Cocktails & Dreams

by Autumn Markus

  Good Lord. How many people had witnessed Nicholas carrying her down the hall with her legs wrapped around his waist and her face practically attached to his? Jena briefly considered throwing herself out a window, but discarded the idea because Travis was already on his way.

  Finally managing to find the elevators to the lobby, Jena peeked at the mirrored wall in the back and was relieved to recognize that she had survived the night basically unscathed. For once, she was grateful that she didn’t wear much makeup. A little smeared mascara, but that was easily remedied. Jena searched her jacket pocket and slicked on the tinted lip-gloss she kept there. The sex hair would have to stay until she could get to her bag because, as usual, she hadn’t taken a purse to the festivities. Purses tended to get lost on her watch, and Jena had seen no reason to take the risk in a club full of people when she could just shove her money and ID in a pocket and travel light. Combing her fingers through her tangles, Jena groaned. She could really use the brush that most girls carried right about then.

  Collapsing in the lobby chair with the best view of the doors, she closed her eyes and tried to reconstruct how she’d gotten in her current position: stranded and sex-worn in a hotel in San Francisco. She groaned at that thought and thanked God that at least Nicholas wasn’t a complete stranger—now that would have been throw-yourself-out-a-window worthy.

  She had met Nicholas in her freshman year at the University of Oregon. From the first time she saw him, all lean muscle and dazzling grin, while waiting for the rowing team bus to take them to the reservoir, Jena had been hooked. Right before he stepped onto the bus, Mr. Beautiful had caught her eye and smiled. Jena remembered looking around to see who he could be smiling at, like she was in some stupid teen movie. His eyes had crinkled up a little more, and he shook his head and boarded the bus. Jena had frozen in place, jaw dropped, until someone had jostled her arm and asked her if she was getting on the bus. And she’d apparently never stopped being floored by him.

  The quiet ding of the elevator door as it opened yanked Jena from her reverie and made her cringe; she slouched down and looked around furtively, knowing the likelihood that Nicholas would exit was low but bracing for it anyway. A woman and two children, all dressed for the pool, passed in front of her, and she mentally shook herself. She was being ridiculous, she decided, straightening up in her chair and checking her watch. Travis should be walking through the door any time. Ignoring the hissing whispers from the desk girls that she recognized from the night before, she ran a quick hand through her hair again, trying to tame the waves. She wished she could remember exactly what she and Nicholas had done to make it so insane; a hazy recollection of a shower sent her scurrying back to the safer, more distant past, but even that wasn’t safe. She shook her head, remembering the way she’d always been so carefully casual with Nicholas, never revealing an inkling of the uproar being around him created in her body.

  Her pretense that he didn’t affect her was blown away now, she thought ruefully.

  “Are you ready to go, sugar?”

  So deeply was she immersed in her thoughts that Jena was startled by Travis’s voice. Gasping, she grabbed her chest. “Jesus, Trav! You scared me to death!”

  “Sorry.” Jena’s roommate took her hand and pulled her up from the chair. Glancing at her sideways, he added with a wicked smile, “Love the hair.”

  “Oh, shut the hell up,” Jena muttered. She heard giggles and whispered conversation coming from the front desk, as the end-of-shift night clerks checked out Travis and talked a mile a minute. Jena took a quick assessment of him and grimaced; she and Travis had been good friends and co-workers for such a long time that she often forgot how good-looking he was. She shook her head at the girls and walked toward the door.

  “Good taste, honey,” the sassier of the two clerks called out. “Can I have the one from last night?”

  Travis burst into laughter as Jena waved an expressive finger in the clerk’s direction. “So ladylike, Jena,” he said, looking back at the clerks and flashing the panty-dropping smile for which he was known around the campus of UC Davis, their home away from respective homes.

  Jena elbowed him in the ribs. “Don’t encourage them,” she hissed.

  Running his fingers through his wavy hair not only led to another spate of whispers; it also allowed Travis the opportunity to nudge Jena in the head with his elbow. Lovingly, of course. “Just making sure they remember me. I might be looking for female companionship if I come back some day,” he murmured back. “We can’t all count on being taken to bed by a total stranger.”

