Daniel sighed and then I heard the sound of the dog barking at something in the background. “Bill, stop!” he told the dog. “Don’t bark at the dishwasher! It’s not doing anything to you!” His voice returned to normal. “I’m sorry, Aimee. I know you needed me to pretend to be your boyfriend, but this is Bill’s life.”
I took a deep breath and took stock of my situation. It was bad. Disastrously bad. A sock-eating dog who barked at dishwashers was going to force me to go solo to this wedding. The wedding where Brandon would be wearing a tux and maybe dancing with a sexy redhead that he met last night. And I was already drunk. This was all Bill Clinton’s fault.
20
Brandon
Aimee looked like a million bucks and her obnoxious date was nowhere to be found. It was Christmas come early. This was my chance to hook up with her again, clear my mind of her for good, and finally be done.
The boyfriend was named Daniel Muller. I’d done some online snooping, but it didn’t turn up much on him. No Facebook, but I didn’t have one either. A professional profile on LinkedIn indicated that he was a tax lawyer at a large public accounting firm. His resume was impressive but boring. He seemed very boring in general, actually.
He was decent looking, maybe, but Aimee could do better. I wasn’t exactly an expert on men’s looks, since I didn’t care about them, but Aimee was drop dead gorgeous. She was a walking, talking example of why you shouldn’t call anyone ugly in middle school. Because puberty had transformed her, and seeing her dressed up proved to me that I really should have kept my dumb teenage mouth shut.
Aimee was stunning in anything, but in a tight, green satin sheath dress she looked like she could win a beauty pageant. She was very petite, but her long, slender limbs and natural elegance made her look taller. When coupled with a tiny waist, rounded curves, classic beauty, and perfect porcelain skin, she was miles away from the girl I had known. At least, on the outside.
Inside, she still hated me.
When Aimee saw me at the ceremony, she stared, but I didn’t think it was because she was happy to see me. Her unblinking stare drank me in, and I had to rip my eyes away from hers to see that she was alone. I was happy to see that Daniel wasn’t with her but didn’t know how to interpret that. Curiosity didn’t keep me silent for very long.
“Where’s your date?” I asked as soon as my dad and his new wife had made it official and we went from the church to the party. I found her at the bar in the reception hall. In proper Catholic fashion, this wedding had a full, free bar. I’d give my dad that much, he didn’t cheap out on the top shelf booze.
Aimee had a glass of strong-looking liquor in her hand and the expression she aimed at me was something I didn’t know how to decipher. For some reason it made my heart pound. “Hello, Brandon. As it happens, Daniel’s dog ate a sock and now he’s at the emergency vet getting a dog endoscopy.”
I blinked in surprise. “Oh,” I managed. “That’s… unfortunate.”
I hated Daniel, but I really liked dogs. I didn’t know how to feel.
Aimee giggled at my expression. “Yeah. I know. It sounds like something I would make up.” She took a long sip of her drink. “But I didn’t. It’s true. One hundred percent true.”
She was in a strange mood tonight, but for once, she was actually talking to me. It was a nice change to not be met with hostility. I smiled at her and for once she smiled back. God, her smile was pretty. It felt so good to see it.
“I had a dog once that ate a tennis ball,” I offered. “When I was a kid. He was fine. He pooped it out in two pieces, but it didn’t hurt him any.”
“I’ll let Daniel know.” She shook her head. “Maybe it’ll comfort him.”
“How long have you been seeing Daniel?” I asked. I was too curious not to ask.
She looked at me for a long moment. “I’m not really seeing him.”
My heart rate doubled. “You’re not?”
She shook her head and leaned close to me. She smelled incredible and I could feel the heat of her body. “He’s gay,” she whispered in my ear. “I just didn’t want to not have a date. It would have been embarrassing,” she confessed.
A realization that should have happened earlier finally hit me.
“You’re… drunk, aren’t you, Aimee?”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course not. Drunk is a very strong word.”
