“What are they even for?” Jose asked, swaying as she tried to point at my hip.
I wasn’t sure what she was talking about – my vagina, my hips, the pocket, or even the people sitting behind us.
“Yes,” Tabby cried, looking over her shoulder at the table behind us. “They followed us in here and they’ve been here all night.”
A round of snorts and snickers came from the occupants, and one shouted, “Fireball!”
That stopped my entrapped panicking. “What a great idea. Fireball!”
And that’s how the day went downhill even more. They had given me four days off to recover from the punch, and damn it, I was going to find out what the hell this pocket was for.
Apparently it was put there for cowboys to put pocket watches in to stop them getting broken, but I wouldn’t remember that until the next morning when I picked my jeans up off the floor and found three watches stuck in it. Oops!The next morning…
The deep groan behind me was what woke me up, the earthquake in my brain making it sound more like a roar than a groan. Sadly, where one part of me woke up so did all the other parts, and they freaking hurt.
Slowly, I blinked open my eyes, then tried again when only one responded. “Holy shit, I’m blind.”
And that’s when it registered that I wasn’t alone, when the top of Raoul’s face appeared in front of me, making me scream and almost kick him in the balls as I rolled to get away from him. “Settle, baby. I’m just looking… shit, that’s bad,” he hissed.
Nothing good ever came from someone saying that, and the possibilities that hit me as to why I couldn’t see out of one eye scared the shit out of me. “Is there a hole? Did you glue it together as a joke?”
“What are you talking about?”
Grabbing him by the ear which was the only thing I could think of to grab, I yanked him closer to me. “Why can’t I see? Did you glue it together?”
He looked almost offended that I’d accuse him of going that far, but at this stage in the prank war, anything was possible. “No, I’m thinking the big tank that punch you yesterday, and the fact your eye is bruised and swollen because of it, is why you can’t see out of that side.”
At the reminder, all the memories from yesterday’s incident came back to me, and I dropped my head back down onto the pillow as I relived the moment his fist hit my face. There had been veins bulging in his neck and face when he’d reared his arm to hit me, making it look like he was possessed. “Sorry.”
Leaning over me, he picked something up off the side table, and then moved back into place. “Here are some painkillers and some water. Figured you’d need them when you woke up, especially the water.”
He wasn’t kidding. Popping the pills in my mouth, I took a mouthful of the water, and then decided to hell with it and drank as much as I could. “That’ll be the mixture of tequila and Fireball,” he chuckled, reaching for the bottle when I was done. “We warned you not to do it, but none of you would listen.”
“Ugh, don’t remind me,” I groaned, rolling over and shoving my face in his chest, relieved that the injured side of my face wasn’t the side on my pillow in this position.
The irony was that he could ‘remind’ me all he wanted, right now the alcohol still made last night seem foggy and like a blur, so I could happily confirm that I didn’t remember one second of it. And that was probably for the best, seeing as how Tabby and Rose were known to have kicked a singer off the stage to sing karaoke. I could sing, but it sounded like a cat being scalded, kicked in the balls, run over, and then fed a fish head with hot sauce in it. The world was a happier place if I didn’t do it, although the same could be said for the two sisters. I’d seen the video and there was just no coming back from it for them.
I felt him move slightly, and then fingers gently lifted my head so that he could see it better. This actually worked just fine for me seeing as how the only eye I could open was now looking straight at his mouth, although the view before of his chest had been far from shabby. In fact, it had been fucking awesome!
I was so focused on the shape of his lips and how smooth they were, the scruffy beard around it, and the way his cupids bow dipped, that I didn’t realize he was raising his thumb to gently stroke the area that had been hit by a wrecking ball. When the pad of the digit hit the swollen and bruised skin, though, I knew. Sweet Jesus did I know. “Ow.”