  “Shut it, Walker,” Jena warned. He laughed and led the way out the door, tossing his keys and whistling a satisfied-sounding tune.

  “Yes, boss. At least until we get home.”

  The ride from San Francisco to Davis was quiet. Jena knew Travis was just waiting for the best time to pounce, so she had only until then to come up with a plausible explanation for her out-of-character behavior. Extremely delayed lust was the honest answer, but that was just too embarrassing to contemplate saying aloud. Various other excuses passed through her mind, but Jena discarded them one by one, fully aware that Travis knew her too well to accept any of them. Her eyes drifted closed somewhere between He must have slipped me a roofie and I slept in the bathtub, really. It was the sound of Travis’s door clunking closed and the trunk opening that dragged her eyes open again.

  Jena and Travis both breathed a sigh of relief as they flopped down on the couch in their comfortable apartment. After a few minutes, though, Jena felt Travis looking at her.

  “So?” He grinned and raised an expressive eyebrow. “Spill it, girl. What the hell happened last night?” Jena’s eyes widened in horror, and Travis laughed. “Not the gory details, spaz. I don’t want to have nightmares about that. I’ve just never seen you take off with a guy like that. And don’t even try to pull the ‘I was so drunk I didn’t know what was going on’ thing either, because I’ve seen you so twisted that you can’t see or walk, and you still have willpower of steel. Or actually, ‘won’t power.’”

  Jena abandoned all hope of excusing herself. “Travis, I really don’t want to talk about it,” she moaned. He just crossed his arms. “Okay, okay! I know Nicholas from my college rowing team, all right? I haven’t seen him since my freshman year, and I guess I had a little crush then that’s carried over.”

  “So you were doing the horizontal bop even then?”

  “No! Dork!” She whapped Travis with a couch pillow. “We talked on the bus sometimes. He just…he saved me from our pervy team captain once.” She smiled, her eyes growing soft at the memory of the first time she’d realized Nicholas had noticed her, too. “He walked me back to my dorm, and he was so sweet…He read poetry to me…”

  Her eyes grew far away as she remembered the casual way Nicholas had reclined on her bed, snagging the copy of Shakespeare’s collected works that was perched precariously atop the stack of texts on her tiny desk. He’d quizzed her with mock seriousness on the play she had marked before flipping silently through the book and wondering aloud if she’d like to hear his favorite. Jena had nodded and smiled wryly, expecting to hear “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?” or some snippet from Romeo and Juliet that he remembered from tenth grade English, carefully chosen for its ability to make a girl’s heart flutter. Instead, she’d felt the grin fading as he came up with something unexpected, Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXXX. Flutter was a weak word for what had begun in her chest as he’d read, punctuating every complimentary phrase with a glance into her eyes or a slight smile.

  “I thought he might kiss me,” Jena continued slowly, sighing, “but a friend interrupted and…”

  Jena shook herself out of her memories when she heard Travis snort laughter.

  “Poetry?” he asked skeptically. “Seriously?”

  “Shut up,” Jena ordered, glaring at Travis as he looked at her, both eyebrows now raised. “And nothing happened then. Satisfied?”

  “Sure. Were
you?” Travis shot back with a sharp laugh. “I can’t believe you set yourself up for that one, Jen.” He held up his hands against another attack.

  Jena lay back on the couch and covered her face with her pillow. “Travis, am I a ho?” she whined.

  His voice suddenly became serious. “Did anyone promise anyone any money?” His chortle was muffled by the furious onslaught of Jena’s pillow.

  Eventually disarming her, Travis held her hands together in one of his. Laughing, he said sweetly, “No, Jena. You’re not a ho.” He released her after giving her a smacking kiss on the forehead, sauntered to the door, and turned for his final words.

  “You are, however, as my grandmama would say, a hoochie.”

  Chapter Two

  IMAGES OF SOFT SKIN and shining hair filled his mind as Nicholas drifted up from the best dream he’d ever had. He smiled, clutching the sweet-smelling pillow tighter and settling back to try to re-enter REM sleep.

