MATT HAD WOKEN UP in a lot of hotels. He’d woken up with plenty of hangovers. But he’d rarely woken up not knowing if he was even in the right hotel room, with the night before wiped from his brain.
The last thing he remembered was walking out of the restaurant with Bridget, her brother, and his fiancée.
“Your ex is a Grade-A douchebag,” was the only thing he’d said about the scene that Chris had made.
“I don’t want to talk about him anymore,” she’d replied, then held up the empty carafe of sake to signal the server. “We’re going to need a whole lot more of these.”
Matt had gone along with it and vaguely recalled committing to a modicum of sobriety to make sure Bridget was okay. At least until the bride-to-be ordered the third round of shots.
After that, everything got a little fuzzy. What a fuckup. He was pretty sure he could kiss any chance of a weekend fling with Bridget goodbye.
He looked over to the other side of bed. Whereas he was under the covers in his boxer briefs, Bridget was facedown in the little sequined dress that would haunt his dreams for years, her pert ass peaking out of the bottom and her face covered by her thick hair. If he could move at that moment, he would have brushed her hair away from her face and kissed her. But he didn’t trust his stomach not to lose its contents if he tried for that.
He squeezed his eyes shut to keep out the searing pain and tried to make a plan. Bridget was probably hurting even more than him—or she would be when she finally woke up. If he couldn’t remember the night before, he needed to make a plan.
First he’d order them both breakfast—the greasier and more bacon-rich the better. Then he’d take a shower—a cold one. Since they were on their own for most of the day, he’d try to convince Bridget to stay in the room and watch movies with him. Along with maybe a late ramen or pho lunch that might just have her feeling human enough to finish out the trip.
Bridget made a somewhat pathetic sound from the other side of the bed. Something between a moan and a wail. In an instant, she was upright, and he had to struggle not to laugh.
“Whaaat?” She looked at him, and then instantly looked a little sick until she looked down and saw that she was fully clothed. “Oh shit.”
“If it will make you feel any better, I don’t remember anything.”
“That does not make me feel better.” She flopped down on her back next to him and he took cold comfort in the fact that she didn’t bolt for the bathroom or the privacy of her own room as soon as she woke up. “I was going to kiss you more last night.”
“For all you know, you did that.” He liked that she’d been thinking along the same lines but shared her disappointment. “We can always try again tonight.”
“Chris always ruins everything.”
“I got that impression.” Relieved of the queasiness induced by worrying that he’d somehow fucked up with Bridget, he grabbed her hand. She seemed startled for a moment but then wove her fingers through his. “What do you remember?”
“After Jack came into the bathroom and we talked about the thing.”
The thing. Matt wished he could say something to make her feel better about what had happened, but he didn’t really know her well enough to know how she felt about it, and he wasn’t about to mansplain her own abortion to her.
“You came out of the bathroom and ordered sake,” he filled in.
“Then we went to gamble.”
“And Jack ordered shots,” he said. And they both paused to think about what happened next.
“Hannah won like five hundred dollars playing blackjack.”
Memories started coming back to him as she talked. “And then she wanted to use the money to get bottle service at the club.”
“We did that.” Bridget slapped her hand over her mouth and laughed. “You are a terrible dancer.”
“Don’t rub it in.” He wondered if he should tell her about the lessons that he’d had to take for years and how much he’d hated them. Maybe he’d save that for the second date—not that this weekend fit the traditional definition of a date. He was helping her out by bringing her here and irritating her ex—which seemed to be working. And kissing her. There was the kissing, too.
But it was probably not a date. He was going back to school in less than a week, and he knew Bridget would be waist-deep in work as soon as she returned to the office. He wondered if she’d worked that much while she was still with Chris. He couldn’t ever imagine her half-assing her job, but it was possible that she’d used the breakup as an excuse to become even more of a workaholic.
“After that, I remember Elvis and purple flowers . . .” She trailed off.
He remembered Elvis, too. And laughing. Maybe they’d gone to see a show? Probably not. The lights had been too bright for a show.
“Oh shit.” Bridget sat up again. This time he joined her in an upright position and immediately regretted it.
“What?”
“I think Jack and Hannah got married.” She looked at him, and he wanted to smile. Her black eye makeup was smudged all over and her lipstick long gone. And her hair was a frizzy halo all around her freckled face. He wouldn’t do it because his breath was likely classifiable as a lethal weapon, but he wanted to kiss her even more seeing her this mussed up.
And then he remembered obliterating her lipstick the night before.
Standing in front of Elvis.
In a wedding chapel.
Bridget in a veil . . .
“I don’t think Hannah and Jack got married.”
