Now a Major Motion Picture (10 page)

The next thing he did remember was waking up in his own room, his bed coverings twisted around the lower half of his naked body. He didn’t recall getting undressed. All he knew was that his head was throbbing and he had the sinking feeling he’d done something really, really stupid…

He rubbed a hand across his eyes and down the side of his face, trying desperately to rewind the night’s events. His brain formed a fuzzy mental picture of the bar, the game on the big screen, Sean.
Damn—how much did I drink?

Then he heard the distinct sounds of someone moving around his room. He raised his head from his pillow—it felt like something heavy was pressing against it—and tried to focus his bleary eyes. When they locked with Ashley’s, his world shifted on its axis.

His mind screamed at him.
No, no, no! Oh shit, no.
Oh please, no. What in God’s name have I
done
?

Ashley just laughed. “Morning, gorgeous.”

She was naked, too—or at least she had been. His saucer-like eyes struggled to make sense of her voluptuous form as she wriggled into a dark-pink thong. He stared in horrified silence as she snagged a matching bra from the end of his bed and slid it over her arms. Her body was the opposite of Amelia’s—her hips curving sinuously away from her waist, her breasts so full they sagged under their own weight. His eyes traveled along her body against his own will, until he realized what he was doing and looked away. Nothing could be worse than this moment, he thought.

Until things got much, much worse.

“You’ve got to go. Get out of here.” The words were hoarse, garbled. He didn’t recognize the sound of his own voice.

Ashley giggled. “I’ll be back, though.”

Just then a clicking sound turned her attention away from him. He watched as she swung her head toward the door, and before his muddled brain could piece together what was happening, her jaw dropped.

In a movement that felt like slow motion, he slumped back onto the bed, his eyes swerving sluggishly in the direction of her gaze. He caught only one brief glimpse of the stunned, pained expression on Amelia’s face before she turned and ran down the hall, his bedroom door swinging behind her.

Train Wreck

Noah and Ashley stared at each other in shocked silence as the sound of Amelia’s hurried steps retreated. He cringed when the front door slammed.

“What just happened?”

The question was slow, rhetorical. He glared at Ashley, grasping his pounding head between both hands. The tenor of his voice escalating, he repeated, “What the
fuck
just happened?”

She stared at him for a few seconds.

“Which part?”

Her voice was mocking, and she scanned the room for the rest of her clothes. She snatched her blouse from the edge of his dresser and pulled it on, grappling with the buttons as he let out an agonized moan.

“How could I…how did I let this happen?”

He tried to sit all the way up, but dropped back down as a dizzying wave of nausea washed over him.

“What the hell is wrong with me?” He moaned. “How much did I drink?”

He reached one hand up and ran it through his hair. Every movement he took felt exaggeratedly slow, and he glared at Ashley with accusation in his eyes.

“How did you get here?”

“I brought you home, Noah,” she said in a patient voice. “We were at Darcy’s together, remember?”

No, he didn’t remember.

“I was at Darcy’s with Sean. Oh.
Oh
—”

His voice trailed off as the memory of the group that had formed before he’d left the bar broke into his consciousness. Everything after that point, though, was blurred, lost to him.

“This is just so flattering, Noah,” she said. “Why don’t I come back when you’ve had a chance to sleep this off? Then I can tell you all about what you missed.” She trailed off suggestively, her eyes traveling down his bare chest, and his stomach wrenched.

“Get out, Ashley.”

His voice was flat, lifeless. He pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers as he tried to think over the pounding in his head, the waves of nausea rolling in his stomach. “I don’t know what happened, but it’s not going to happen again. This was a huge mistake.”

God, was that the understatement of the year.

How was he going to explain this to Amelia? The image he’d seen moments earlier of her face, contorted in pain, flashed behind his closed eyelids, searing itself into his brain. He winced and rolled onto his side, turning his back on Ashley.

He felt a warm hand brush against his arm, and he cringed, hating himself. He shook her off, not looking up.