  “Hey, Screaming Beauty! If you don’t get your ass out of bed we’re going to miss our plane.”

  Nick started to turn over to tell Conor exactly what he thought of him when Conor yelled, “And pull the blankets up, for God’s sake. I’ve already seen your ass and have no desire to view your junk.”

  That brought Nick’s eyes wide open, and he jerked his head up only to just as quickly lay it back down. “I’m dying, Conor. Get the fuck out of here,” he muttered. Moving as slowly as he could, so as to jar his aching head as little as possible, Nick groped around until he could pull the sheet up over himself. “What time is it?”

  “Eight thirty, man. Our plane leaves in a little over two hours, so you’d better get moving.”

  Opening one eye, Nicholas glared at his best friend as Conor lounged shirtless in the doorway, hands gripping the top of the doorframe. He grinned at Nicholas, and Nick groaned, knowing the shit was coming his way.

  “Have fun, sweetie? I caught a glimpse of your little honey as she scurried out the door a couple of hours ago. Nice.” Conor said.

  Nick searched his memory, wishing he could remember anything about her. He vaguely remembered dark hair, but that was about it.

  “Who the hell was she, Con? I can’t remember a damned thing after about ten o’clock last night.”

  Conor busted up. “How should I know? You just said something about knowing her from college the last time I saw you before you disappeared. That club was so dark she could have been Quasimodo and I wouldn’t recognize her on the street today.”

  Nick flopped back on the bed and put his arm over his eyes. “Which college? I’ve gone to three so far. And what the hell is poking me in the back?” He reached underneath himself and pulled out a pink, lacy bra.

  Conor’s eyebrows shot up and then his eye caught something on the floor, almost behind the dresser. He reached out and plucked up a scrap of matching lace that was masquerading as underwear.

  “Holy crap, Nick! You can’t remember the chick that wore these? You sad bastard!” Conor laughed again, flinging the scrap to join the bra in Nicholas’s outstretched hand. “I can assure you though, you both had an absolutely great time, if that makes you feel any better. I finally couldn’t stand it anymore and left to get a cup of coffee at about four, and all was quiet when I got back a couple of hours later.”

  Nicholas shook his head and then winced. He had to remember not to do that again. “So you just sat here all night and got to listen to me have great sex, huh? What happened to the lady killer?”

  “Oh, I went back to the room of your Mostly Naked Girl—remember her?” He laughed when Nicholas gingerly shook his head. “Sad. Tall, built, nasty as all get out…” Conor smiled wistfully, lost in memory. Nick laughed, thinking that she sounded like Conor’s type, and Con jumped. “Those of us who didn’t try to drink our weight in Jäger last night just have the good sense to know when to call it a morning. That shit gives me a headache,” Con said in a lecturing tone before grinning. “Though, if we’d started on tequila, I would probably look just as crappy as you do right now.”

  “Thanks, Conor, for your editorial comments. I’m sure I’ll come up with a witty reply when my brain stops exploding.” Nick looked at his friend again, back at his station in the doorway. Chucking a pillow at him, Nicholas said, “And will you please stop posing?”

  Conor grinned, dropping his lanky arms from above his head to flex. “You’re just jealous, Dickolas.” He kissed both of his scrawny biceps. “We represent, don’t we, guys?” Conor escaped a thrown shoe, laughing loudly as he left the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Sitting up gingerly, Nick looked at the underwear in his hand. Pretty hot indeed. He searched his mind once again for some clue as to who had been wearing them at the beginning of last night, and came up with nothing more than the same impression of hair and skin and voice. No face. No name even, for God’s sake. Nick shook his head in disbelief then winced, cradling his forehead between gentle hands. While he wasn’t a virgin, he certainly had never slept with a total stranger before.