He pulled his hand from hers and looked at his left ring finger—the one bearing a probably fake gold wedding band.
Bridget saw it at the same time and her eyes got wide.
He nodded at her left hand, which she’d balled into a fist and shoved under the covers. “Let me see it.”
She shook her head and blanched because her brain was probably sloshing around in the champagne he remembered drinking once they’d gotten back to the room—after their wedding.
“I can’t,” she said, sounding as though she was going to be very sick, very soon.
“I think we did.” Part of him felt as sick as she did. This was a mess. Sure, he’d wanted to have sex with Bridget Nolan. He’d entertained thoughts of dating her once he was done with his internship. Maybe. But he’d never once thought about marrying her. He’d never really thought about marrying anyone, not even Naomi—much to his mother’s chagrin.
Still, he was a little bit offended that Bridget looked as though she was going to throw up because they might have possibly, accidentally gotten married while drunk in Vegas.
As though something inside them had synched up when they said their vows in front of Elvis to the dulcet tones of another Elvis singing “Heartbreak Hotel,” they both looked as she raised her left hand—the one that wore a definitely real, definitely large diamond solitaire.
“Oh shit,” they both said simultaneously.
She mumbled something about an annulment, and he felt a hit of relief.
And then—he’d never seen a hungover person move so fast—she ran into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.
OH SHIT. OH FUCK. What the hell have I done? was a continuous refrain in Bridget’s mind as she vomited up the contents of her stomach.
Apparently, now that her heretofore most colossally stupid secret was out in the open in front of her family—not the abortion; the fact that she’d let one of Chris Dooley’s players slip past the goalie—she’d decided to make an even bigger mistake.
She laid her face on the cold tile of the floor, and it felt so good that she teared up. She never did this kind of thing—had never gotten drunk enough to make life-altering mistakes. From the time her parents had gotten divorced, she’d taken the responsibility of being the lady of the Nolan house very seriously. Without being asked, she’d started making the grocery lists, cooking the meals. She’d stolen her father’s credit card to hire a house cleaner—even she wasn’t enough of a masochist to clean up after her two older brothers.
If someone had to pick one of the Nolan siblings to accidentally get knocked up or knock someone up and then get married to someone on a whim the same night everyone found out—it would definitely be Jack. Her poor, sweet sap of a brother had always fallen in love on a whim and been willing to change his whole life because of it.
Bridget had never fallen. She’d always been the kind of woman to airdrop herself precisely into the exact zone she wanted to be in. Until Chris had derailed her plans, she’d had everything mapped out. And she guessed this was as good a time as any to admit to herself at least that she’d been drifting ever since they broke up. Her only real goals after that had to do with her career—work at the state’s attorney’s office, pay off her student loans, figure out the rest of her life after that.
How could she have let this happen? How could she go from carefully contemplating a fling with Matt Kido to getting drunk-married in Vegas to Matt Kido? Thank goodness he wasn’t the kind of well-known person who had paparazzi following him around. At least he was old-money-politics rich and not new-money-celebutante rich.
Christ, this was like a Keeping Up with the Kardashians subplot. She was sure that he was probably just as mad at himself, if not more so. Like, what would his parents think? What would her family think?
They would think she’d lost her mind. Maybe she had.
That thought got her up off the floor and had her turning on the shower. As she turned the knob to steaming hot, her gaze caught on the stunner of a diamond she wore on her hand. This time, it didn’t make her sick. It filled her with a strange longing. Totally silly.
She took off her dress and underwear and stepped into the shower. As the hot water poured over her clammy skin, washing away the cigarette and booze smells, she let herself wonder what it would be like to be married to someone like Matt.
He came from an entirely different world than she did. She let herself wonder whether the kind of money his family had—that she hadn’t really seen any evidence of him caring about—would make life with him easier or harder. If this was a real marriage and not one that he would probably demand to have annulled immediately, would she like being married to him?
Or would it be a kind of domestic drudgery in which she’d lose herself and eventually bug out from just like her mom?
Was marrying him in the first place evidence that she was just as impulsive and irresponsible as Molly? Because no matter how much she tried to be nothing like her mother, it sure as shit wasn’t working on this trip.
She shampooed and conditioned the tangles out of her hair before getting out of the shower and pulling on Matt’s robe. When she opened the door in between the part of the bathroom with the shower and the part of the bathroom with the vanity, she found her toothbrush and her pajamas.
It might have upset her that Matt went through her things, but they’d spent the whole summer in close proximity, and they were married now.
She shook her head. Maybe she should start looking on the bright side of things.
At least he wasn’t her intern anymore.