“Just go. Get out. Please.” His words were muffled by his pillow.

He didn’t budge until he was sure she had left. Once he’d heard her footsteps echo down the hallway and the front door close again, he curled into a tight ball, a strangled sob escaping his lips. He was in too much pain, physical and mental, to move from his spot on the bed. The only thought he could manage repeated itself over and over in his mind:
What have I done?

* * *

He stayed curled up on his bed for the better part of an hour, too sick to move. His eyes wanted desperately to close, his body seeking the healing properties of sleep, but his brain was frozen, paralyzed by the thought of what he’d allowed to happen, what he’d potentially lost.

Finally, he managed to drag his limp body from the bed, his head pulsating painfully with each step he took toward the bathroom in the hallway. When he reached it, he grasped at the gold-laced, white Formica countertop and wrenched himself in front of the toilet just before the heaving started.

He felt like death itself, and at that moment he might have welcomed it. He threw up until his retching turned into dry heaves, his eyes bloodshot and his skin clammy—and still his physical pain was nothing compared to his mental anguish. He was tortured by the fact that he couldn’t get to Amelia.
God, God, God, what is she thinking?
Especially since he hadn’t tried to follow her, hadn’t even tried to call.
I have to call her
now.

Desperation fueled him as he pressed his hands into the frigid tile and dragged his body to a standing position. Bracing himself against the countertop, he hunched over the sink until the rush of dizziness subsided and then turned the faucet handle and splashed cold water onto his face. He didn’t look at the mirror—he didn’t want to see the person staring back at him. In one horrific night he’d become someone he didn’t recognize.

He grabbed his towel from the bar on the wall, wrapped it around his waist, and staggered to his room, his eyes avoiding the twisted mass of sheets that now served as evidence of his betrayal. He clambered for the phone on his dresser and dialed Amelia’s apartment, his terror growing with every ring as he realized she wasn’t going to pick up. Of course she wasn’t going to pick up. He called again and then again.

He ached to get to her, but how? There was no way he could make it to his car. Empty as it was, his stomach roiled with nausea and his head throbbed with dizzying pain. He didn’t know where Zack was, but he wasn’t about to call him. He wasn’t ready to tell anybody about what had happened tonight, especially until he’d talked to Amelia.

After pressing numbers on the phone until his fingers were numb and leaving message after message until her answering machine was full, he gave up with a choked sob and then dropped onto his bedroom floor, finally giving himself over to his exhaustion.

* * *

When he woke up, light was streaming through his bedroom window. It took him a few seconds to realize where he was, and when his eyes registered the fact that he was lying on the bare hardwood floor beside his dresser, it took a few seconds more to remember why.

Noah moaned as the haze began to lift. His throat felt like a million tiny darts were shooting into it, and he screwed his face up in disgust at the sour taste of his breath. As snippets from the night before flashed behind his eyes, his heart lurched. It would have seemed like a bad dream if not for the evidence of his makeshift bed staring him in the face and announcing its effects throughout his aching body. He stretched his stiff limbs, his left arm colliding with the phone that still rested beside his head and knocking the cordless handset from its base. As he dragged himself into an upright position, the pain in his head screamed at him, but he barely registered the hangover. It was the least of his problems.

He bent his legs and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. His blue bath towel, still his only covering, gaped open, and he dropped his head into his hands.

“Amelia.” He choked out the word, drowning in it.

What the hell could he say to her? Would she even let him say anything? He thought about last night’s desperate calls, his pathetic messages begging her to pick up, hear him out. Forgive him. Could she forgive him? What if she didn’t forgive him?

A wave of terror crashed over him, and the phone was in his hands again. He dialed, and the phone rang once, twice, three times.

“Hello?”

“
Amelia
.” Relief drenched his tone before the voice at the other end of the line registered in his brain.

“No, it’s Reese,” she said. “I don’t…I don’t know if Amelia’s ready to talk to you.” She paused. “She’s asleep right now anyway, I think. And I’m not waking her up—she was up all night.”

