Chapter Eleven
I Will Never Drink Again. I Need a Drink.
Sometime during the night I began dreaming about Feudal Japan. It was a specific interest of mine, developed accidentally due to a combined lack of elective choices during my second year of college and an open class in Asian History. The dream, in hindsight, was surely my mind’s way of desperately searching for common ground with Peter. It found a miniscule thread of commonality in the fact that Peter spoke Japanese, and I had a fascination with samurai warriors. A less-than-slim thread. A fucking gossamer strand of spit. But my brain latched on, and thus began my nightly fantasies of swords colliding. Which, in turn, birthed my hangover.
Mid-battlefield my samurai dream-warriors began stabbing into the grass while a team of gong ringers marched behind them. “Sweet Jesus, make it stop,” I whispered, grabbing my head as I woke. A supernova of light hit my eyes before I fell off the bed, shutting my lids tight. The gongs continued in the form of my doorbell, as the teeny samurai began work on the sides of my skull.
“I’m coming,” I moaned, stumbling to my feet and nearly falling into the hallway. I staggered downstairs, head held tightly between two curled fists. Peter’s shirt tangled around my feet on the last step. While I tried to lose its hold on me, my shoulder hit the wall, my leg the sofa. And after stubbing my toe on the umbrella stand, I answered the door hopping on one foot, green cotton still dangling off my ankle.
Between my cries of “Ow, fuck, shit, ow”, I wasn’t sure whether to soothe my broken toe or block the sunlight lasering into my pupils. I did manage to kick off the shirt, soccer-style, past my partner and onto my front stoop.
“Morning, Sunshine,” Luis said, shoving a Styrofoam cup of coffee in my hand. At least I thought it was coffee. There was a vague aroma of espresso, but the cup surely held the contents of Satan’s stomach.
I mumbled a gruff, “Hey”, and raised my eyes from the cup to thank him when my gaze caught something as the door clicked shut. I blinked twice and canted my head to see around Luis, hoping I was only imagining one of my steak knives buried through a piece of paper and driven into my four-thousand-dollar, custom-made door.
Fucker.
“Nice outfit,” Luis motioned at my boxers and then frowned, turning to follow my line of sight. He pulled the note off the door, reading it aloud—with way too much volume, in my opinion. “I borrowed the Jag. I didn’t steal anything. Unless you count your…anal virginity,” Luis choked out the last words pretending to cough into the fist holding a laptop bag.
“Changing,” I growled, wincing at my headache and snatching the note from Luis’s fingers. I was fucking blushing as I stalked upstairs to change. I wanted to stomp up them, but I had a thimbleful of dignity left. I wasn’t wasting it on a tantrum.
Upstairs, standing under the shower spray, I actually checked my ass—like I wouldn’t have already known if someone had been up in there. Jesus. I needed my head examined. My hangover chose that moment to remind me of the samurai battalion still digging their way out of my skull. Mother of God, I needed a drink.
No need for a suit today. I felt a pang of loss in my gut. Dressed in chinos and a light cotton shirt, I returned downstairs, headed past Luis who sat poring over files on my table, and grabbed good old Johnny off the corner table for another round of oral pleasure.
“I need a drink.”
Luis checked his watch and gave me a bemused frown. “It’s ten in the morning.”
“I’m aspiring to maximum cop cliché.” He just gawped at me. I pulled a glass out and started to pour, then paused mid-stream as Peter came in. He took one glance at me, grabbed the bottle from my hand and just kept walking past Luis and into the kitchen. My hand was left clutching…air.
Only about four drops had made it to my glass. Luis had the same number of wrinkles in his brow as he tried to understand what he just saw. And Peter had ten times that volume of recrimination in his glare.
“I was drinking that,” I said mildly.
“And now you’re un-drinking it,” he mimicked.
“I have a hangover.”
“I don’t care,” he replied, tilting the bottle high over the sink and challenging me via maintained eye contact while he dumped the liquid down the drain. I hoped it was the drain, at least, and not my floor.
When did my life become a series of lectures and scoldings from a twenty-year-old whore?
I childishly wanted to grab the bottle of Jaeger in the liquor cabinet. And then drag Peter upstairs and rip off those suspenders he was wearing, tie him up with them and—