Chapter Three

Cormac

When I tried to blink my eyes open, I realized that my face was squashed up against a carpeted floor, and for a few moments, I had no idea where I was.

Waking up drunk with a raging hangover wasn’t new to me. That was pretty much what every weekend in Harvard had looked like, but since my return to Brunswick, I’d been behaving myself. I knew that neither my brother nor his friends would have tolerated that sort of behavior. They had a business to run, and even though I was a shareholder at the company now, I was still required to get the job done.

With Pierce in Brunswick now, things had gotten kinda out of hand. Since his arrival two weeks ago, we’d spent every night out, drinking like we used to in college and waking up with hangovers and no memory of the previous night.

I tried to push myself off the floor now, and in a dark daze, I looked around the room to discover that I was in Pierce’s living room. The place looked trashed, and I figured we’d had some kind of party the previous night.

I could barely manage to get myself up into a seated position, before a blinding ache shot up the back of my head. An empty bottle of Havana Club was lying on the floor beside me, and I knew that had done the trick.

I was rubbing my temples with my fingers and trying to get my eyes to open wide, when Pierce walked into the living room. He was fully suited up, showered, shaved, and looking alive.

“What the fuck?” I mumbled, not wanting to even imagine the state of my appearance.

Pierce let out a laugh as he walked over and looked at his reflection in the glass of his bar cabinet.

“It’s Monday morning, old man. Time to get to work,” he said, adjusting his cufflinks.

“Monday morning? Wasn’t it like Friday a minute ago?” I said, trying to get myself off the floor again, but I kept crashing down on the carpet.

Pierce turned around, smiling again. He thought this was hilarious, and I was worried how I’d even be able to stand, let alone change and get to work.

“I tried reminding you not to drink as much last night, but you declared you were the king of the world,” Pierce said, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his tailored pants.

I blinked up at him, trying to adjust my eyes but to no avail.

“Fuck. I don’t know how I’m going to get myself to work. Rhett’s going to be mad,” I said and started fumbling around in my clothes to look for my cellphone.

“I can’t imagine he’ll be happy, but he might rather you slept it off than go to the office looking like this,” Pierce said, studying my slumped posture with a smirk.

I snarled at him as I tried to type a text to Rhett on my phone. My fingers didn’t seem to be doing their thing.

“I suggest you sleep in, on the floor here if you have to. I’m off,” Pierce said, and I mumbled a response before my body crashed back down on the floor again. My phone beeped with a response from Rhett as Pierce shut the door of the living room behind him as he left.

I managed to get the text message from my brother open, just before my eyelids drooped down.

Are you hungover, Mac? Monday morning. Not cool. Get yourself sober and your ass down here before the end of the day.

I fell back asleep immediately.

***

I had no idea how long I’d been sleeping when the front doorbell woke me up again. I realized I’d been drooling on Pierce’s carpet, and I managed to pull myself off the floor as the bell rang again.

“Okay, fuck, I’m coming!” I shouted, running my hands through my hair. I was feeling better now, just by a few degrees. Better enough to at least get myself off the floor and in walking, functioning condition.

I caught my reflection in one of Pierce’s floor-length mirrors in the hallway, and I shook my head in disappointment. I was supposed to have gotten my act together by now! Instead, I was in Friday’s pants, shirtless and with a blue bowtie at my neck. My hair was ruffled, my eyes were bloodshot, and I had no idea where either my shirt or my shoes were. I bet I stank of rum and stale pizzas too.

The bell rang again, just as I managed to get the door open, and on the other side stood a girl I had never seen before.

She had a smile on her face, but it drooped the moment she saw me at the door. I looked her up and down, racking my brain to think of who she could possibly be. Pierce was new to Brunswick, and there was a girl ringing his doorbell in the middle of the day on a Monday. My brain wasn’t exactly working full throttle either to figure this thing out.

She had thick blonde hair, straight and golden, cut at a sharp angle around her shoulders. They fell in long bangs over her forehead, covering most of her eyes, which, now that I peered and looked, were large and bright green. She had milky pale skin, with a dusting of freckles on the tops of her cheeks. Her face was slender and heart shaped, and she was wearing a bright red lipstick that nearly blinded me as I stared at her.

