The pounding in his head was the first thing Caleb became aware of as he swam back to something resembling a state of consciousness. The pounding in his head and the taste in his mouth that was a combination of sour, poorly digested liquor and the stuff he hadn’t managed to keep down. He’d woken up with hangovers many, many times, He’d woken up with them this very same week, in fact, but nothing he’d ever experienced came even halfway close to the one he was rocking now. Even the hangovers in college that went along with a complete lack of experience when it came to drinking didn’t rival this one, and those were the ones that he thought of as hurting the worst. This one, however, trumped all of the rest of them combined. He groaned and rolled over onto one side, not giving a shit about anything other than forcing himself back to sleep. Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to be an option because also for the second time this week, he was waking up not alone. When he rolled over and flung his arm out to one side, it hit a soft body. Her heard a female moan a little but she did not wake up, thank God. Or if she was awake, she wasn’t talking, which was fine by Caleb. More than fine, it was necessary. It was necessary because he needed time to think, to regain some memory of what the hell had happened last night to lead him to this place.

At first, there was nothing there. He searched back into his memory and found a total blank, or total darkness, which felt like a more accurate descriptor. He’d had mornings-after like that before, mornings where he felt like he’d lost not only the information from the time when he was drunk but along with it significant portions of the time that had come before as well. Those mornings came after nights when he had really gone on a tear, and last night must have been the tear to end all tears, if the way he felt was any kind of indication. Still, he probed back into the recesses of his mind that might hold what he was looking for because this wasn’t one of those times when he could just blow it off and settle for having a residual taste of shame in his mouth that would last a few days and then dissipate into the background fog of his life. This time he needed to know as much of what had happened as possible because things like that mattered more now. He had a charade to keep up with the interminably difficult Elsie Morrow, and he needed to know just how much damage the two of them had done to the charade the previous evening. With that in mind, he cracked one eye open, knowing that he had to see who was in the bed beside him. He knew it wouldn’t be Elsie. He knew it as completely as he knew the sun would set that evening and then rise again the next morning, but he almost hoped that it was because if it wasn’t…

“Oh Christ. Oh shit, you’ve got to be joking.”

The sound of his hoarse whisper made the girl beside him stir again, but at this point Caleb hardly even cared. It was definitely not Elsie sprawled out in the bed beside him; he had been correct on that front, but that didn't mean he didn’t recognize his current bedmate. He did. He didn’t want to, but he did recognize her, and it was not something that made him even a little bit happy. It was the brunette. It took him a couple of seconds to figure out which part of last night he recognized her from, but once he did, he knew that what he’d done was bad. This was the same girl Elsie had run into, spilling her drink and then almost getting into a fight with her. Caleb could remember that part, although he’d already had a couple of drinks and a couple of shots so that things were starting to feel pleasantly fuzzy by that point. He could remember trying very hard to talk this girl down from really getting into it with Elsie, and then he remembered that the next thing he knew, Elsie was just gone. Thinking about it now, even after everything had happened and his own undeniably bad behavior, Caleb felt a wave of hot, thick aggravation wash over him with that memory. It was like she had wanted to be a problem, like she had been trying to make as big of a mess out of things, as much she possibly could. It never even occurred to him to think about the fact that she might have been feeling frightened or uncomfortable. At that point, empathy still wasn’t his strong suit on his best of days, which this was surely not. No, it didn’t occur to him to think anything of why she had behaved the way she had. He only remembered what she had been like and he felt a real sense of anger.

So how had he gone from angry and self-righteous to being in bed with this chick? What had happened in the in-between time and where the hell had Elsie gone? He shut his eyes tight and strained to remember, his flying open wide again when he actually did.

“I kissed her,” he said in an astonished voice, feeling like he was watching a movie of his life instead of living it. “I actually fucking kissed her.”

“You did,” the brunette mumbled from beside him, her face still buried in her pillow so that her words came out in muffled sounds, “but you went home with me, so I guess I won’t hold that little slip up against you.”

Went home with...Jesus, she was right! How had he failed to notice that he wasn’t in his own home? Was he really so far gone as all of that? When he sat up a little and took the time to look around, he saw that this place couldn’t ever be mistaken for his, not in a million years. For one things, the whole bedroom was lined with Pepto-Bismol-pink-colored, gauzy silk, something he would never in a million years have put up in his place. It was also about a fourth of the size of his bedroom, as well as unbelievably messy. The whole place was littered with clothing and other junk he didn’t even want to know the source of, all of which contributed to the room having a musty, vaguely mildewy odor. The girl, who must have looked appealing enough to him last night, had a very obvious, very unattractive fake tan and makeup smeared all up and down her face. In short, Caleb had landed himself in a place he had no desire to be, and he had no idea how he had gotten there. He didn’t know how he had gotten there in the literal, physical sense, but there was a lot more to it than that. There was also the fact that he didn’t know how he had gotten to that place in his life, a question that made him want to sit down and have a good cry. The only thing he knew for certain was that he had to get out of there. Even if it meant sprinting out of her apartment buck-ass naked, whoever she was, he had to get out of her God-awful apartment and back to something loosely resembling his version of normal.

“I could have told you right off, right from the very beginning that your chick wasn’t worth the trouble,” the naked brunette went on, talking in a thick Jersey accent he didn’t remember her having the night before. “I could see it written all over her face.”

“Is that right?”

“Sure, it’s right,” she answered, both her tone and her makeup-smeared expression smug and only getting smugger. “She’s got that kind of face, you know it? She’s got that kind of face that tells you all you need to know. It’s the face that lets you know the bitch has been too pretty for too long and it’s gotten to her personality. Daddy’s little princess, right? Daddy’s little rich-girl princess. That’s the problem with you super-wealthy boys, you know it? You spend so much of your time with the prissy princesses that you don’t get the chance to meet real girls.”