She was drunk. She actually held her liquor pretty well, but she was definitely drunk. I pulled the drink from her hand and gave her my water.
“Drink that,” I ordered. “We haven’t even had dinner yet and this is going to be a long night.”
She pouted at me. “Don’t tell me what to do.”
“I’m looking out for your best interests,” I told her. “You think not having a date is embarrassing? Try falling down drunk on the dance floor.”
She scrunched her nose and took a tiny sip of water. “You’re a bully and I don’t like you.” She was very drunk. “Nobody likes you, Brandon.” Her voice was louder than she probably intended, and a few people looked over curiously. A few of the onlookers were our fellow hospital staff physicians. Not good. “If you weren’t so hot, I’d punch you in that smug face,” she chirped.
I was rapidly reassessing how functional Aimee actually was. The fact that she was admitting that she found me attractive, while exciting, was proof that she was actually well past tipsy and into out-of-control.
“How much have you had to drink?” I asked her in a whisper, drawing her away from the crowd and worried she might cause a scene. In the quiet of the hallway, she slumped against the wall.
She shrugged. “Enough to make seeing you bearable.”
I smirked. “So, a lot, huh?”
She nodded. “A lot.”
My head was suddenly pounding with a brand-new stress headache. This was so not how this night was supposed to go. Indecision warred in my chest.
Eighteen months. If I could make it through this reception, I would avoid eighteen months at St. Vincent’s hospital.
I could have walked away from Aimee. I could have left her to make a drunken spectacle of herself in front of everyone, played my part, and taken a bow. I could have been free, but that conscience that Aimee didn’t think I had wouldn’t let me.
“Come on, Aimee,” I told her, wrapping an arm around her waist. “I’m taking you home.”
“Okay, Brandon.” Her tone was suggestive, and she leaned into me with a flirty smile, but she was barely holding herself up. I hated to admit it, but the only way she’d ever go home with me was if she was in an altered state. The fact that she went happily along with me just proved how far gone she was. “Take me home.”
21
Aimee
When I woke up, it took a long moment to realize I wasn’t still dreaming. The room was not familiar at all. I couldn’t remember how I got here.
The bed I was lying in was huge and soft, covered in white linens and sitting in a white, featureless, almost empty room. There was nothing on the walls. The floors were beige carpet. It was all attractive enough, but spartan. Minimalist.
This was not my room. My room was warm and inviting, filled with lace pillows, soft drapes, and obvious femininity. This was a man’s space. My brain caught up with my eyes and the hangover hit me right at the same time the memories did.
Oh God. I’m in Brandon’s bed.
I lurched up from the bed and realized in abject horror that I was completely naked. My dress was on the floor next to the bed and my underwear were just missing. None of this was good, and a wave of nausea rose and crested.
In a mad scramble of bare limbs, I rushed to the bathroom that I glimpsed from the bed and threw up with mere seconds to spare. I emptied my stomach contents into the toilet bowl. Twice. Somehow, even when I was left with nothing but dry heaves, I still didn’t feel like I was relieved of my burden. Maybe because most of it was mental.
There was a window in the bedroom, but it showed that we were on the fourth fl
oor. I couldn’t escape out of it. That meant the only way out was through Brandon’s apartment and his smug, self-satisfied attitude. In my moment of weakness, I’d gotten drunk and gone home with him. He’d never let me live it down. The worst part? I didn’t even remember the sex. I hoped it was worth it.
I shimmied back into my dress, finding my underwear under the bed and my shoes next to the door. There was no real chance that I could fix my hair, which was now a tangled, nightmare rats’ nest, or my makeup, which was a smeared disaster, but at least I had clothes on. I also found a wrapped toothbrush and toothpaste in the bathroom so at least I could fix my nasty-tasting mouth. It all made me feel just a little more human.
