His Wicked Mouth

by Jessica Mills

  At first, I had no idea who the woman was. Even with all the bright lights of the Strip, there were enough shadows being cast that it was difficult to see her face. I got a little closer and could see she was a beautiful young woman with coppery-blonde hair and big eyes. She smiled and something clicked in the back of my mind.

  I knew that smile. It was familiar in that kind of way where I knew I’d seen it many times before. But it wasn’t there in Vegas. And usually it wasn’t attached to half a yard of shiny silver fabric and a necklace performing the multicolored-light rendition of the dance of the sugar plum penis.

  I stopped and frowned, my head tilting to the side as I tried to figure out who this woman was and why she knew me. She came closer, the smile lessening slightly as her eyebrows knitted together. Obviously, she was concerned about me and more than just as a random drunk person stumbling around after getting his ass kicked at a bar.

  She stepped into a brighter pool of illumination from a sign nearby and I could see her face more clearly. Everything fell into place and I knew exactly who she was. It just didn’t make sense.

  “Annabelle?” I asked incredulously.

  She nodded and looked me over. “What happened to you, Garrett?”

  I shook my head and waved my hand across the air in front of her like I was trying to brush the question away. “It wasn’t a big deal. Just a fight.”

  “So, up to the same tricks, is what you’re telling me?” she asked.

  “Hey, I did not start this fight,” I said. “This one was most definitely not my fault.”

  She nodded and made a sound that said she was absolutely not buying it. “You’re not fooling me with that, Garrett Montgomery. Don’t forget, I’m your little brother’s best friend. I know how much of a handful you are. Come here and let me look at you.”

  I didn’t know what it was about her, but I did what she asked. In the light of the glowing sign, she let out a deep sigh and inspected the damage from the brawl. There was a deep gash across my cheek, and my lip was split, and I could feel my eyebrow swelling. The injuries stung when her fingertips touched them, and I hissed slightly, but it didn’t stop her.

  She picked up my hands and looked at my cracked knuckles and swollen fingers.

  “It’s not that big of a deal,” I said. “Not like it’s my first fight.”

  Her eyes lifted to me and she stared at me for a few seconds like she wanted me to think through what I just said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m well aware of that fact. I would have hoped you would have grown out of this by now. Where are you staying?”

  I told her the name of my hotel. “It’s not too far from here. But that’s not where I was headed.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I don’t really know,” I said. “Just trying to find somewhere else to go. It’s still early.”

  “It’s after two in the morning,” she said. “Unless right now is when you’re getting up for the day, it’s not early. You’re not going anywhere else tonight. You’re going to bring me back to your hotel.”

  I looked at her with my eyebrows raised. “I’m doing what?”

  She sighed again. “You’re going to take me to your hotel room so I can get you all fixed up. Don’t think I’ve forgotten how to piece you boys back together just because you’re grown now.”

  “What about your party?” I asked, nodding toward the direction where the rest of the women had gone.

  Annabelle followed my stare and shrugged. “They’ve already moved on. They are all having way too much fun to notice I’m gone. It’s not a big deal. I’ll catch up with them when I’m done helping you. They all have phones. I can call them and find out where they are. Or I might just go back to the hotel and let them meet me back there. All of them are a little bit more accustomed to partying than I am.”

  “Still running on farm hours?” I asked. I realized as it came out of my mouth how critical it sounded.

  Either Annabelle didn’t notice, or she decided not to say anything about it. “Back home, I would be getting up in about two hours,” she said. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  We started walking toward my hotel and fell into silence for a few seconds. It wasn’t the kind of comfortable silence I would hope to have when finally seeing somebody from home again. It was more awkward and strained. It was like getting hurt while doing something wrong at school and having a teacher escort me to the nurse’s office. She wanted to help me and make me feel better but at the same time was silently scolding me for my misbehavior.

  “So, you’re here for a bachelorette party?” I asked.

  It was a completely stupid question considering how obvious the answer was, but it was the only thing I could think of to say to fill the unpleasant silence. Annabelle’s eyes slid over to me for a second, then went back in front of her.

  She nodded. “Yeah. A girl I knew in college back home came here to work. Another friend of ours is getting married and wanted to come out here for her bachelorette, so Kaitlyn is using her pull to get us the VIP treatment.”

  “How long have you been in town?” I asked.

  “We just got here last night. And we’ve pretty much been going nonstop since then. How about you?”

  “I’ve been here a while.”

  We got to the hotel and I brought her through the lobby. My feet wanted to bring me over to the slot machines. It was the usual route I walked every time I went through the hotel. Instead, we went to the elevator and I hit the button for my floor. It wasn’t until we were almost to it that I started wondering how she was going to react to my room.

  It wasn’t like I had planned on seeing anybody I actually knew or bringing them up with me. The only women who ever came up there with me were usually just as compromised as me, so I doubted they even noticed the state of the room. And if they did, I didn’t have any reason to care. It wasn’t like I had any intention of seeing them again. I didn’t even care if they were there when I woke up in the morning.

