
“You would be too, if you were her,” I snap.
“Oh god,” Talia’s saying as Coach leads her off the dance floor. “I really just did that?”
I go to her and put my arm around her shoulders. She buries her face in my chest, shielding her face. I lead her away from the tables and out of the room as quickly as I can.
“I’m going to be sick,” she says weakly.
“Let’s get her into a cold shower,” Coach says, taking off his suit jacket as he follows me.
“I’ll do it.”
He lowers his brows. “I shouldn’t have let her drink so much. She never drinks like that.”
“I should’ve stopped her, too.”
Talia stands up straight and looks between the two of us. She shakes her head and groans.
“Don’t worry about it,” I tell her. “We’re going back to our room.”
“I want to make sure you get her there okay,” Coach says.
“I’ve got her.” I meet his eyes. “I promise I’ve got her.”
He nods. “Okay. Text me later and let me know how she’s doing, okay?”
“I will.”
The reception venue is also our hotel, so I hustle Talia onto an elevator. I don’t want anyone coming out of that reception to confront her.
She puts a hand on the elevator wall when it starts moving, looking confused.
“It’s an elevator, babe,” I say. “You’re fine.”
“We had sex.”
I grin at the way she’s acting like she just realized it for the first time. “Yeah, we did.”
“Lucien. What did I say back there?”
I shrug. “Not much. Just like ‘congratulations’ and stuff like that.”
She cringes and takes a deep breath in and out. “I’m going to be sick.”
“Hold it in for two minutes if you can.”
The elevator doors slide open on our floor, and I lead the way to our room. I manage to get her into the room, but before I can get her dress unzipped, she bolts for the bathroom to barf into the toilet.
I wet a washcloth and pass it to her when she’s done.
“Just leave me here to die,” she says mournfully.
“You’re not gonna die,” I assure her. “You’ll just feel like you’re going to for the next day or so.”
She curls up on the tile floor of the bathroom, her only answer a weak groan.
Chapter Seventeen
Talia
* * *
It would be bad enough if I had only humiliated myself by yelling a drunken toast into an invisible microphone last night. If my attempt at taking the high road had crashed and burned spectacularly in front of three hundred twenty-five guests at my sister and Kyle’s wedding.
Today, though, it’s worse. Someone took a video of it and posted it on social media, and now hundreds of thousands of people have witnessed me belting out things I never, ever would have said without doing all those shots.
Lucien is beside me in the backseat of the SUV taking us to the airport. The itinerary in the app listed a brunch this morning at ten a.m. for close friends and family, but I wouldn’t have shown up there for anything.
Dad’s flight left around that time, and we were supposed to be on the same flight. Lucien booked us an extra day at the resort and moved our flight to evening instead of morning so I could sleep. And so we could sneak out of the resort while Audra, Kyle, their wedding party and families were at the farewell luau several miles away.
I still feel like I’ve been run over by a fleet of trucks. I can’t get rid of my crushing headache, and I haven’t been able to eat. I’m not complaining, though, because I was so stupid for drinking so much. I deserve to have the mother of all hangovers.
I’m horrified as I watch myself walk toward the dance floor on my phone for at least the tenth time in the past hour, AirPods tucked into my ears.