I wobbled a bit; feeling the full weight of alcohol hit my system. My tongue felt heavy and my lips sort of numb. I thought about saying something nasty right out of the gate, just to get the upper hand. But his following words caught my drunk girl brain off guard.
“It’s all sort of ridiculous, right?” he asked, his voice soft and barely audible over the noise. I squinted at him, feeling my beer goggles slip firmly in place. Because right now, Garrett Bellows was perhaps the best looking guy I had ever seen. Even when I was a hundred percent sober, I could sort of appreciate his looks. There was nothing conventional about the guy who sat beside me.
He was the epitome of everything I chose to stay away from. But right now, with him leaning into me, my heart still feeling the after effects of a world class bludgeoning, I forgot about why he bugged the shit out of me.
“What’s ridiculous?” I asked, clueless to his point, my nose filled with a scent that was at once unfamiliar but also absurdly tantalizing. Garrett smelled like musk and man and it was a total turn on.
In point two seconds the twisty thread of undeniable attraction took hold. I wasn’t expecting the way my hormones took over all rational thought. This was new. And at the moment, I kind of liked it.
My eyes were drooping a bit and I was having a hard time focusing on what he was saying. Mostly because I was suddenly and inexplicably horny.
Garrett cocked his eyebrow at me; as though he were picking up on the crazy amount of pheromones I was suddenly slinging his way. He looked amused but there was a heat in his eyes that I knew was for me alone.
He leaned in further until his lips were next to my ear and the warmth of his breath teased the hair at my neck. “All of this.” He gestured to the party around us. “I get tired of it all, you know? Sometimes I wish these people would just disappear.”
His words surprised me. “Well, why do it then? Why continue to have these things if you don’t want to?” I asked, genuinely curious.
Garrett pulled back and I was irrationally bereft at the sudden space between us.
He drank the rest of his beer and promptly opened another one. I recognized in him the same drunken looseness that I was currently feeling. The pair of us were a hot mess. Two sad drunks, feeling sorry for ourselves.
He sighed and looked at me again. His blue eyes were red and unfocused but in my current state of inebriation, I swore that he saw me better than anyone else ever could. Yes, alcohol clearly unleashed my inner poet. The hyperbole going through my head was completely over the top.
“It’s what everyone expects of me. And I guess I’d rather have people around than be by myself,” Garrett replied finally. I found myself nodding, understanding all too well this need to live up to some sort of twisted expectation you had for yourself. He was making a scary sort of sense right now.
After that we sat together in silence, watching the partygoers and drinking more beer. Finally after what felt like an hour, but was most likely only a few minutes, Garrett got to his feet and held out his hand. I looked at it as though it were a snake about to bite me.
Garrett chuckled, obviously finding my response funny as hell. He inclined his head toward the staircase behind him. “Come on. Let’s get away from all of this. So we can hear ourselves think.” His suggestion seemed, in that moment, to be totally logical.
But I caught the underlying meaning behind his words. Garrett Bellows wanted to have sex.
With me.
Oh crap. Did I want to have sex with him?
I drank in the sight of his chest (he had lost his shirt totally by this point), which was ripped and toned. I wanted to wrap my hands around his biceps and squeeze with all my girlie might.
Oh yeah. I could imagine what the rest of him looked like. I could almost taste the anticipation of getting him naked on my tongue. The edges of a tattoo wrapped around his side, disappearing behind his back. It looked like words in a script that was impossible to read at this distance.
I wanted to read it. I wanted to lick it. I wanted to eat this man whole with a side of screw me senseless.