  But it was different with Annabelle. She knew me from way back. And she was going to go back to Green Valley having seen me. It was hard to exactly identify the emotion that idea caused. It wasn’t quite embarrassment. Or maybe it was. Maybe I had just forgotten how to feel embarrassed.

  I reached in my pocket as we walked down the hallway toward the room. Pulling out the key card, I swiped through the card reader and opened the door to the chaos beyond. Before she stepped through, her eyes locked on the Do Not Disturb sign I had forgotten to take off my doorknob. I quickly snatched it off and brought it inside with me. It wasn’t going to do me much good now, but maybe tomorrow.

  Chapter 8

  Annabelle

  To say it was utterly bizarre to run into Garrett Montgomery on the Las Vegas Strip would be a tremendous understatement. I hadn’t seen this boy in well over a year. Maybe even two at that point. He walked out of Green Valley one night and left behind nothing but a bad reputation and a lot of questions.

  To most people in Green Valley, his loss wasn’t one to fret over. He wasn’t exactly one of the members of the community we were the most proud of. He was more along the lines of the man fathers warned their daughters about and mothers gave the side eye to when they saw him walking down Main Street.

  He was always up to something. A lot of it was just mischief, but sometimes, it was far more than that. According to Sawyer, Garrett had been tangling with the law since he was barely a teenager. Maybe even before that. I knew a slightly different side of him.

  Not that we were ever particularly close or I witnessed any type of undercover good acts from him. But I did occasionally see him at the Montgomery Ranch when I was spending time with Sawyer. I saw him work out on the land with his brothers and had a few meals with him. It wasn’t enough to make me question everything about his reputation, but it was at least some extra insight.

  And I did know he wasn’t all bad. Not the way the Hayes brothers made him out to be.

  I co
uldn’t help but be a touch surprised when he brought me to his hotel. When he told me the name of his hotel, I didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t like I was particularly familiar with the area and that I would immediately know where he was talking about. I just assumed the hotel where he was staying would be similar to the one the girls chose.

  Maybe not quite the level of luxury, considering we had gotten some special perks from Kaitlyn, but not as rundown as where he brought me. It was probably nothing short of naive of me to not think that there were places like this so close to the glitzy, glamorous resorts and casinos. I never thought about that when I imagined Las Vegas. In my mind, everything was beautiful and fancy.

  Now I was learning the seedier reality of the Strip. And it stunned me that I was seeing it at the same time I was seeing Garrett Montgomery again. But even seeing the nondescript front of the hotel and the lobby that made me a little squeamish to walk through didn’t prepare me for Garrett’s hotel room.

  It wasn’t that the areas I had seen so far were dirty or looked dilapidated. It was more that there was just a heavy feeling about them. Like this wasn’t somewhere people chose for their vacations but they’d ended up there due to any number of circumstances.

  Garrett’s room, though, brought that to another level. It was filthy and cluttered. It smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned in a while. Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me, considering the way Garrett looked and was acting, but it did. I almost didn’t want to go inside. Pushing the initial reaction down, I followed him in and shut the door behind us.

  I didn’t say anything about the room or its condition. It wouldn’t have done anything but embarrass him, and he didn’t need that right then.

  “Go wash your hands,” I said. “I’m going to call down to the front desk and ask if they have any first-aid supplies. If they don’t, I’ll run to the pharmacy at the end of the block.”

  “You don’t need to do that,” Garrett said.

  “Go wash your hands,” I said.

  He complied and I walked over to the phone positioned between the two beds. They both had messy, dirty sheets and blankets on them, like Garrett had slept in one for as long as he could stand before moving over to the other.

  “Front desk,” the woman who answered the phone said in a voice that was somewhere between bored and robotic.

  “Hello, is there a first-aid kit available down there?” I asked.

  “First-aid kit?” she asked, her voice clearing up a bit and getting more energy. “Is everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I assured her. “Someone just had too much to drink and took a fall. It’s no emergency or anything. We could just use some bandages and whatnot.”

  “Absolutely. I’ll send that right up to you. Is there anything else?”

  I looked around the room. “Some fresh sheets, towels, and a trash bag would be nice.”

  “It’ll be just a moment,” she said.

  I set the phone down just as Garrett came out of the bathroom, drying his hands on what looked like a towel that had been used multiple times before. He crossed the room and sat down in a chair beside the window. He made it look like he was looking through the gap in the curtains, but he was watching me out of the corner of his eye for a few seconds before he spoke.

  “So, what have you been up to?” he asked.

  He didn’t ask about Green Valley, but there was something under his words that told me that was what he really wanted to know.

  I shrugged. “All is pretty much the same in my neck of the woods. I’m living with my father full time again. I only lived on my own for about three months, so there’s that. Working on the farm. Doing some writing on the side. Nothing terribly exciting.”

  Garrett turned to me, one eyebrow arched up. “Writing?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I write articles and reviews mostly. But I’ve also dabbled in some short stories. It’s not a lot and mostly on a freelance basis, but it’s been good. It gives me something to think about other than just working on the farm.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s really interesting. I didn’t know you did anything like that.”

