Page 18 of So Bad It Must Be Good

Chapter Five

When Kayla opened her eyes the next morning, she immediately closed them again. Everything in her vision had wavered and rolled, so it seemed safer to keep her eyes shut.

Except she still felt like she was rolling or spinning or something. Why had she insisted on getting so drunk? What had she been trying to prove? The morning-after misery was never, ever worth it.

She’d had a few hangovers in her day, but usually from just one extra glass of wine. And she’d always woken up in her own bed. Not someone else’s.

Oh God, she was in someone else’s bed. She thought back to the night before, pressing the back of her hand to her forehead and hoping it might stop the evil pounding.

She’d been going on a date with Aiden, except . . . Liam had shown up, hence the drinking, and she’d . . .

Her memory got a little blurry beyond that, like a dirty lens had been put over everything that happened. There’d been, well, drinking obviously. Something in a truck, a bear.

Puking. There had definitely been throwing up in the grass of Liam’s little backyard. Which was horrifying enough, but remembering the fact she’d thrown up in Liam’s yard meant remembering she’d insisted on him taking her to his workshop, which was at his house.

She was in a strange room. Presumably in a strange house. Surely she wasn’t in Liam Patrick’s bed. Surely . . .

She opened one eye, taking in her surroundings. She was in a bed. A very masculine bed. Dark linens. One pillow.

She closed her eyes again, trying to breathe through both nausea and panic. Okay, so she’d made some poor choices last night, but the bright side was she’d done it in front of someone who didn’t matter.

Something in her chest shifted painfully at that, but she couldn’t put enough pieces of last night together to figure out why it settled all wrong. What could have happened last night that would make her think he mattered?

She opened her eyes and pushed herself into a sitting position, quickly scanning the room, but Liam wasn’t there. She seemed to have been the only one who had slept in the bed last night, and . . .

She was not wearing the dress she’d been wearing last night.

Oh shit. Oh shit, shit, shit, shit. What on earth had she been thinking last night? She should have gone home the second Liam showed up with Aiden’s lame in-person-by-his-brother brush-off. Instead she’d gotten drunk and . . .

She didn’t remember anything inside this bedroom. She certainly didn’t remember sex, or Liam naked. Naked. Oh God, Liam naked, and she didn’t even remember. Had he touched her? Was he a good kisser?

She shook her head, but that only made it pound harder.

What a failure.

She rubbed her temples, something about failure poking at her sore brain. She had to get out of here. She had to go home and try to forget this night. Surely Liam wouldn’t be any more eager to remember it.

On less than steady legs, she pushed out of bed. Liam Patrick’s bed, an annoying voice whispered in her mind. She placed a palm on either side of her head and pushed, hoping to steady the swirling dizziness.

After a few moments, some of it dissipated. She looked down at her legs. They were bare. Completely. She was wearing a T-shirt, not hers, and zero underwear. She smelled vaguely of men’s soap.

A wave of nausea rolled through her, but she forced herself to breathe through it as she grabbed one of the blankets off the bed and wrapped it around herself.

She needed clothes, and her purse, and her shoes, and then she needed to disappear. She edged toward the door in the small room, hoping her roiling stomach would behave.

Another deep breath, a desperate attempt to marshal some courage— a thing she wasn’t very used to at all. It had taken courage to quit Gallagher’s, but then she’d spent the past six months recovering from it—a whiny, sniveling baby, really.

This sort of rock-bottom moment showed her how clearly she’d been an idiot. Waiting around, feeling sorry for herself, moving through life as if she’d been personally victimized.

If anything good was going to come out of this failure, then she had to decide to make some good come out of it. She lifted her head as much as her aching brain would let her and sailed down the hall hoping to find Liam sooner rather than later.

She reached the end of the hall and stepped into a warmly lit, if spartan, living room. And there was Liam. He was sitting in an awfully uncomfortable-looking chair, phone cradled to his ear, while his hands held a small piece of wood and a knife. He murmured into the phone and scraped the blade across the piece of wood, and Kayla squinted at it trying to make out its shape.

But he suddenly dropped the wood, and the phone, and the knife, as he jumped to his feet, swearing as he sucked his finger into his mouth.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” she offered.

“No. Um . . . Hold on.” He grabbed the phone that had clattered to the floor, saying something into the speaker before hitting end.

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