There was a very long text on my phone from Daniel explaining that he and Bill were going to be okay, although he was now facing a three-thousand-dollar vet bill and the memory of what the inside of his dog looked like. I was relieved for him and Lucy. Bill had indeed eaten a sock, but they were able to get him to throw it up somehow. I texted Daniel back that I was happy for him and Bill and in return received a short video of the happy puppy lolling on his dad’s lap. It was cute enough to almost make me smile. Almost. Unfortunately, my own issues were all too real, and now that I’d checked in with Daniel, I had nothing else to distract myself with. I summoned my courage, stood up as straight as I could manage with the pulsating headache from my hangover, and opened the door.
Brandon’s living room was as sparely decorated as his bedroom. It was clearly a design choice, but I couldn’t help feeling like he could use a little… life in here. It was almost sterile. The furniture was flat and modern, the surfaces were all bare, and it just felt kind of sad to me. There was no personality to it. It was bleak.
For some reason, being in his living space reminded me of Martin’s house. It didn’t look like it at all. Martin’s house was decorated in an aggressively ornamental Mediterranean style, complete with faux paint designed to look like it fell out of an Italian villa, stylish statuary, little nooks and enclaves where classical paintings were hung, and tassels on anything that could possibly accommodate a tassel. It was positively magniloquent. I learned that word for the SAT right around the first time I saw Martin’s house and always thought it fit perfectly.
Brandon’s home was by no means magniloquent, quite the opposite really, but it was intentional in the same way. Brandon, like Martin, had a style and executed on it completely. There was no more deviation or compromise in Brandon’s minimalism than in Martin’s maximalism. They were two sides of the same coin. In a lot of ways, probably.
I was reflecting on the odd parallels when Brandon opened the front door to find me standing in his living room in my green dress.
“Good morning,” I ventured as bravely as I could.
“Good morning. How do you feel?” he asked, setting a bag and two coffees on his kitchen counter and looking at me curiously. “Did you sleep okay?”
I blinked. He wasn’t nearly as smug as I expected. “I think I slept alright.”
“Do you remember what happened last night?”
I focused down at my feet. “It’s kind of fuzzy, but I can put two and two together, Brandon. I woke up naked in your bed.” I was ashamed, but less than I thought I might be. Mostly I was disappointed that I couldn’t remember anything.
“We didn’t sleep together,” he told me, causing me to look back up at him in surprise. “I slept on the couch.”
“You what?”
“You don’t remember anything, do you?”
“No.” I barely remembered the wedding and reception.
I hoisted myself up on one of the stools at his breakfast bar and grabbed a coffee. He settled next to me. His expression was nothing like I expected. He wasn’t being smug and superior with me like I thought he would be. I honestly didn’t know what to think.
“You were a bit of a mess last night,” he told me in that same nonjudgmental tone of voice. “I had to get you out of there before you embarrassed yourself, but then we got in the car, you immediately passed out, and I realized I didn’t know where you lived. I brought you here and I slept on the couch.”
“I woke up naked.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Then you did that yourself,” he said. “I didn’t touch you.”
I believed him. Brandon was a lot of things, but I didn’t think he was a rapist. He wasn’t even the monster without a conscience I thought he was. He’d rescued me from myself.
“You stopped me from embarrassing myself?” I asked in a small voice.
He nodded.
I bit my lip. “Thank you.”
His answering smile was small but genuine, although I got the feeling that there was a lot going on behind his dark eyes. “Don’t mention it.” He smirked. “But this time I am going to expect something in return for saving you.”
“Oh?” Blackmail. I should have known. What would Brandon want? My job? Something worse? Irritation leapt in my chest. “What?”
“Nothing much. I want you to have lunch with me, three days a week. Not at the hospital, either. Somewhere else.”
“You want… lunch? With me?” I stuttered. Not what I expected at all.
“Yes. I want lunch with you. Three times a week. Every week.”
“Okay.” He grinned in apparent victory and it tugged at an unnamed thing in my chest that had showed up when the irritation fled. A strange, breathless feeling seized me. “I, um, I guess I can do that.”
