“Feeling any better?” Andrew asks coming into the room with an ice bucket in one hand and a stack of plastic cups and a bottle of Sprite in the other.
He sits down beside me and places the stuff on the nightstand, breaking the seal on the Sprite.
My head is pounding and I still feel like I could throw up again at any moment. I hate hangovers. I would rather fall down shitfaced drunk and bust my nose or something than deal with a hangover of this magnitude. I’ve had one like this before; it’s so bad that it’s not much different from alcohol poisoning. At least, according to Natalie, who actually had alcohol poisoning once and described it as ‘being shit on by Satan himself the next morning’.
“Not at all,” I finally answer and my own words send pain shooting through the back of my head and around behind my ears. I close my eyes tight when the room starts to double.
“You’ve got it bad, babe,” Andrew says and then I feel a cool cloth dab the side of my neck.
“Can you close that curtain? Please?”
He gets up immediately and I hear him walk over and then the sound of the thick fabric being moved until he gets it into place. I draw my bare legs up toward my chest, taking the sheet with me to keep myself partially covered and I lay in the fetal position against the softness of the pillow.
Andrew removes a plastic cup from its wrapping and I hear the ice shuffling into it afterwards. He pours the Sprite over the ice and then I hear a bottle of pills moving around in his hand.
“Take these,” he says and I feel the bed move as he sits back down and rests his arm over my leg.
My eyes crack open slowly. There’s already a straw poking from the top of the plastic cup so I won’t have to try lifting from the bed too much to get a sip. I reach out and take three Advil from the palm of his hand and pop them in my mouth, afterwards sipping enough of the Sprite just to wash them down with.
“Please tell me I didn’t do or say anything completely humiliating at the bars last night.”
I can only look at him through slit eyelids.
I sense him smiling. “Yeah, actually you did,” he says and my heart sinks. “You told this one guy that you were happily married to me and that we were gonna have like four kids—or maybe you said five, I don’t remember—and then this chick came over later and was hitting on me and you shot up from the chair and got in her face all white-trash-like—it was hilarious.”
I think I’m going to throw up now for sure.
“Andrew you better be lying—how embarrassing!”
My head hurts worse. I didn’t think it could get any worse.
I hear him laugh lightly and I open my eyes a little more so I can see his face more clearly.
“Yeah, I’m lying, babe.” He reaches up and moves the cool rag over my forehead. “Actually, you handled yourself very well, even all the way up here with me.” I notice him look my body over. “Sorry, I had to strip you down—well I enjoyed the opportunity personally, but it was in the line of duty. It had to be done, you see.” He looks all pretend-serious now and I can’t help but smile.
I shut my eyes and sleep another couple of hours until the housekeeper knocks on the door.
I wonder if Andrew has left my side much.
“Yeah, come on in and let me take her next door to my room so you can clean.”
An older lady with a bad red dye-job on her hair enters the room wearing her housekeeping uniform. Andrew walks over to me on the bed.
“Come on, babe,” he says, lifting me into his arms with the sheet still wrapped around my lower half, “let’s let the lady clean.”
I could probably walk over there on my own, but I’m not about to protest. I rather like being right where I am.
As we walk past my purse on the TV stand I reach out for it and Andrew stops, picking it up for me and carrying it out with me. I lay my head against his chest and drape my arms around his neck.
He stops in the doorway and looks back at the housekeeper.
“Sorry about the mess beside the bed.” He nods in that direction with a grimace. “There’ll be a good tip in it for you.”
He walks out with me and takes me over to his room.
First thing he does after he lays me against his pillow is close the curtains.
“I hope you’re better before tonight,” he says walking about the room as if he’s looking for something.
“What’s tonight?”
“Another bar,” he says.
He finds his MP3 player beside the recliner cushion by the window and sets it on the TV stand beside his bag.
I moan in protest. “Oh no, Andrew, I refuse to go to another bar tonight. I will never drink again for as long as I live.”
I catch him flash me a grin from across the room.
“Everybody says that,” he declares. “And I wouldn’t let you drink tonight if you decided you wanted to. You need at least one night in between hangovers or you might as well get your AA card stamped early.”
“Well, I hope I feel good enough to do something besides hang around in bed all day—but the prospect isn’t lookin’ too good right now.”
“Well, you have to eat, that’s mandatory. As much as the thought of food right now probably makes you sick, if you don’t eat something you’ll feel like shit all day for sure.”
“You’re right,” I say, feeling nauseous. “It does make me sick just thinking about it.”
“Toast and eggs,” he says, walking back over to me, “something light—you know the drill.”
“Yeah, I know the drill,” I say blankly, wishing I could just snap my fingers and be better already.
By late afternoon, I do feel better; not one hundred percent, but good enough to ride around New Orleans with Andrew in a streetcar to a few places we didn’t get to see yesterday. After I managed to get down some eggs and two pieces of toast we took the Riverfront Streetcar to the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas and walked through a thirty-foot-long tunnel with water and fish all around us. And we hand-fed parakeets and worked our way through rainforest exhibits. We fed stingrays and took pictures together with our cell phones, the stupid-looking kind with our arms out in front holding the phone. I later looked closer at the pictures we took, how our cheeks were pressed together and the way we smiled into the camera as if we were any other couple having the time of our lives.
Any other couple … but we’re not a couple and I realize I just had to remind myself of that.
Reality is a bitch.
But then again, so is not knowing what you want. No, the truth is that I do know what I want. I can’t force myself to doubt it anymore, but I’m still afraid of it. I’m afraid of Andrew and what kind of pain he could inflict if he ever hurt me, because I get the feeling it wouldn’t be any kind that I could bear. Already it’s unbearable and he hasn’t even hurt me yet.
I sure got myself knee-deep in a mess, no doubt.
By the time the night falls over New Orleans again and the party-people have come out of their dwellings, Andrew