And it was starting to come back to him, in disconnected chunks. Stacey. The blonde was Stacey. The brunette was Kendra.
He extricated himself carefully from the bed. He didn’t want the babes to wake up on him, no matter how round and rosy their collective butt cheeks were. He wasn’t up to being sweet and charming today.
He stared at them, trying to reconstruct the impulse that had drawn him to them last night. Probably the brunette. With those kissable dimples in the small of her back, he could almost imagine she was Liv.
Not that he’d ever seen Liv’s naked ass. He’d just worshipped her from afar, like the lofty virgin goddess that she was. Although he’d worshipped her pretty thoroughly with his fingers once.
His dick jumped up like a puppy whenever he thought of that warm summer night when he’d cornered her in the historical collection room, and put his hand up her skirt. He remembered her pussy, tender and snug around his fingers. The way her soft thighs squeezed his hand. The choked, helpless sounds she made when she came.
The smell of old books made him hard to this day.
That sashay down memory lane had rendered him stone hard, hangover and all. He massaged his turgid cock. Eyed the brunette’s peachy ass. Half tempted to suit up with latex, close his eyes, and…
Christ, no. He shook away the bad idea, and froze, motionless, as a punishing bolt of pain reverberated through his head like one of those big Chinese gongs. Ouch. Fifteen years, and still hung up on that chick.
It would be funny, if it weren’t so fucking pathetic.
Sean massaged his throbbing forehead and let the Liv tape play through his head; he’d done her a favor, dropping her before doing anything unforgivably stupid—like marrying her, the equivalent of lying down and offering to be her personal throw rug. He would have tied himself in knots trying to be a good boy, and ultimately failed. Torture, agony, humiliation, blah blah blah. He knew the drill so well, he bored himself.
But he still saw the look in her eyes when he told her to get lost. He saw it every night, at four AM and whatever girl’s bed he woke in. Always with that same sucking hole in his gut as he pondered the most spectacular fuck-up of his life. The one that defined him as a person.
He eyed the brunette’s tantalizing ass, and sighed. He must have screwed hundreds of girls in his effort to get that chick out of his system. Hadn’t worked so far, but hey. He was nothing if not persistent.
He felt betrayed by his own body. The amount of tequila he’d drunk last night should have guaranteed a longer blackout.
Maybe he should bash himself over the head with a bigger pharmaceutical nightstick. Hard drugs weren’t his scene, though. The desperation that clung to the people who dealt and used them was a big, flesh-crawling downer. He didn’t even like alcohol that much. It made him fuck up in embarrassing ways. Not that waking up behind bars or in the emergency room really mortified him all that much, but it upset the hell out of his brothers. Upright, respectable family men that they now were. Pillars of the community. Legally wed to their fine and lovely lady wives. Soon to spawn big families too.
Connor and Erin were well on their way. Only four months to D-Day. A baby, whoa. Uncle Sean. So cheerful and normal. As if his brothers hadn’t grown up in the same gonzo parallel universe that he had. Crazy Eamon’s wild boys.
Even worse was this new family phenomenon he now faced; a pack of concerned sisters-in-law ganging up on him, trying to get him to open up and share. Suffering Christ, save him. They were great women, and it was sweet of them to care, but no fucking way, thank you.
His jeans were draped on a leather couch, beneath assorted lingerie. Another condom wrapper fluttered to the ground as he pulled on his jeans. He grunted, unimpressed, and rooted through his pockets.
Typical. He’d blown his emergency cab fare buying drinks for those girls, from the looks of them. So he was stranded, on foot, who the fuck knew where. Partying was such a freaking chore sometimes.
A trip to the john revealed two more condom wrappers. So he’d engaged in sink and/or shower sex. He stared at the scraps of foil as he pissed, trying to remember the aquatic adventures. He felt soiled.
Not that he had moral problems with an anonymous three-way. On the contrary. Girls were yummy. Bring ’em on. He was just lower than dirt depressed today. And it was just going to get worse from here.
The face that stared back from the bathroom mirror was both familiar and strange. The face of his dead identical twin, as Kev might have been. They hadn’t looked as much alike as some twins did, but his own mug was still Sean’s best point of reference. The superficial details were the same. Hard-muscled body, give or take a few scars. Wavy dirt-blond hair, which had gotten shaggy lately. A mirror image of Kev’s one-sided dimple in his own lean, stubbly cheek.
The grim face that stared back at him had no dimple today. Eye sockets smudged with purplish shadows, which made his light green irises look weirdly pale. The hollows under his cheekbones looked like they’d been chopped out with a hatchet. He looked grayish in the harsh light. Zombie pale. Something to scare the kiddies into good behavior.
Looking into a mirror on August eighteenth forced him to reflect on how much his face resembled Kev’s—and how much it no longer did.
He was harder, sharper, after fifteen years of hard living. Had a fan of squinty crinkles around his eyes. Grooves bracketing his mouth.
Years would go by, and the resemblance would continue to fade, until Sean was a gnarled, toothless, yammering old coot who’d lived many times the span of Kev’s short life. A yawning gulf of years.
He yanked open the medicine cabinet and scanned the contents.
Excedrin. He shook out four, tossed them in, crunched, gulped.
He leaned over, pressing his throbbing forehead against the cool porcelain sink, and let out a long, hissing string of vicious profanity.
This sucked ass. Utterly. Shouldn’t time have healed him? Wasn’t it a natural process, like continental drift? He tried so hard to dodge it, but this goddamn feeling circled him like a vulture, waiting for its chance to pick out his eyes and feed on his flesh. Sometimes he just wanted to lie down flat on his back and let that old vulture have its way.
And so it began. The sucking sound of Sean going down the drain.
He had to get the fuck out of here. Slinking away without coffee and pleasantries was rude, but better to leave before the charming sex machine of last night mutated before their eyes into a grunting zombie.
A cautious sniff at his pits practically knocked him out. A shower was too risky, though. So was coffee, he concluded with regret, gazing at the gleaming coffee technology on display in the kitchen. The bean grinder would wake up the cuties, and there he’d be, up shit creek. Forced to smile, chat, flirt, give them his phone number. God save him.
He stumbled out into a bland residential neighborhood. No money, no wallet. He never went out on the eve of August eighteenth with credit cards, or anything with his address printed on it. Just cash and condoms. Flashing lights, blasting music, sex, dancing, liquor, anything that blotted out higher cognitive function.
Fighting worked fine, too, if anybody was ass-for-brains stupid enough to get in his face. He loved a good fight.
He had no clue which direction to go, so he picked a vaguely downhill slope. Uphill would make his heart beat faster, and every lub-dub smacked at his brain tissues like the blow of a splitting mall.
Downhill. Down the drain, like Kev’s dream scolding. The partying, the fucking, the fighting, on days like this he saw it for what it was: a cheap trick to distract him from the sinkhole under his solar plexus.
His whole life, one big goddamn flinch.
The sinkhole was getting bigger, ground shifting, threatening to pitch him in. He might never