I did not have it down pat. I held the green bottle to my stomach and pointed the cork away from me, but it wouldn’t come out, even as I nudged it gently. I looked down at it and started to pull again, but Cammie reached out and pulled my hand away.
“Don’t open it in the direction of your eyes!”
I sighed, “Fine. Give me that knife and I’ll chop off the end of the bottle like a pirate,” I said, holding my hand out in annoyance.
Oddly enough, Cammie wouldn’t let me do that either, so we went across the hall, to my neighbor’s condo and knocked on the door so we could ask the older man who lived there if he could open the bottle of champagne for us.
Except we never got the chance to hand it over to him because when he opened the door he was wearing a banana hammock and a ski mask. Only a banana hammock and a ski mask.
I screamed because he looked like a burglar. The Banana Hammock Burglar. But apparently, it was all a giant misunderstanding. He was hosting “an orgy of sorts” and thought we were his guests that had been running late. Once we assured him we were not, and would never be, attendees at his orgy, he popped the champagne for us and we went on our merry way.
When we closed the door to my condo, I completely lost it. I started crying so hard that I couldn’t get coherent words out. Cammie kept asking me what I was saying and I kept repeating it, annoyed that she couldn’t interpret my speech.
Finally, I dropped my hands and looked up at her as I spoke. “I’m a whore, I’ll never have a proper orgasm again, and now I live across the hall from an old people orgy fest. Why can’t this day just end already?”
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was about to drink that bottle of champagne with Cammie and promptly pass out on the couch in the living room in a pool of my own drool. It wasn’t the best way to end the worst day of my life, but I was happy to wake up the next day in my own condo with candy wrappers and tissues stuck in my hair.
Until I heard pounding on my front door, followed by Jason’s deep voice.
“Open the door, Brooklyn,” he shouted, continuing to pound away.
Shit.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jason was here. Jason was in LA. Oh, hell no. How dare he follow me back to LA as if he’d planned to make some grand, romantic gesture? I’m a simple girl. The only romantic gesture I need is TO KNOW WHETHER OR NOT A MAN IS MARRIED.
I pushed up off the couch and checked my reflection in the hallway mirror. Oh dear God, a small family of raccoons had infested my hair and was now planning on making it their permanent home. I had a jolly rancher stuck to my cheek, which seemed strange until I remembered a hazy memory of daring Cammie to launch a jolly rancher from across the room to see if I could catch it in my mouth. We’d tried like fifty times, and apparently I hadn’t cleaned them all up by the time I’d passed out on the couch, which is why the melted sugar was imprinted on my cheek.
I peeled it off my face, but it left a layer of residue that I couldn’t get off before I reached the door. Since I couldn’t do anything else with the Jolly Rancher, I popped it into my mouth and opened the door. (This was a really low point in my life, so if you could reserve your judgment about that, I’d appreciate it. And it was a blue raspberry one, as if you’d waste it either.)
When I swung open my front door, Jason was leaning against the doorframe with his head down, staring at the floor. As soon as the door opened, his gaze shot up to me and he pushed through the doorway.
“Oh sure, welcome to my condo, asshole,” I said, moving out of his way and closing the door behind him. “Would you like an ice cold bottle of fuck-off, or how about a get-the-fuck-out martini?”
I hadn’t checked, but I assumed that Cammie had fallen asleep somewhere in the condo the night before, and hopefully she was smart enough not to come out and join us during the fight that was about to ensue.
I watched him stalk toward the kitchen and then spin around with his back to my marble island. He was seething, his chest rising and falling with anger, but I wasn’t going to give in. The bastard could stare at me all he wanted.
“You left without hearing the real explanation and now you think you’ve got it all figured out.”
He’d dressed it up with fancy wording, but he truly meant the age-old excuse: “It’s not what it looks like.”
I rolled my eyes and folded my hands over my chest, only then realizing that I was in fact not wearing a bra. My eyes darted to the couch and I saw it resting on top of a champagne bottle. Clearly, I hadn’t been keen on wearing it to bed.
Great, so I had to argue bra-less with Jolly Rancher gunk on my face.