Page 61 of Dedicated
I cut him off with an unintelligible croak, then tried again. “I need you to come pick me up.”
Something in my tone made his reply come out softer. “Where are you, though? I’ve been looking for you for a day and a half.”
“Isn’t that the question?” I mumbled, and scrabbled around some more, pawing over surfaces until I found a notepad with the Tropicana logo on top. I gave him the name, and he promised to be at my door in a half hour. I’d had to go physically look at the door to tell him the room number.
Before I hung up, he said, “Bro, you might want to stay off the internet.”
Shit.
Of course that was the first place I went after I hung up. I didn’t have a computer, any of my clothes, a suitcase. Apparently I’d left everything at the hotel Blink and I originally checked into. But my phone was enough. The screen had a nice new crack in it that cut up through the center of the face that popped up. My face. My Facebook page. My level of intoxication was so evident I could practically smell the booze rising from the screen. I should’ve put the phone down and not looked, like Blink had advised me, but I couldn’t. A train wreck–style allure took hold of me as I scrolled through the pictures to see just how badly I’d embarrassed myself. It was quickly evident that I hadn’t just gone off the rails, I’d chewed through the bastards and dragged the twisted metal carcasses of them after me.
Bellagio, 8:00 p.m., Saturday. Blink in the background, a bunch of glowing drinks with smoke pouring off them in the foreground. Faces I didn’t remember. Shit, I hadn’t just lost a night; I’d lost an entire day and two nights. That was a new low.
My descent was hard, fast, and reckless. And catalogued almost hour by hour via my own uploads to Facebook. Fucking hell, I was my own worst enemy. A publicist’s nightmare come to life. Every hour of my misery was accounted for in confessional style. The second to last picture I’d posted was a blurry shot of a bathroom floor covered in scattered paper, dark with crosshatches of ink. My notebook. I panicked all over again.
I tore through the suite to the bathroom. No notebook, but there was a residue of a bubble bath ringed around the tub and an empty bottle of champagne next to it.
A knock at the door pulled my attention away from the meltdown in progress, and I flung the door open to find Blink looking tired and surly. Also, worried. There was a bruise on the right side of his jaw, but somehow it was the concern in his eyes that made my breath hitch and my stomach drop to the floor below me.
“My notebook,” I said, and when my voice cracked, I realized it wasn’t necessarily about the lyrics on the page, it was about Evan. It was about that notebook being the only catalogue of us I had left.
Blink put one hand to my shoulder and pushed me backward, closing the door behind him. “I’ve got it, man. It was in the other room. Picked up all the pieces, and I think most of it can be taped back together.”
I dropped onto the couch, elbows to my knees, bunching my fists in my hair.
“I fucked up.” In so many ways.
“Yeahhhhh.” Blink drawled the word out. “But that’s kind of what people expect.” I loved him a little more for his honesty even though it fucking hurt, and he’d clearly thought my primary concern was the publicity, when really it was hurting Evan more. “It’ll blow over fast.”
“The tabs pick it up?”
“A few. Some of the Facebook photos. It’s not terrible, though. Not the worst they could do, and give it twenty-four hours and something else will come down the pipeline and it’ll be forgotten.”
But not by Evan, who’d just received yet more evidence of exactly how much of a fuckup I was. As if he needed it. Blink was saying all of that just to make me feel better. I could tell by the expression on his face, but I appreciated the effort anyway.
I scrubbed at my face and drew in a deep breath. “I want to go home.”
Blink nodded slowly to that. “That’s a good idea, yeah.”
“How did I get here?” I asked. When I searched my memory, I came up with zilch. I stood up and walked around the suite, gathering various belongings of mine as Blink trailed after me, righting a few turned-over lamps and picking up empty bottles that he pitched in the trash.
“Dunno. I mean, I guess you walked or took a cab. I lost you when the Bellagio ejected you.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, you were a hot fucking mess and making a scene, and I was trying to talk the manager down. Thought maybe if I could get him to listen, I could calm you down. Thought about giving you some shit to knock you out, but by that point I didn’t know what the fuck all you had in your system, so I was scared to do that. Turned out it didn’t matter. You punched the fucking security guard and took off.”
I cringed listening to the account, and then my gaze landed on the bruise at his jaw. “That how you got that piece?”
Blink grimaced and looked away, bending over to pick up a throw pillow that was lying in the middle of the floor.
“Nah, man, that was you. Way earlier.”
“I punched you?”
“Yeah. Shit.” He straightened up, holding the pillow in front of him like a shield before he glanced down and realized what he was doing and tossed it aside. He stared at me, jaw working as his tongue pushed against the inside of his cheek where the bruise was. “I tried to kiss you, dude.”
“What?” I nearly lost my grip on the shoe in my hand.