Prologue
Alice
“What happened to girl’s night?” Jordan muttered out of the corner of her mouth.
Daniel had to have heard her. He was only standing a couple inches behind me, so close I could feel his breath on my ear. From the look on my friend’s face, I doubted she cared.
I sighed and puffed a piece of loose hair out of my face. I didn’t have much of an answer for her. Daniel’s presence was almost as much a surprise to me as it was to her. He’d texted me as I was slipping on my red party dress, asking what I was up to.
Girl’s night, I’d told him.
All night? was his reply.
I’d ignored him after that, but he hadn’t stopped texting.
I told myself through every bar, at every club, during all the stops we made at the beginning of the night, don’t answer him. Don’t respond. Let it die. And yet, despite my best intentions, I caved. Somehow I blinked my eyes and found myself standing in the long, long line outside the Black Shade Saloon with Beck, Jordan, and Kylie by my side and Daniel at my back.
Daniel had been happy to get there and was just as happy to leave immediately with me in tow.
“Are you sure you want to go inside?” he asked, hands snaking around my waist to rest on my hips. “My roommates are gone. We could just head back there.”
To be honest, I was over the night already. I was happy to go, but I also wasn’t particularly in the mood to have sex with Daniel. I was still currently pissed at myself for allowing him to push his way in, a feeling my three friends shared. Well, maybe just Kylie and Jordan. Beck was off in La La Land thinking about our boss, Sam Callahan and hadn’t been paying much attention to anything all night.
“We’ve been standing in this line for almost an hour,” I said. “We’re getting in and having at least one drink.”
“And then you wanna head out?” he pushed.
“Maybe,” I said. It meant yes, but I wasn’t about to give in a second time, at least not so easily.
I tried to ignore Daniel’s hot breath on the back of my neck and refocused on my friends.
“Doing okay?” I asked Beck. She was standing next to me, gazing off in another direction with a twisted look on her face. She started when I nudged her.
“Yeah, definitely,” she said. “Just thinking.”
About Sam’s hunky figure, I completed the sentence in my head.
Beck was my former college roommate/best friend and had just moved onto my couch from Kentucky. In typical Beck fashion, she’d fallen immediately into a torrid love affair with our boss, the billionaire real estate mogul Sam Callahan. Beck was currently in the least fun stage on the road to acceptance (denial), and this night out was supposed to do her some good. Ever since they’d hooked up on her first night in the city, there’d been a frown on her face and an undeniable listlessness in her voice. I wasn’t sure if she was regretting it happened or sad it might not happen again.
The dilemma left her face as she met my eye, clearing into a soft smile. “Having fun?” she asked in a light Southern drawl.
“Sure, sure,” I said. My own accent had been purposefully dropped when I moved to the city. “Just want to get the hell inside.”
Kylie said something from Beck’s other side before she could respond. My friend turned away to answer, leaving me back alone with Daniel.
I pretended to dig in my purse so I didn’t have to talk to him. Honestly, Daniel wasn’t that bad. He was a little pushy, occasionally conceited. He could be a douche, but he was cute in an Ivy League-trust fund kind of way. And he was okay in bed, which was a lot more than I could say for Harrison, my previous boyfriend.
There was nothing really wrong with Daniel, nothing that couldn’t already be found in thousands of young guys across the city. And maybe that was the issue. I was getting a heavy sense of déjà vu. Another Cornell frat boy that I met on Tinder (or was it Bumble?) who I’d date for six months until he left his dirty boxers on my kitchen table for the final time and I washed my hands of it all.
Daniel was supposed to be a hookup, a fling to put the spark into singles life lest I forget the touch of a man. But the past few times I’d gone out, he’d come with me. Not just at the end of the night either. Like, stay the whole time and then come home afterward. Which was not what you did with a hookup. That was what you did with a boyfriend.
And was I ready for a relationship again already? My brain declared a resounding no way. And yet somehow Daniel stood behind me anyway.
Stood behind me a little too closely. I started as Daniel palmed my ass through my dress. He leaned closer and I could smell the liquor on his breath as he whispered in my ear. “God, Alice. I’m so hard.”
Yeah, and what exactly do you want me to do about it now?
As it turned out, he had an idea in mind. He pulled one of my hands behind me and pressed it against his length. I glanced out of the corner of my eye at my friends. Beck was still talking to Kylie, and none of them seemed any the wiser. That being said, while I wasn’t above experimenting sexually, a public hand job mere feet from my best friends was a single step (or three) too far.
I yanked my hand out of his. “Stop it,” I hissed out of the corner of my mouth. “You can wait until we get home.”
“But this line is so long,” he whined.
“Your balls aren’t going to fall off. And anyway, we’re almost at the front,” I said, thankful for the excuse so this conversation could die.
As the words left my mouth, the group in front of us was ushered into the Black Shade. I walked forward, but because Daniel was slightly leaning on me, the movement caused me to stumble.
“Shit!” I cried, just as Beck swooped in for the Best Friend of the Year Award by catching me before I went down hard on the pavement.
“Damn, Alice, are you okay?” Beck asked, righting me and keeping her hands on my arm to hold me steady.
“Yeah,” I said. “I just tripped.” The only thing wounded was what remained of my pride.
“Sorry, babe,” Daniel whispered in my ear. I turned and he grinned sheepishly at me. “Didn’t know you were about to take off like that.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Let’s just go in and—” My sentence faded away as I turned and looked directly into the eye of the unsmiling bouncer.
“I wouldn’t bother waiting,” he said, confirming that, yes, he was going to be a dick.
“What do you mean? Why the hell not?” I demanded.
“I mean I’m not letting you in here. You’re too drunk. Can’t serve you.”
My mouth fell open. I had not wasted an hour of my Saturday night just to be turned away at the door.
“I’ve been in this line so long, I’m completely sober,” I said. “We’ve been waiting forever and you’re just going to turn us away?”
The bouncer’s face was set. “You’re too drunk,” he repeated. “I don’t care. Get out of here.”
“I’m not drunk!” I insisted. “I wasn’t stumbling. I tripped. You try walking around this city for hours in heels.”
The line behind us was starting to murmur in annoyance, but I didn’t care. Unfortunately, neither did the bouncer. “Nobody ever thinks they’re drunk,” he said. “Everyone ‘just tripped’. Well, sorry, but I’m not getting yelled at by my boss for letting in a group of wasted chicks.”