Nicole Helm - All I Want

How had she gotten kicked out of Grandma’s funeral?

“Apparently daring to show my tattoos was grounds enough to be told I couldn’t be in the church. Then I was informed I was deeply upsetting my mother, you know, by existing. So I couldn’t go to the burial site. At least not without causing a scene and...that wouldn’t be right. They aren’t right, but neither would that be.” It wasn’t anywhere close to the full story of her parents’ disdain for her, but she didn’t have years, and this man wasn’t her therapist.

She stared at the drink. Three in. She didn’t feel numb or light or any of the things getting high used to do for her. She just felt heavy and sad and she couldn’t erase the look on her mother’s face, the hurtful words from her father.

Their little failure. She meant nothing to them. A stain to the Carmichael name, the worst thing two proud, conceited, powerful people could produce.

At thirty-two she should be over it, and on the day-to-day she was, but the fact they couldn’t take a break from protecting their precious image for her grandmother’s funeral...

It made her feel like nothing and, considering that was what had shoved her into the drug scene in the first place, considering she was sitting here getting trashed, was just pathetic.

“So, what’s your story?” she demanded of the man in front of her.

“Not as bad as yours.”

“Good. I want to hear all about it. So I can feel less pathetic. Spill. Every lame detail.” Even though it was wrong, she finished off the second drink and pulled the third one toward herself.

“I got fired. Sort of.”

“You? You look like a guy who spends Saturday night responding to work emails.” Just as her father would have been doing twenty-some years ago.

“Something I would do, yes. It wasn’t... I mean, I shouldn’t have been let go. But the company I worked for was bought out and I was axed to make room for their staff. Since I’m high up on the food chain so to speak, there wasn’t really room for me anywhere else.”

“Yeah, I definitely win.”

“If it helps, I’m having kind of a premidlife crisis over it.”

“That does help, actually. Tell me, Super Yuppie, what’s so terrible about losing your job? If you’re so great, don’t you just get another one?” Anytime Dad had bought out some mom-and-pop, he waved away the damage. Oh, those people will find jobs if they’re any good.

“Well, jobs at that level don’t just sit around. But you’re right, I’m not too worried about unemployment.”

“So why the crisis?”

He took one of her empty glasses, clinked the melting ice around before crunching a piece in his mouth.

She watched his throat move. He was dressed up in his yuppie best from the waist up. Striped polo short-sleeved shirt. Though his hair looked less perfectly mussed tonight, and the five o’clock shadow looked a little more accidental.

“Let me get one more. You want?”

She nodded, watching him head back up to the bar. She had no idea why she was attracted to him. The square jaw? The brown eyes with flecks of lighter brown and maybe gold? Or maybe the way he smiled without showing any teeth, like he was always holding back, which made her want to make him not hold back.

Or maybe she was just lonely and any guy would do. With alcohol thickening in her limbs, she didn’t care about the answer.

He returned with two drinks instead of four this time, which was good. She was going to need to call a cab to get home regardless, but anything beyond one more drink might lead to passing out.

Or other really bad choices.

“All right, you have your drink, tell me your sob story,” she demanded. Maybe whatever his lame crisis was would make her feel better about hers.

“That company, that job, it was everything I’d worked for. One more promotion and I would have been exactly where I wanted to be to start focusing on my personal life. You know, the wife-and-kids thing. Now I have to start all over, and I’m thirty-five. I’ve worked my whole life...for nothing.”

Even though it wasn’t as bad as losing her grandmother and being kicked out of her last chance to say goodbye, Meg did feel sorry for him. Because for all the ways he surprised her by not falling into type, he’d obviously wrapped his identity in his job, and he’d lost it.

She understood that. She’d wrapped her identity in being a screwup. She’d never lived up to her parents’ exacting standards, so why not thumb her nose at said standards at every turn? That had been the hardest part of getting clean, finding her real self, not how other people viewed her. “We’re pathetic.”

“So. Much.”

She looked around the smoky bar. It was getting late and a lot of the sturdier crew had disappeared a while ago. “You got money for cab fare?”

“Um. Sure. If we can catch New Benton’s one and only cabdriver.”

“I’m sure we can flag Dan down. Eventually. Let’s go,” she said, grabbing his hand. “I want to show you my goats.”

And that was only a little bit of euphemism.

CHAPTER FOUR

CHARLIE WOKE UP praying to every available god that he would not throw up. Or maybe he was praying that his head wasn’t going to roll off his shoulders and then throw up.

Why did it smell like...he didn’t know, but not his apartment, not the farm, not any smell he was familiar with? Kind of flowery, but not quite floral.

What had he done last night?

Gearing up for the onslaught of pain, he slowly squinted his eyes in a semiopen position. Then, despite the headache slicing through his skull, he opened his eyes completely, because he had no idea where he was.

Something moved next to him. He jerked, cursed at the sloshing of his stomach, eyes involuntarily closing again. He took a deep breath and let it out, willing the nausea away. And then opened his eyes to the woman next to him. In what he assumed to be her bed...

Goat Girl. That colorful arm of hers a shock of memory. The bar. The cab. They’d...

He rubbed his hands over his face, trying to remember, but everything was so blurry.

Goats. He remembered goats. Feeding them?

Christ.

He took another deep breath and tried to focus. The important thing, the most important thing, was that he still had pants on. And Goat Girl still wore the black dress she’d been wearing at the bar.

So, hopefully, whatever idiocy their drunken selves had been up to, it wasn’t sex. Because surely if they’d had a drunk hookup, he’d (a) remember, and (b) not have pants on. Surely.

“Damn.”

He dropped his hands, glanced sheepishly at... God, he didn’t even know her name, did he? Had he asked and forgotten? Surely they’d at least exchanged names?

But you didn’t have sex, so it’s fine. It’s totally fine.

Tell that to all the panic hanging out with all the ill-advised liquor in his bloodstream.

Her blue eyes met his gaze tentatively. She shook her head and covered her face with her hands, repeating the F-word approximately ten times.

“Please tell me you’re not swearing because you remember something I don’t.”

She peeked at him through her fingers. “What do you remember?”

“The bar. The cab ride. Goats. I remember goats.”

“I remember kissing.”

“In the cab?”

She nodded.

Yeah, he kind of remembered that. Kissing and laughing in the back of old Dan Riley’s cab. He really hoped that didn’t get back to his mother. Making out with some tattooed goat farmer in a cab.

Actually Mom would probably get a kick out of it. Dad, not so much. And Dell or, possibly worse, his little sister? He’d never hear the end of it.

“There was some...bra removal on my couch and subsequent...touching,” she added, her face all wrinkled up.