  Of course, Nick knew this girl, according to the idiot. He just didn’t know from where. Which college? He’d gone to UC Santa Barbara for his freshman year, transferred to University of Oregon for his sophomore and part of his junior year, and finished up back home at Northeastern after his dad had a stroke in the middle of his junior year. Three schools equaled a lot of possibilities, and that didn’t even include medical school. Even if he narrowed it down to the closest and most likely, U of O, there was a lot of ground to cover.

  Rising gingerly from the bed, he impulsively brought the lacy jumble in his hand to his face and inhaled. That was definitely a smell that couldn’t be easily forgotten, earthy and herbal-floral. He realized that his nighttime visitor’s smell lingered in the room as well, and inhaled again. Nicholas had a sudden flash of nuzzling his face in the hair that draped across the crook of her neck and trailed over her collarbone to cover her breast. Nick shook his head sharply, accepting the pain that came with the motion because he had to shut that shit down or he’d never make his plane.

  As he adjusted the temperature of the water, Nicholas tried to reason out how he’d gotten into his current position of cluelessness.

  How a quick vacation trip to check out the University of California at Davis had turned into…whatever…was mystifying. A quick reconstruction of events would logically never have brought him to this point: first he got restless with his job as an EMT, then he started thinking about going back to medical school, then he researched schools with a good emergency medicine program, then he decided to check out the campus over winter break to see whether the lifestyle change from big city to earth-crunchy college town would be acceptable. Conor had some vacation time saved up at the firehouse and had decided to tag along. That was it. Simple enough. No indication of trouble. He’d even been sort of excited when Conor suggested that they travel down to San Francisco for New Year’s Eve. The rest was history.

  Nick grimaced as he stepped under the shower’s spray, trying to piece together the night before. He remembered hitting a string of open parties raging in the club district and then deciding to try the hotel party. Things got hazy quickly after that, largely because, relieved of the responsibility of either one of them having to drive anywhere, Nicholas Cooper decided to cut loose for once in his life. He groaned just thinking about it. The liquor was flowing, the music was loud, and the girls were hot; he’d just lost himself somewhere in there. He didn’t want to even think of the seven kinds of shit he was going to catch at the firehouse when Conor told the story. As Nick knew Con would inevitably do. With relish.

  The only good thing was that almost no one was going to believe that straitlaced, quiet EMT Cooper would ever drink until he couldn’t remember anything. And especially not that he had brought an amazing girl back to his room for wild sex.

  Nick was just assuming he’d done that, based on Conor’s story and the delicious ache all over his body. Which brought him back to his first proble
m. Who was she? Just thinking about the long hair that streamed down her back in the shower, the water leaving trails down her derrière, trails that curved inward when they hit her taut thighs to disappear between her legs…

  Nicholas nearly dropped the soap as he jumped. What the hell was that? They’d showered together? He had an impression of a hand playing with his chest hair, and twisted the handle to full cold, yelping as the icy water hit his overheated skin. “Get a fucking grip, Cooper,” he muttered.

  Quieting his body was easier in the arctic blast, and Nick hurried through the rest of his shower, toweling off roughly when he was through. He leaned down to dry his lower legs and spotted the telltale foil wrapper that told him that they had, indeed, showered together—and more. He wondered…

  Yep. There was another one on the nightstand, alongside a box of twelve with four missing.

  Four? And where did they come from? Fascinated, Nick searched until he found another wrapper under the bed and one between the sofa cushions in the living room. Good Lord, he thought, I guess it should be some comfort that I was a responsible stupid drunk.

  Chuckling ruefully, Nick quickly dressed and decided the first order of business was a huge glass of water, massive amounts of ibuprofen, and coffee. In that order.

  “Hey, Con? Got any pain meds with you?” he called as he carried his bag out into the living room of the suite.

  Conor laughed, opening his door and pulling out his wheeled suitcase. “Feelin’ it, are you? Sorry, man, used the last aspirin myself a couple of hours ago. I think there’s a store in the lobby, though. Want to shoot down while I take the bags to the car?”

  “Thanks. Yeah, I will,” Nick answered, tossing his suitcase on the couch. He headed downstairs to find out if the shop sold sundries or just tourist crap. With any luck, there would also be a coffee shop, and he would be set.