“Girls like you?”

“Sure! That’s what I’m saying, right? Girls like me. Nothing rich princess here, you know it? Just authentic New Jersey.”

Sitting all of the way up now, and trying to white knuckle his way through a truly extraordinary effort on the part of his tired body to just give up and throw in the towel, Caleb glanced down at the woman whose bed he’d chosen to spend the night in. Last night she had been beautiful to him, or beautiful enough at least, but this morning, he thought she was just about the ugliest thing he’d ever seen. It wasn’t the makeup or the bad tan, either. It was her. It was the nonsense spewing out of her that made her so ugly and that was something he didn’t think a person could fix. For the first time, the idea that a pretty person could be made ugly by who they were inside rang as a truth to him, and it was a surprising enough revelation to almost lay him out flat on his back again. It wouldn’t have mattered if this chick was the most heavenly, beautiful creature ever to walk the face of the planet, the things she was saying made her pretty much intolerable.

“Look, I hate to say it, but I gotta go.”

He didn’t hate to say it. He was—in fact—so eager to say it that he wasn’t sure he could get the words out of his mouth fast enough, but it was his habit to try to leave a person with a good impression of him. It was one of his real flaws, he was starting to realize. He hated having that need to have everyone think he was a good kind of a guy, and come to think of it, he didn’t think he was pulling it off all that well to begin with. Judging by the look on Jersey’s face, he wasn’t pulling it off at all, at least not with her.

“I’m sorry, I thought I heard you say you gotta go.”

“Right. I am sorry, but I also have to go. It’s already—” he stopped to look at the face of his watch and saw that it read seven-thirty in the morning, all the while careful not to make any eye contact with the woman beside him at all. “Seven-thirty in the morning, and I have to be at work.”

“You don’t have to be at work,” she said in a haughty voice that made his skin crawl. “You don’t, and we both know it. You should stay right here with me. I’ll make you breakfast or something.”

“That’s very kind of you to offer but—”

“It’s that bitch from last night, ain’t it? That’s why you’re running off like this. Now that you’re all sober and shit, you wanna run back to daddy’s little princess. I bet it’s like an arranged kind of a thing, right? Where you’ve got money and she’s got money, so hey, you might as well pool it all together and make sure you keep it in the circle.”

“I’m going to have to ask you not to talk about her that way.”

“Why, because she’s your girlfriend? You think I give a shit about that? From the looks of it, you don’t care too much either, or else why the hell would you be here with me?”

“I’m here with you because I made a mistake, one I promise you I won’t make again. I’m going to go. You might want to think about making judgements about people you don’t know though. You really might, because some of the time you might have no fucking clue what you’re talking about.”

The situation dissolved rather quickly at that point, with Caleb moving as calmly as he could around the room while the still very-naked brunette shouted insults and obscenities at him from where she knelt on her bed. She groped around her, reaching down to the floor for any kind of object she could get her hands on to throw at him. Unfortunately for Caleb, and because her apartment was such an unholy mess, there were plenty of items to throw, some of which included clothing, books, and a couple of plates that looked like they hadn’t seen the inside of a sink or dishwasher in a good long while.

“You bastard!” she screamed, as she heaved each and every item she could get her hands on, breasts bouncing heavily with the overzealous movement. “You complete and utter shit! How dare you! How dare you come into my home and talk to me that way!”

Caleb had been through rocky experiences before. He had hit things he would have called low points if he’d felt the urge to discuss them with someone (which of course he wouldn’t), but none of them held a candle to this one. This one took the cake, without a doubt, and he was surprised that he managed to maintain any semblance of dignity while rooting around this woman’s pigsty of a room, looking for his clothing. It would probably have been funny if it hadn’t been so goddamned tragic, him hopping into a five-hundred-dollar pair of slacks and trying to slide his loafers on at the same time while a moldy crust of bread hit him in his backside. It might have been funny, except that it wasn’t, and by the time he was finally able to walk out the front door, by the time he was finally able to flee from the front door, it felt more like it. And then, he had begun to become aware of something he’d never even considered before. By the time he made it down to the street and found his Ferrari—mercifully in one piece…although parked at a haphazard angle and with a scolding ticket waving lackadaisical from one window wiper—that something had taken full form in his mind and become a certainty, an absolute. It was time for this shit to stop. He wouldn’t require of himself that he stop drinking altogether, not yet anyway, not unless he proved to himself that he wasn’t able to have some and not all of the drinks he could get his hands on, but he was done with nights like the one he’d just had. He was done waking up and feeling like he was going to die, done waking up with people he didn’t know and didn’t care to know. When he got behind the wheel of his car, so grateful that it didn’t look like it had been in any kind of altercation, he knew it would be the last time for him to drive away from a place like this. He felt tears spring up in his eyes and was surprised to find that the person he really wanted to tell about this revelation of his was Elsie. He didn’t know her at all, and he was still pretty pissed off about the night before, but she was still the one he wanted to tell, and he couldn’t for the life of him understand why. Still, it was the only thing he thought about until he made it into his loft and plugged his phone in so that it could charge. When he did that, he was slammed back into his current reality, which was far more complicated than just too much partying and drinking. When his phone popped merrily back on, he saw that there were many messages waiting for him. Messages from his assistant, messages from two different board members, messages from his brother, and worst of all, two very upset messages from his mother. He sat down and listened to each and every one, all twenty-two of them, and by the time he was done, he was left with one very clear point. If Elsie didn’t figure out who was messing with his life and how to stop it, he was pretty much fucked.