Four Day Fling

CHAPTER ONE – POPPY

The Morning After

I’d been in a lot of awkward situations in my life.

In fact, you could almost say I was an expert in awkwardness. If it were a degree, I’d have finished it by age ten and been handed my PhD on my sweet sixteen.

Which, as history dictated, wasn’t all that sweet. Mostly because I walked in on my then-boyfriend playing a pretty intense round of tonsil tennis with my twenty-seven-year-old cousin.

That was partly my fault for dating a senior who was legal to put his snake in a girl’s basket who wasn’t legally able to be the basket, but still.

Awkward.

Then, there was the day in third grade where I’d gotten into a very serious fight—as serious as an argument could be in third grade—with Millie Turner. Something about who was quicker on the monkey bars.

Turned out, it didn’t matter. I was quicker but a hell of a lot clumsier. Halfway along, my hands slipped, and that was all she wrote.

Actually, it wasn’t. What she wrote was how I ended up on my back, my dress around my waist, and my Barbie panties on show to my entire class.

I wasn’t even going to get into all the things that happened between then. Starting my period while wearing white shorts in the middle of an airport… Kissing a boy on the lips in ninth grade to find out he was only going in for a hug… Finding out your parents had a genuine bias toward your perfectly put together, non-clumsy older sister who was just one week away from marrying her high school sweetheart.

Who happened to be a doctor—the youngest doctor in our state to open his own pediatric office and employ four other doctors, if you please.

I mean, who gave a shit that Daddy had bought the building? Not my parents. Not anyone in our town. Nope. Everyone loved Dr. Mark Perkins.

Even I did. Mostly because he was just a really nice freaking person—and not because he’d never told anyone he’d once walked in on me masturbating.

See?

Awk. Ward.

But, hands down, nothing was quite as awkward as the situation I faced right now.

As in, the hot guy sleeping in his bed.

He was pretty. Oh, so fucking pretty. His bedhead was the perfect, dark-brown mess of hair that spread badly across his cream pillow. Here, there, everywhere, it was all kinds of did-you-wake-up-like-that?

Ignoring that his bold, blue eyes were closed as he slept and dark-brown eyelashes fanned across obnoxiously high cheekbones, I—

Well, I had nothing, because I couldn’t freaking well ignore that.

He coughed in his sleep, rolling from his side to his back. He threw one arm over his face, covering his eyes. The five o’clock shadow that coated his entire jaw seemed extra shadowy thanks to the sliver of sunlight that made it into the room through the dark-gray curtains.

God, he was beautiful. I’ll-chisel-you-into-marble kinda beautiful. The kind of beautiful that should be displayed in museums for years to come. In a hundred years, people would marvel at the statue of him the way we did the Mona Lisa today.

God, what was I doing, standing here staring at him like the idiot I was? I needed to either write the note or leave.

And, no, it wasn’t a note to apologize for leaving him, it was to leave my number.

If my life was a TV sitcom, the audience would gasp at this very point. Or do that low “oooh” thing they did.

I sighed and leaned against the wall. Was I crazy? Leaving my number with a one-night stand and asking him to be my date for my sister’s wedding this weekend?

Yes. I mean, I knew that. It was weird. Definitely not something a normal person did.

God. There was a hockey stick on the wall above his bed, and it was looking ever more tempting as a weapon to whack myself in the head with.

I couldn’t ask a stranger to be my date. It didn’t matter how desperate I was. I’d just take the stick from my mother instead, or I’d claim my non-existent date had a family emergency and couldn’t make it.

I sure as hell couldn’t ask Mr. Hottie McTottie with the body of a Greek god to come with me.

If I was honest with myself, my mother would take one look at him and know it wasn’t real. I was nowhere near put together enough to get a guy like him.

Hell. It was seven-thirty in the morning, and I was standing, staring at him, wearing a graphic tee that proclaimed I ran on coffee, chaos, and cuss words.

I’d worn it to the bar last night, too.

That was how fancy I was.

In my defense, it was only supposed to be one drink, and it was all my best friend’s fault. If my best friend, Avery, hadn’t taken us to the place with a happy hour…