An endless moment passed. Noah struggled not to break down on the phone as disappointment and dread twisted around his throat, strangling him. Silent sobs passed through him in convulsions.

Reese was the one who finally spoke.

“Noah, how
could
you?” She half-whispered it, her voice drenched with equal parts pity and condemnation. “I…don’t…understand—”

A choked cry escaped from his lips, but still he couldn’t speak. Reese was silent for another long minute, and then said, “I’ll see what I can do to get her to talk to you. I’m not making any promises.”

He swallowed. “Thanks, Reese.” His voice was as gritty as sandpaper. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” she said sadly. “But I’m not the one you have to worry about.”

* * *

After hanging up, he stared at the phone in his hands, unsure what to do next. He had to see her.

But not like this
, he realized, glancing around his disheveled room and then down at the towel in his lap, feeling sick all over again. He got to his feet in the crumpled stance of an old man, determined to ignore the throbbing ache at his temples. He ripped the sheets from his bed in one violent movement, wadding them into a ball and stuffing them as far down as he could into his overflowing laundry hamper.

Grabbing the first clean items of clothing he saw out of his closet, he crossed the hall to the bathroom and flipped on the shower. As he stood under its hot stream, he closed his eyes and sucked in a lungful of steamy, soapy air. He scrubbed his skin until it felt raw, wishing he could simply wash off the events of the last twenty-four hours.

But nothing was simple anymore.

He turned off the shower, stepped out, and reached for his towel on the towel bar, but it wasn’t there. With a strangled cry, he slammed his fist into the wall, causing little shards of plaster to erupt from the spot and trickle to the floor. Blood oozed from one of his knuckles as he stood dripping in the middle of the room. Dread gnawed at his stomach, and his breath came in short, clenched-teeth gasps.

When he’d calmed a little, he turned to the sink and stuck his fist under the faucet. As he watched the water turn pink and swirl into the drain, he felt like he was watching his entire life, everything he cared about, go down with it. He glanced into the mirror, realizing with a horrifying clarity that he’d come face to face with the worst day of his life.

No!
He crossed the hall and got dressed—suddenly anxious to remove all outward traces of his betrayal. He dug the dirty sheets back out of the laundry bin and carried them down the hall and through the basement door, almost tripping on the bottom step.

The room’s frigid temperature and dank, musty smell sharpened his senses. He yanked clothes out of Zack’s dilapidated washing machine. Half-dry and stuck together, they smelled like soured milk. He moved them to a cracked, white plastic laundry basket on the concrete floor and filled the washer with hot water, stuffing in his sheets and measuring out the soap—and then adding an extra half-capful for good measure.

He climbed the stairs three at a time and returned to his room, eyeing the phone again. He didn’t know if it would help or hurt his case to call again so soon, but he didn’t have the will to wait. After he called he’d go to her—with or without permission.

He sat on the end of his bed and dialed her apartment.

Four rings this time, then silence. His heart almost leaped out of his chest.

“Hello? Amelia?”

His words were met with more silence, but he could tell she was there. He heard her draw a ragged breath.

“Please, Lia, let me talk to you, see you…to explain—”

He faltered over the words—they sounded weak even to him. What the hell kind of explanation could he give? She’d seen him with Ashley with her own eyes.

She couldn’t possibly hate him more than he hated himself, though, and that thought gave him a small glimmer of hope. He listened to the sound of her breathing. She still didn’t speak, and he was scared to push. The silence dragged on endlessly.

“Please,” he said finally, anguish dripping off the word.

Another long moment passed.

“Fine, Noah.” Amelia’s voice was hoarse, lifeless. “Come over. But I don’t see how you can explain.”

Oh, thank you, God. Thank you.

“I’ll be right there.”

Frantic, he scanned the room for his keys, but they weren’t in their usual spot on the dresser. He jogged down the hall to the living room and found Zack on the couch,
SportsCenter
on the screen.