Page 5 of How to Say I Do
She blinked.
I tipped my hat and smiled. “I’d like to check in, please. Wyatt McKinley, party of one.”
CHAPTER2
Noël
I’d have rather diedthan woken up.
Drunk sleep was the worst sleep, and it never lasted as long as you needed. At 3:22 a.m., my eyes peeled open, gritty and Saharan feeling. My cheek stuck to the pillow. My skull felt like it was going to tear in half, like the top part could slide off and roll to the floor and my brain would plop out after it.Good,I thought.I’ll feel better then.
It took five minutes to heave myself from my stomach to my back. When I was done, I wasn’t convinced that had been worth the effort. The ceiling spun, and my eyeballs hurt so fucking badly I wanted to rip them out and throw them across the room.
The sounds of waves crashed through the open back doors. The bed was situated perfectly for an oh-so-romantic view of star-strewn skies, the moon-soaked ocean, and the pearlescent sand running uninterrupted from your feet to the tides. Even the palm trees looked dusted with iridescence. Fronds swayed against each other with a gentlewhish-whish.
They sounded like a hammer was bashing the inside of my brain. Wave rolling in:slam. Rumble of the water’s retreat:bang. Palm frond swaying:cat-scratch fury behind my cerebellum.
I reached out in the darkness. My arm moved over the emptiness of my bed.
What was Idoinghere? Why the hell had I decided to go on my honeymoon alone? Could this possibly be the most depressing—no, the mostmortifying—situation a man could find himself in? Ditched at the altar, alone on his honeymoon?Left.
If we were talking about mortifying situations, I’d certainly secured a lock on those. Jesus. Had Ireallydrunk my way from New York to Cancun? My memories got hazy around the breakfast shots I’d downed at JFK airport. Three of them, one right after the other. But my thoughts cleared some in Dallas because—
Wyatt.
Holy shit,Wyatt.
Did men like himseriouslyexist in this day and age? No-shit cowboy types, with the big hat and the ostentatious buckle and the ridiculous boots, riding to the rescue? He could have just been an alcohol-induced delusion I’d spun out of a night of zero sleep and vodka. That would have been keeping with the theme of this trip so far, me hallucinating a made-up cowboy companion because I wasthatabsolutely smashed off my face.
But, no, there was physical evidence that an honest-to-fucking-Godcowboyhad been in my villa. Airplane pretzel packs on the nightstand, bottles of water—three I’d already downed while groaning—and an absence of rose petals on my bed.
Left on my own, I wouldn’t have taken such decent care of myself. I’d probably be facedown in a gutter, inhaling my own vomit.
And there was a faint smell of leather, too. Sunshine and sweat. Better smelling than me.
Those burgers Wyatt fed me—had one been his that I’d stolen?—probably kept me alive. They’d slowed me down enough to keep me on the right side of alcohol poisoning.
Had Iactuallysnuck that bottle of vodka onto the plane? And chugged a homemade screwdriver in the back row? Fuck, I was sloppier than the subway after two a.m.
And—
Oh, shit, the memories were really coming back now. We’d ridden in the limo to the resort together. I’d asked him—demanded of him—that he ride with me because the thought of getting into that limo alone and having to explain that Iwasn’tmarried, that thiswasn’tmy honeymoon anymore, and that I had been left for someone else had shredded the very, very last of my undrowned nerves.
I scrubbed my hands over my filthy face—stubble, sweat, and vodka oozing out of my pores—and hauled myself out of bed. Look, it was a big resort. The chance that I’d run into Wyatt again was miniscule. We could forget about each other. Or, I could forget about yesterday and he could share an utterlyhilariousstory with all of his friends and family about the insanely drunk guy who had embarrassed himself every way he possibly could have.
A shower brought back a shred of my humanity, but after, standing in the bathroom soaking wet and wrapped in a towel, I realized I was fucked again. The only things I had with me were a tuxedo that needed to be burned, two packs of pretzels, and—
Something about diapers tugged on my memories.I can’t recover that for you, sir.Fuck.
I had my wallet, at least, and I gingerly picked it out of my pants and checked that I still had my credit cards. I hadn’t flung them out the car window or flushed them down the airplane toilet in my madness yesterday. All there, but I was about a grand lighter in cash.
Well. I had drunk a lot.
A bottle of vodka on an airplane.Really, Noël?
I flopped back into bed and tried to smother myself in the filthy pillow I’d slept on. The stench of pre-shower me, left behind like an imprint, made me gag. Shit, I felt so fucking wretched physically that there was almost no room to feel destroyed emotionally.
Almost.