  I scoffed. “I used to work for the Green Valley High paper.”

  He looked like he was thinking about that for a second, as if he were searching his memories to see if he could remember any of that. He shook his head.

  “I have absolutely no recollection of that either,” he said.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. Shaking my head again, I went to work taking the pillowcases off the pillows on the bed closest to me. I wasn’t planning on mentioning the room or its condition to him and didn’t want to make a big deal out of helping him clean it out, but I couldn’t just leave him like this.

  “Of course, you have no recollection of it. I really doubt you ever read a single issue of the paper even once during your entire time in high school. Much less when I was writing for it. You were far too busy throwing punches and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes under the bleachers. I would actually be a little bit shocked to find out you have many memories of high school at all,” I said.

  That finally got a grin out of Garrett. “You have me pegged.”

  He hesitated for a few seconds and I sensed a bit of discomfort and awkwardness settling over him. I decided to fill up the silence for him.

  “How about you? It’s been years since I’ve talked to you or seen you at all. What have you been up to?”

  Garrett leaned back in the chair, throwing his feet up to rest on the table cluttered with fast-food containers and balled-up napkins in front of him. He gestured around the room. “I’ve been living the dream. Can’t you tell?”

  I forced a smile but couldn’t bring myself to laugh. I felt a pang of sadness for him. This was a man who had lost his way. I didn’t know when or why, and I didn’t know what had happened to him in the time since he left Green Valley, but something had deeply affected Garrett and shoved him off track in life.

  A few seconds later, there was a knock at the door. I opened it and a hotel employee in a dark blue uniform with his name tag pinned at an angle to his chest held a knotted plastic bag and a small, flat cardboard box out to me. I rummaged through my purse and pulled out a couple of dollar bills to hand him.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  He gave a sharp nod but didn’t answer before backing up into the hallway, turning, and walking away. It struck me as odd, and I eased the door closed slowly. I turned to face Garrett.

  “That was strange,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Not really. You get used to stuff like that after a while. Most of the people who work around here either don’t speak English or like to pretend that they don’t. They would rather interact with the people staying at the hotel as little as they possibly can. Means they don’t have to work as hard.”

  “Well, isn’t that inspiring?” I said. “All right, come on over here. Time to get you patched up.” I looked down at the bed, then up at him again. “On second thought, let’s go into the bathroom.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe this place needs a little attention.”

  I couldn’t find the right words to respond to that, so I didn’t. We walked into the bathroom and I set the bag down at my feet. Putting the flat cardboard box on the counter, I opened it to find a variety of small package sizes of various first-aid supplies. He hissed as I used an alcohol pad to swab his various cuts and scrapes.

  “Oh, stop your fussing,” I said. “It’s just a little bit of rubbing alcohol. You were just in a full-on fight. I’m sure busting up your knuckles and getting your face cut hurt more than a quick wipe with some alcohol.”

  “It burns,” he said.

  I laughed and shook my head. It took a few more of the alcohol prep pads to fully clean all of his injuries. Once I was satisfied I had removed as many of the germs as I possibly could, I went to work bandaging him up. Simple adhesive bandages covered some of the smaller places, but I had to break out the gauze
and tape for some of the others.

  “There isn’t a whole lot I can do about your lip,” I said. “It’s pretty well split, but I don’t think wrapping up your mouth with gauze would be the best option. Might keep you from getting yourself into more trouble, though.”

  Garrett smirked at me. I finished cleaning him up, then went back into the main part of the room and stripped the beds. He argued with me, but I wasn’t going to hear any of it. There was no way I was walking out of that room and leaving it in its state. He put the fresh linens on one of the beds while I did the other. Then I gathered up all the towels from the bathroom and tossed them on the dirty linens.

  “You can probably just put those out in the hallway for housekeeping to pick up, but I recommend you don’t put the Do Not Disturb sign on your doorknob anymore.”

  Chapter 9

  Garrett

  Annabelle went back into the bathroom to wash her hands. When she came out again, she was carrying an instant ice pack. She cracked it and shook it around for a few seconds before handing it to me.

  “This might make your cheek feel better,” she said. “But that’s going to be pretty nasty for at least a few days.”

  “That wouldn’t be anything new,” I said. “I think I might recognize myself better with a busted-up face than I do without one.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” she said.

  I thought about asking about my brothers. She was the closest connection I had gotten to the seven of them in a long time. And it wasn’t some distant, multiple degrees of separation type of a link. She was direct and I could almost sense all the details she carried about my family and the hometown where most of them still lived.

  But I couldn’t figure out how to bring them up. I wasn’t even completely sure I wanted to. Maybe I didn’t want to hear what she had to say. There were still the questions in the back of my mind about whether they wanted to hear from me or if I had been completely written off. There was always that possibility that they now considered themselves the seven Montgomery boys and I was just a distant memory they wanted to forget.