The woman named Jack shakes her head. “Absolutely not. Besides, it’s Christmastime.” She shrugs again, and I get distracted by the tug of fabric over the expanse of her wide shoulders. “And it seems like you could use a friend.”

I glance at the snow one more time. Maybe, on a snow day, you could befriend random strangers in bookstores.

“You know,” Jack says, “a friend who isn’t a footstool.”

This Christmas

Chapter Five

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

When I wake up, everything is spinning. I try to puzzle out if it’s because I’m hungover or still very, very drunk.

The blankets are heavy and hot against my skin, and I kick my legs out to stand, but I can’t seem to find the edge of the futon. Silky sheets slide across my naked limbs.

But I don’t have silk sheets, and I never sleep naked. The bed also feels softer than my futon, and my head is buried in feathery pillows that definitely aren’t mine, next to…

Someone else’s head.

“Fucking fuck!” I snap sideways, away from the other naked human in the bed beside me.

Andrew Kim-Prescott makes a half-asleep sound of confusion.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!”

I fumble for my glasses and frantically assess the situation while he takes his sweet time rolling onto his back and stretching. I’m not entirely naked, in fact. I still have my underwear and a camisole on, but that is somehow more humiliating. My underwear is nude and high-waisted, and I bought it in a Target eight-pack two years ago. There is a small hole in the elastic waistband above my right hip bone.

My cheap underwear should be the least of my concerns, though, because there appears to be a ring on my finger. A huge fucking ring on one very specific finger. “Shit!”

“What’s wrong?” Andrew asks with a lazy yawn.

“What’s wrong! I think we got married!” I shove the ring in his face across the California king.

“I might not remember much of what happened after we left that club,” he starts calmly, “but I definitely don’t think we got married.”

I don’t have any memory of a club, so he’s got one up on me. “We drunkenly eloped!”

“You can’t drunkenly elope in the state of Oregon.”

“And we had sex!” My anxiety has completely overpowered my hangover, so I’m running on pure panic fumes, impervious to any attempts at logic from the male participant in this clusterfuck.

“We did not have sex.”

I start pacing the foot of the bed because it seems like moving might help the slithering feeling in my stomach.

It does not.

“I can’t believe I got drunk and came home with you! I’m not even sexually attracted to you!”

Andrew cocks his head at me. “Wait, you’re not?” He sounds confused by the statistical anomaly.

“Fuck. Fuck.”