Beautiful, cute, quirky were the thoughts that went through my head the longer I stared at her. She was wearing a pair of short denim dungarees and a thin white T-shirt underneath. Sandals on her feet, and a collection of long silver chains around her neck. She also had a backpack hanging off one shoulder and a guitar case on the other. She could have been eighteen or twenty-eight; the girl had an ageless quality to her that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

She was looking at me too, surprised to find me at the door seemingly. Her green eyes roamed over my body, and her nostrils flared—no doubt from the stench of alcohol and stale food coming off me. I really didn’t give a shit. She was at my door, and I didn’t owe her anything. If she wanted something from me, she’d just have to stand there and deal with my ragged appearance and my weekend of noshowering.

“You’re not Pierce,” she said, snapping me out of my admiration of her. I’d forgotten that she was a living being standing in front of me, and I realized now that we’d been standing there, staring at each other awkwardly for several minutes in silence.

“Spot on,” I replied, leaning against the open door for support.

“But this is the address he gave me,” she declared and crossed her arms over her breasts, which I noticed now were small and would fit perfectly in the palms of my hands.

“I have no idea who you’re talking about,” I told her. Pierce and I had a strict rule of turning away any girl who might show up at our doors. I figured, looking at this girl now, that she could be one of the many girls Pierce had been talking up at the bars around town since his arrival.

She furrowed her brows and glared at me some more. Then her gaze drifted down from my face to my bare chest, and I remembered that I wasn’t wearing a shirt.

“You’re saying that you don’t know Pierce?” she insisted with a sizzle in her voice, and I decided that she couldn’t be a teenager. She was too sure of herself, and too confident, and her eyes betrayed a maturity that you only acquire with age. In my head, I couldn’t help but commend Pierce on his taste in women. This one was definitely a winner. On these nights, when Pierce sweet-talked every beautiful young thing in our vicinity, I was usually drinking too much or flirting with a different beautiful young thing whose face I would forget the next day.

I wasn’t much of a conversationalist, unlike Pierce who liked to get to know the girl first before sleeping with her. I much preferred just getting done with it and out of the way.

Now, as I looked at this girl, I wondered how much about himself Pierce had told her and why she had come looking for him the next day.

“I don’t know this guy called Pierce, and he definitely doesn’t live here,” I told her with a smile, and she seemed like she either didn’t believe me or didn’t like me. Maybe it was both.

“Well, okay, I guess he gave me the wrong address, then,” she said and adjusted the strap of her guitar case, which looked heavy for her petite frame. But she was carrying it admirably.

“I guess he did, and he should be ashamed of himself for it,” I said with the smile still on my face, which she didn’t return. It did seem like a shame to be turning her away. She was gorgeous, and if I was sober, I was sure I would have had more striking things to say to her. But there were two rules regarding women that Pierce and I abided by. One, that we never entertained clingy girls and supported each other in turning them away. Two, that we never slept with a girl the other had already banged.

By the looks of it now, this girl definitely had a bone to pick with Pierce, which meant that he’d banged her and then abandoned her. So, me sleeping with her was out of the question.

“Yeah, well, it’s typical,” the girl said now, agreeing with me that Pierce ought to have been ashamed of himself. I clucked my tongue and shook my head.

“I would offer you some help in finding him, but I have no idea who he is,” I continued, and the girl stuffed her hands into the pockets of her dungaree skirt, turning her face away from me and squinting her eyes.

“Yeah, no, that’s okay. I’ll figure it out myself,” she said, and I lingered at the door a few moments longer.

“Sorry for interrupting,” she added and looked at me again. A smile finally broke on her face as she assessed me. “For interrupting whatever it was that you were doing.” She eyed the bowtie still around my neck. I grabbed it, slipping it off and grinning at her.

“Sleeping. I was sleeping,” I said, and she nodded.

“Of course,” she said and then stepped down from the porch and started walking away.

I couldn’t tear my gaze from her or go back inside, as I watched her leave. I followed her with my eyes as she walked out through the gate, onto the sidewalk, and proceeded toward the docks.

The hangover still throbbed at the back of my head, but I was distracted now. I cursed under my breath for our stupid rules. She was totally my type, not Pierce’s, and I wished that he hadn’t slept with her so that I could have invited her in and maybe made good use of my day off from work.

After she was gone from view, I went back into Pierce’s house and shut the door behind me.

I was exhausted already from that short interaction, and I rubbed a hand over my face. I couldn’t go back to sleep now; the spell was broken. So I had no other choice but to get myself together and go see if I could get some work done at the office.