Melinda Lorenzo - Bad Reputation

I sighed with relief.

“One more thing, Joey.”

I tensed. “Yeah?”

“The girl who drove you here. You owe her your life. Try not to forget it.”

Present Day

Friday

“Shots, Joey?” asked a girl I didn’t know.

She was dressed in a tight black skirt and a hot-pink halter, and carrying two tiny plastic cups full of something blue and gelatinous. Jell-O shooters, I assumed.

I glanced down at my watch. Midnight on the sixth. On the dot. Perfect.

“Brought my own,” I replied with a purposefully winning smile and held up my bottle.

Her eyes widened. “You’re that guy.”

“Aw, damn. Does my reputation precede me?” I teased.

She tipped her head to the side thoughtfully. “My roommate’s sister said some dude with his own bottle of tequila took her home a few months ago and humiliated her.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Did she say whether or not she liked it?”

The girl suppressed a smile. “She called you a jerk, actually.”

“Jerk. Hmm. That’s fairly mild. Most of my…er…lady friends…toss around swear words.” I leaned down to whisper in the raven-haired beauty’s ear. “You can pour me a drink if you like.”

She downed the shots her in hands, then eagerly grabbed the bottle of tequila from me. She didn’t need to know half of the liquid gold was water.

I watched her with a smile as she traipsed off to the kitchen. She wasn’t my type, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t appreciate her assets. In a few seconds, she returned with an overflowing shot glass tucked into her cleavage and an expectant look on her face.

“Well…thank you,” I said.

I grabbed the drink with my teeth, tipped it back expertly without spilling a drop, then took a little bow. The girl clapped, handed me my bottle and waited.

“I’d like another,” I told her regretfully. “But I’m here with someone. And I’m a one-woman kinda guy.”

“That’s a lie if I ever heard one.”

“I’ve never said a truer thing.”

“You don’t come with girls. You leave with them.”

I made a wounded face. “I’m hurt.”

“Which one is it then?” she asked.

“Which one what?”

She rolled her eyes. “Which girl?”

“A…brunette?”

She handed me my tequila. “Which brunette?”

I laughed and grabbed a random girl as she walked by and nuzzled her neck playfully. She pushed me away.

“Stop that!” she said.

I chuckled as she took off in the other direction. She wasn’t my type, either, in her buttoned-up blouse and designer jeans.

“C’mon, babe,” I called mockingly. “Give me a chance.”

“Have another shot!” she yelled back.

“Talk me into it, why don’t you?”

I took an enormous swig of the watered-down liquor and whipped back to the Jell-O shooter girl. She was already gone. I slumped into a couch, and after just a few minutes, a smiling blonde put her hand on my knee.

“You wanna get outta here?” she whispered.

I gave her a quick once-over. Was she my type? I liked them pretty. I liked them vapid. I liked them to be so utterly self-involved and terrified of ruining their otherwise perfectly cultivated reputations that they wouldn’t give out details to their friends. Calling me a jerk was fine. Calling me an asshole was all right, too. All I wanted was a girl who did the name-calling without maniacal enthusiasm. I didn’t need my misadventures getting blown out of proportion and then getting back to my dad. Because that would ruin my own carefully cultivated reputation.

After a year and a half of operating under my dad’s rules, I knew exactly how to ride the just-tame-enough line. Taking one girl home every month could hardly be called excessive. So long as she was on board with the fact that all I could ever be was a one-night stand.

Would this girl be like that?

Impossible to tell in five seconds. In the smoky, party-dark room, I couldn’t even be sure if she was attractive. I decided quickly that I would take my chances. After all, my thirty-six hours of freedom would go by very quickly. It always did.

* * *

“You have to be super quiet,” she whispered. “The girls in here are ridiculous about men.”

A warning bell went off in my head.

“Ridiculous how?” My voice echoed in the stairwell, and the girl shushed me immediately.

“I said super quiet.”

“Sorry.”

“And my roommate might be home, so when we get up there, let me check before we go in.”

“And if she is home?”

“Then we have to be super- duper quiet.”

“Uh-uh,” I muttered

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t do group living situations.”

She turned to give me a coy smile. “Do what with them?”

“Anything.” We’d reached the top of the stairs and I gave her a bleary-eyed grin.

“Very funny.”

She dragged me into the hall, and I gave the line of doors a horrified look.

“So, I’m gonna go home.”

“You’re what?”

“Listen…” I blanked on what her name was, and struggled to find an endearment that wouldn’t lead her on. Not any more than I had already. “Kiddo.”

“Kiddo?”

Whoops .

Quickly, I switched tactics, launching in my favorite rejection speech. “Do you really want to be that girl?”

“What girl?”

“The girl who has a one-night stand while her roommate sleeps in the other bed.”

That was enough. Even in the dim light, through my tequila haze, I saw her face cloud over.

“Go,” she ordered. “And don’t you dare tell anyone you were here with me.”

She shoved past me and let herself into one of the rooms without looking back. I felt momentarily triumphant. Until I remembered that the girl— shit, what was her name? —had driven my truck from the party to the dorm, and my keys were still in her purse.

Damn. I’d screwed myself over.

“The Joey Fox MO,” I muttered to the empty hall as I settled down for the night. “Through and through.”

I debated on whether or not I should try to find a couch somewhere in a common area, then swiftly rejected it. I might be a bit of dumb ass sometimes, but I’m not so much of an idiot that I want to risk incurring the wrath of an entire dorm full of women. It was bad enough that the one who’d stormed off would complain to her roommate about me. They always did. Then the roommate would probably tell two or three of her friends what a jerk I was. Maybe one day I’d find the campus completely plastered with least-wanted posters featuring my lovely face.

I grinned at the mental picture.

Until that point, though, I needed to pull up a piece of floor and wait for the girl to simmer down and bring me my keys.

I slid to the ground, closed my eyes and did my version of passing out.

I woke up in a panic, then lay there in the dark, trying to calm my racing heart and isolate the source of my worry. It took a few moments, but as my pulse normalized and my sleep fog lessened, I was able to grasp it.

I’d been dreaming of my mother, and a promise she’d had me make when I was twelve years old.

I’d been holed up in the coat closet at our apartment while my parents argued about money, about unmet dreams and about God knows what else. I drifted in and out of doziness as the screaming went on, jerking awake when it finally reached its crescendo. My father stormed out, drunk and angry, with our grocery money in his hands, ready to hand it over to his preferred dealer. It had been very quiet for a few a moments after that, then my tearful mother had dragged me out of the closet and sat me down on the couch.