Page 31 of Impulsive Saint
Had he honestly been thinking earlier that it wasn’t fair he was getting paid to take her on this trip? He snorted. He should ask for more money. He could call it reimbursement for the strain on his mental health. He glanced down at the thick erection that tented his boxers and scowled. He turned the water to cold before he climbed inside.
Scratch that, his mental and physical health were on the line where this girl was concerned.
9
Somewhere, in the back of Ashtyn’s aching head, she saw the irony of her current situation. At least she thought it was irony. Really, that Alanis song had screwed up the definition so badly it was hard to tell anymore but whatever it meant, this had to be a giant cosmic joke.
Last night, when they’d arrived at the motel, she’d been scared to touch anything for fear of contracting some strange disease. She hadn’t walked barefoot over the carpet or gotten into the shower until she’d let the hot water disinfect as much of the grimy old tub as she could.
Yet in the harsh light of morning here she sat, on the dingy, dirty bathroom floor, hugging the toilet as if it was an old friend. She’d made its acquaintance sometime around seven am when the light spilling through the cheap curtains had woken her from her drunken dreams. Within seconds, her stomach had revolted against the poisons she’d ingested the night before and she’d flung herself off the bed and towards the bathroom as fast as she could so that she didn’t throw up in front of Tyler.
In between her bouts of retching and gagging, she’d heard his laughter from the other room and simultaneously wanted to die and commit murder at the same time.
Never in her life could she remember ever being this sick. That one time in college when she’d had the flu and couldn’t get out of bed for days had been bad, but this was far worse than that. At least with the flu she hadn’t been hurling her guts up on the floor of a cheap motel room while one of the most handsome men she’d ever met listened and laughed from the other side of the door.
The flu had been normal, this was not. This was mortifying.
A soft knock came from the door and she groaned without raising her head from her hands, “Go away.”
“Not this time.” The deep male voice on the other side wasn’t laughing at her now but she couldn’t face him. “Open the door, Ashtyn.”
“No. I’m sick.”
“You’re not sick. You’re hungover as fuck, but you haven’t puked in…” He paused and she cringed.
Was he actually checking the time? Had he been timing her? Keeping track of how much and how often she threw her guts up? That was the last straw. She was simply going to lay on this grimy bathroom floor and die of embarrassment.
“Fifteen minutes.” he finished. “I think you’re done with the puking portion of the hangover.”
“I don’t feel done with it.” her voice came out whiny despite her attempt to keep calm.
“Come on, open the door. You can’t stay in there forever.”
She didn’t bother answering him because even though she knew he was right she was in no mood to admit it. She felt immature and childish for wanting to hide in the bathroom but that didn’t change the fact that she was in no way ready to face the bad decisions she’d made last night.
When she’d left that church it had been so that she could make her own decisions but if she was this bad at it, maybe she hadn’t been wrong to let the men in her life steer the car instead of doing it herself.
Yes, she’d wanted to experience all the things that she felt she’d missed out on in the tiny bubble of polite society she’d grown up in, but even she knew that getting drunk in a bar hundreds of miles away from home with complete strangers wasn’t a great idea. Getting drunk for the first time shouldn’t have been something she did alone at all. She should have been with Kelsey, who would have made sure she had just enough to have fun but not enough to dance on a bar for complete strangers. Her friend would have held her hair back for her while she purged the night’s excess and rubbed her back with understanding instead of standing on the other side of the door demanding she get up because it was her own fault that she felt terrible. Sure, she’d checked an item off her bucket list last night but in the cold light of morning she was fairly certain getting drunk never should have been on the list to begin with, which she probably would have known if she hadn’t grown up so sheltered that she’d never even had a sip of wine until her twenty-first birthday.
She groaned. Her head hurt and all of her reasonings were just making it ache more. It was an endless and vicious cycle. In the end, it didn’t even matter. She knew better than most that you couldn’t change the past. All she could do now was put herself back together and move forward.
Tyler knocked on the bathroom door again and sighed, “Does this mean you’re ready to go home now?”
Ashtyn grit her teeth at the question. She knew he wanted her to say yes. He wanted her to feel so horrible about the night before that she gave up on what he deemed a silly try at independence. He didn’t think she could handle the aftereffects of her night of drinking and locking herself in the bathroom and hiding from him only gave his low opinion of her more credence.
Proving him wrong was the only thing that made her move at that point.
She reached over from her spot on the bathroom floor and twisted the knob. The push button lock unclicked and the door swung open a couple of inches. She glared up at the man standing in the doorway, smirking down at her as if she was a pitiful but possibly rabid animal.
“No.”
“No?” He raised a dark eyebrow. “You sure?”
She nodded but the movement made her brain swim inside her head again. Ashtyn groaned and rubbed the heels of her hands against her eye sockets. She just needed the world to stop spinning and then she would get up on her own two feet and prove to him that she was fine.
“Well, if you’re sure, we should hit the road.”
“You’re not serious.” she whined.
