It’s Raining Men
Chapter Four
I woke up in my bed the next morning to the sound of my phone buzzing across the counter in my adjoining bathroom. The inside of my mouth had taken on the consistency of a gym sock—fuzzy and stinky—and I could feel the beginnings of a headache marching outward from the depths of my brain.
One by one, memories from last night popped into my head like still images from a slide show: talking to Dax after my disaster of a date, Kelly flouncing into the bar with a spectacular engagement ring on her finger, the two of us holding Yessi’s hair back in the ladies’ room, me talking with Dax, fighting with Dax, smelling Dax’s leather jacket as he put it on at the end of the night…
I rubbed my throbbing temple. I hadn’t gotten sloppy like that since the day after I finished med school, because I never allowed myself to let loose to the point of forgetting chunks of the night. I had responsibilities.
My phone buzzed again.
A sad numbness lurked behind my hangover. I hadn’t gotten drunk last night simply to have fun and celebrate. I’d allowed myself to be over-served in order to drown out an impending sense of dread and doom. My vision blurred, and not just because I hadn’t put my glasses on yet.
Kelly, my perpetually single best friend, was getting married, and I was the last spinster standing.
Not really. I mean, I didn’t see it that way, not exactly. I knew neither a ring nor a mate determined my worth, but I still couldn’t shake this sensation of being left behind.
It was like back in high school when all my friends suddenly started dating, and I found myself at home alone on Friday nights, watching Boy Meets World with my mom and dad.
Did ABC still host a TGIF lineup on Fridays? I was about to find out.
No, Mal, stop it. No more wallowing. I’d allowed myself one night of being a pathetic, blubbering cliché. It wasn’t a night I was proud of, but it was over. No harm, no foul. Now, in the light of day, I could go back to being a kick-ass concierge doctor who was fine on her own, who didn’t need a man or anyone else to fulfill her, who didn’t even need a mother-sucking plant to keep her company.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, pausing a moment to let my pounding brain catch up. I was never drinking again. Never, ever, ever, ever. Ever. I patted my bedside table, hunting for my glasses, but they were nowhere to be found. My dress from last night formed a puddle in the corner of the floor, and I had fallen asleep in my bra and underwear—black lace, my “I have a date” lingerie, though it had been quite some time since anyone had actually seen it. I was on a bit of a dry spell.
The phone buzzed again, and I attempted to coerce my body to spring into action. I had an obligation to answer the call. My patients paid good money for me to be on-call for them, 24/7, a big part of the reason why I generally avoided drinking too much. It was rare to get a call in the middle of the night or early on a weekend morning, but it did happen, and I had to be at the ready.
I stretched and padded into the bathroom, the cold tile waking up the bottoms of my bare feet. I picked up my phone and squinted at the screen, holding it arms-length away and closing one eye to see better.
Ten messages? Crap. Who was trying to get ahold of me while I was sleeping?
I clicked on the first one, from someone listed in my phone as “John the plumber.” It said, “Mal, I’m flattered, but I’m married.”
An unpleasant tingling sensation made its way up my neck.
I looked at the next message. From Derek, an awful stock trader I’d met on an app and had gone out with twice a few months ago. “Not for me, Mal, but I’m always game for a hookup, if you’re interested.”
My chest tightened, and my ears burned. What. The. Fuck.
I scrolled up to the top as a slab of lead settled in my stomach. I closed my eyes and counted to three before reading the text I had sent at 2:34 a.m. to…I counted…twenty-one men in my contacts. “Hi, everyone! This is Mallory Kyle, and I am letting you know that I am serious about settling down. I’m sick of playing games and pretending to be someone I’m not. I am a doctor, which means I work a lot but make a ton of money. I’m a fair-weather sports fan. I love to run. I hate cheese, all cheese, every single kind of cheese in existence. If this interests you and you are serious about settling down, please respond to this text. Everyone else, thank you for your time.”
A pained squeak escaped from my throat, and I couldn’t decide whether to run or lock myself in the bathroom forever. As a compromise, I hurled my phone as hard as I could at the bedroom wall, watching as it slammed against the plaster. I prayed that I had smashed it to smithereens, as if that’d erase the embarrassment of last night, like ten men hadn’t already read and responded to my embarrassing messages, like the goddamn Cloud wasn’t a thing.
Oh, but it was a thing.
My bedroom door flew open, and Dax appeared, still wearing his black jeans from last night and a white undershirt. His dark hair shot up at all angles. “Are you okay?”
“What are you doing here?” I lunged for my bed and grabbed the first thing I could find—a large unicorn-shaped pillow my niece had given me for Christmas—and attempted to hide my underwear-clad body.
Dax’s eyes traveled from the floor up to where the unicorn horn rose like a spire between my breasts. “You told me last night I could stay here.”
“What? Why?” A little flicker of a memory popped into my head, but it was attached to Dax putting on his leather jacket, and its smell was the only thing I could recall about that moment.
“My apartment is being fumigated, and I was going to spend the night in the bar. Remember?”
I rolled my eyes. Oh yeah. I did vaguely recall that.
He reached down and picked up my phone, dusting it off. “I’m assuming someone responded to your text?”
I hugged the unicorn tighter. “You knew about that?”
He held up his hands in surrender. The sunlight through the window glinted against my phone’s screen. “Don’t shoot the messenger. I tried to stop you.”
My nostrils flared. “Why didn’t you?”
His shoulders rose to his ears. “Because…I’m not your keeper, and I barely know you.”
“You over-served me.”
“Again,” he said, “not your keeper. And I started watering down your drinks after a while anyway.” He glanced at the phone. “How was the response?”
I reached for the phone, accidentally dropping the unicorn in the process. Oh well. What did I have to hide? I placed one hand on my hip and held out the other one expectantly. “Give it to me.”