Two Days Ago…
It was the too large, manly foot resting on her chin that woke her.
Layla sprawled over a flattened pillow, a crick pinching her neck, head pounding something fierce and an anonymous male foot resting right against her chin.
Shit, she thought, trying to decipher the smells of the room. There was a chance, but only a slight one, that Walter, her on-again, off-again boyfriend, had somehow convinced her to come back to his apartment for what was a continuous cycle of “We Need To Talk” chats. Those had been lasting a good month now. But she would never be in Walter’s bed and she had to believe he would be too proper, too gentlemanly, to fall asleep with his foot slapped against her face. Besides, the room did not smell like Walter. It smelled, in fact, of stinky male—soiled socks and athletic gear that had not been tended to in quite a while. Layla knew the stench. Her father’s constant flow of rugby players on the university squad he coached made that particular smell familiar. Stinky, male and very familiar.
With that idea in her thundering head, and the throb aching behind her eyes growing worse, Layla tried to hold onto the sparse flashes of memory that replayed the previous night’s disconnected events.
A fight with Walter. Her screaming over his judgmental opinions about her friends and then… sitting on the tailgate of someone’s pickup?
There had been liquor, the cotton ball texture of her mouth told her that much, Patrón was a possible culprit and then…
Oh, Sweet baby Jesus in Heaven please, please no.
Donovan.
Donovan the Demon.
Donovan who Layla hated with the intensity of eleventy billion suns.
Dear Lord, she prayed, if you make this not my reality, I promise to stop drinking. Much. I promise to never, ever to say the F word, ever in my life again. I promise to stop cheating on my Chemistry exams. I promise to…
The low grunt from under the covers and the movement of that offending foot from her face, stopped Layla cold.
Please, please, please. Thank you. Your friend, Layla, she hurried to finish.
The lump under the covers didn’t do more than roll on its side and after keeping still and silent for a full minute, Layla was able to take a shaky inventory of herself. She pulled up the worn chenille blanket and surveyed underneath.
Fuck, fuck fuckity fuck!
She was completely and utterly naked and the realization had her head pounding double time. Naked, except for her shoes. Or, one of her shoes. Layla lifted her foot from underneath the blanket, away from the snoring lump, and spotted one of her black Jimmy sandals. The other rested next to her discarded clothes on the floor. Eyes moving around the room, all vestiges that she did not do something immensely stupid vanished. She knew the room. Less than two months before she snuck in there and situated a large bucket of oil-based fluorescent green paint onto the top of the open door. It had been one prank among dozens she’d visited on Donovan Donley since their unspoken prank war began. She’d finished up by slicking his bathroom floor with butter and only felt mild shame over the sprained ankle Donovan had suffered in the process.
The giant shit should have never stolen my puppy.
Escape from her mortification and that lump grunting under the covers was forefront on her mind. The sooner she could begin her walk of utter humiliating shame, the faster she could ignore that she ever let him touch her. Oh God. She let Donovan Donley touch her. Or did she? Layla squeezed her scratchy eyes shut, trying desperately to focus on the pickup and the laughing—she remembered there had been a lot of laughing and flirting? No. She would never flirt with him. Arrogant, bullheaded, humiliating bastard that he was. Never.
She had to know what had happened. The whole being naked bit didn’t give her much hope that they passed out before anything truly nefarious could take place, but maybe they had, maybe they’d both been too drunk to finish the deed. Maybe… there were no maybes about it, not when Layla slithered a bit unsteadily from the bed and her foot brushed against something cold on the floor. Condom wrapper. An open condom wrapper.
She took a moment, her throbbing, pulsing head held in her hands, to let reality settle in. She had sex with Donovan. Something she vowed to God and Buddha and Santa Claus that she would never do. Donovan, who tortured her all through high school. Donovan, who Layla only managed to escape when she and her parents went to Ireland for six months so her father could scout new recruits for the squad. Donovan Freaking Donley, who had only given her a reprieve from his constant bullying because he didn’t want her father to find out how much he pestered her.
That had changed when one of her friends, Autumn, began dating Donovan’s best friend, Declan. Then their paths converged and one snarky comment from Layla about how Donovan only managed to get on the university squad because of his father’s deep pockets had stirred the smoldering fires of contempt.