Something big shifted in me and it wasn’t until I was riding home in an Uber that I realized what it was. I felt lighter. Better. There was an absence in me that hadn’t been there the night before. The hate and resentment that I’d been carrying around for Brandon forever? Well, it wasn’t gone. It was still there, hurting, the same way it always had. But it was… less. It had started healing and I hadn’t even realized that I wanted that. It turns out that I did. Although I was horribly hungover and looked like death warmed over, things were looking up.
22
Aimee
Aimee and Brandon left the reception together.
Aimee and Brandon are secretly in love.
News travels fast in a hospital. Bad news travels faster. Gossip travels the fastest. By the time I arrived back at work Monday morning after the wedding, it was way too late to do anything to stop it from happening.
The rumors spread around the hospital like a damn hemorrhagic fever. It was the Ebola of rumors: virulent, contagious, and incurable. I could feel the contagion like a buzz against my skin in everyone’s knowing looks and whispered comments. Lucy confirmed it when I asked her.
“Are you sure you want to know what people are saying?” she asked me, cocking her head to the side and looking worried that I might blow up at her. “I can tell you, but you might not like it.” She swallowed hard and glanced back at the door like she was considering an escape route. I wasn’t going to blame the messenger.
“How about I guess and then you don’t have to tell me. Everyone thinks I’m in love with Brandon Koels?” I’d heard people whispering already. I wasn’t an idiot, either. I’d assume the same thing if I saw one of my coworkers leave a party with Brandon. Especially if she were sloppy drunk at the time.
Lucy looked relieved. She nodded. “Yeah. That’s exactly what they’re saying.” She paused. “Are you in love with him? Are you secretly dating?” She was looking at me curiously. “I thought you hated him.”
My lips parted in shock. The fact that she asked meant she thought it was plausible. “No. We’re not dating. Yes, I do hate him.” I sounded pretty believable in my own ears. The hate might be wearing off, but I could still convincingly fake it.
“I’ll try to set the record straight if you want me to,” Lucy offered. She seemed appropriately outraged on my behalf now that she knew ‘the truth.’ I didn’t deserve her. Not remotely.
I frowned as I considered her offer of damage control. “There’s probably no point. People will believe whatever they want to believe. This is really
juicy too. Gossip is annoying, but it’s not really important. In the end, the story will just peter out.”
“Of course.” Lucy smiled at me. “I knew you wouldn’t let it get to you.”
I shrugged.
I talked a good game, and I’d love to say I always took the high road, but the reality was that I hated being talked about just as much as anyone. I’d been the target of plenty of rumors back during my miserable high school years, some of it thanks to Brandon himself. I suspected, for instance, that he was the one who spread the rumor that I was not actually three years younger than the rest of my grade, but three years older and mentally and physically retarded. That had been a fun one. Not the worst though. The worst one was that I was actually the Koels’ live-in servant and only attended class part time not because I was taking community college classes but because I needed to be available to scrub toilets.
All those rumors were annoying, but once I had graduated from high school and started college, I’d hoped that I would leave the immature gossip world behind. It turned out that college students, and doctors, were just as bad as high school kids. Maybe worse. The problem with adult gossip is that it can have actual real world implications on things like careers and patient outcomes.
I also worried that Martin would find out. He was currently on his honeymoon in Fiji, so I had at least three weeks, but he’d be back soon enough. I could only pray that the rumors would die down by then. Maybe I was wrong not to take Lucy up on her offer. It would be bad for Martin to get suspicious. The last thing I wanted was for him to know or even suspect that I’d ever slept with Brandon. It would change our dynamic in a way that I was simply not able to predict and couldn’t imagine would be positive. It was just better for him to never know. What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt me.
“If you do have a way to subtly suggest that I’m not sleeping with Brandon or otherwise in love with him,” I said to Lucy, “then please do that.”
Bad For You: An Enemies to Lovers Romance Page 10
