Before Oliver could say another word, Big Guy slammed his fist straight into Oliver’s face, knocking the rock star off his feet and straight to the ground.
People shouted and crowded around the fallen star with their cameras in hand as Oliver tried his best to get to his feet but couldn’t accomplish standing up at all.
“All right, all right! That’s enough! Bar is closed! Everyone get up and out!” I shouted, but no one listened. I had to physically start shoving the customers toward the front entrance, and when they were all gone, I glanced over to Oliver. The Oliver Smith. The man of my made-up dreams. My biggest celebrity crush lying there drunk, dazed, and confused like a broken puppy.
It didn’t take long for the paparazzi to get word that Oliver Smith was at Seven that night, and they were swarming the outside of the bar, banging on the door.
It looked like they weren’t ready to leave anytime soon.
Great.
“Here, let me help you up,” I said, combing my hair behind my ears as I walked toward Oliver, who was still struggling to stand on his own. His left eye was already turning deep shades of black, with purplish tones beneath his eye. With one hit, Big Guy had messed him up terribly. He looked as if he’d been beaten over and over again, pounded until he was nothing. Yet it was one tamed, controlled hit that had sent Oliver flying.
“No,” Oliver muttered, waving me away but still allowing me to help him. I got him into the booth, and he slumped over as the paparazzi pressed their bodies against the window and flashed their cameras nonstop like freaking crazed maniacs.
I hadn’t a clue how celebrities dealt with it all. Fame seemed more like a curse than a blessing to me.
“Another one,” Oliver muttered, putting his finger up in the air.
“Yeah, okay,” I mumbled, walking over to the bar and grabbing him a big glass of water. I returned to the booth and sat on the edge of it. “Here you go.”
He didn’t sit up because, let’s be honest, he couldn’t. But he allowed me to place the glass in his hand, and he lowered it to his lips. The moment he tasted the water, he huffed and tossed the water out of the glass—straight onto me.
“Jeez!” I hissed, shooting up from the booth, drenched. “What the hell?”
“I wanted w-whiskey,” he stuttered.
A big part of me wanted to push him out to the hyenas standing outside the building. I wanted to get rid of him and start cleaning up the bar, pretending that the whole night hadn’t taken the most dramatic turn in the history of turns.
But I knew better. I’d worked in the bar scene long enough to know that sadness mixed with liquor was a dynamic duo. When the two were combined together, people acted out in ways they never would when they were sober. And I knew that if I gave Oliver to those monsters outside, they would destroy him more than ever. They would rip apart the small part of his soul that still remained intact and feed their families with his struggles.
I walked around to the windows and shut all the blinds so the animals outside couldn’t get any more shots of Oliver’s meltdown. I knew what it was like to go through dark days. I couldn’t imagine doing it with cameras flashing in front of my eyes.
“All right, come on now,” I said, moving over to Oliver and lifting his body up. He grumbled but didn’t argue too much as I got him to his feet. He leaned against me, feeling like pounds of exhaustion, and I managed to get him to the back employees-only entrance of the bar. I unlocked my car door and slid him into the passenger seat, where he slumped into a ball. And passed out.
I hurried back to the bar, locked it up, and then headed to my driver’s seat, hopped in, and turned on the engine. Before I drove off, I reached over Oliver to put on his seat belt, because I swore to God, I wasn’t going to kill a rock star in my 2007 Honda Civic.
“Don’t touch unless you suck,” Oliver muttered as I brought the seat belt across his crotch area to buckle.
Good lord.
There was a point in my life when that statement from Oliver would’ve made me giddy. Currently it made me want to sober him up, because clearly he wasn’t himself that night.
“Don’t worry. No one’s touching you tonight,” I said, but he didn’t even stay conscious enough to hear me.
As I put the car into drive, Oliver tilted his head toward me.
His eyes were narrowed, and I was certain he was seeing three versions of me swaying with his whiskey goggles on.
Then, he paused. His lips parted, and a rough word rolled off his tongue. “Whiskey?” he murmured.
I froze.
My foot sat against the brakes as he stared my way, a level of disconnect from reality floating around his pupils.
Was he asking me for whiskey? In his current state?
His lips parted again, but before he could speak, he lurched forward and decided right then and there that violently vomiting all over my dashboard was the right thing to do.
4
EMERY
“Come on, Oliver. Just give me an inch,” I muttered, trying to drag him up the front steps of my apartment building. Bringing the rock star to my apartment was my last resort. I tried to get him to tell me where he lived, but he couldn’t even form a coherent sentence. All he did was mumble and drool. Then I grabbed his phone to see if I could get a number to call, but his phone was dead, and I didn’t have the type of charger needed to charge his. Therefore, all I could think was to bring him to my apartment for the night. Getting him out of the car was a headache of its own kind, and now trying to get him to move his feet was a nightmare.
“I’ll give you a few inches,” he mumbled back.
I wondered how horrified the shy, distant Oliver would’ve been by his comments that night.
I wrapped his arms around me and pulled him to the best of my ability. He had the hiccups, and he kept muttering something under his breath, but it wasn’t clear what he was saying. Honestly, I wasn’t even interested in his words. I just wanted to get him onto the couch and let him pass out so I could go into my bedroom and do the same thing.
I called Abigail on my way home to ask if she could keep Reese overnight. Most of the time when I worked late shifts, I used the key Abigail had given to me for her apartment, went inside, and grabbed a sleeping Reese to take over to our apartment. Yet that evening, I thought it would be best to keep her away from the drunk celebrity.
When we finally got inside the building, we headed for the elevator. The moment Oliver’s feet hit the elevator floor, he leaned hard against the railing and began singing one of Alex & Oliver’s songs with his eyes closed.
Even though he was drunk, he sounded like perfection. It wasn’t the concert of my dreams, and Oliver definitely smelled like old cod, but he was singing, and I didn’t hate it all that much.
My mind went straight to my sister, Sammie. I wondered how she would’ve enjoyed this interaction with Oliver. I wondered if she would’ve been irritated or completely smitten with the drunken man in front of me. I wondered if she would’ve sung along with him.
When we entered my apartment, I was finally able to let him go. He stumbled back and forth, running into side tables and lamps—which I caught before they shattered to the ground.
“Okay,” he muttered, as if someone had said something to him.
“What’s that?” I asked, confused.
“Bathroom,” he said, swaying back and forth.
“Right, of course. It’s right over—” I started to gesture toward my bathroom, but my words were cut off by the sound of a small waterfall happening behind my back. I whipped around at the speed of light to find Oliver, my idol, my celebrity crush, peeing straight into my houseplant. “What are you doing?”
“It needed water,” he mumbled.
My breath caught in my throat as I stared in shock. Even in his drunken state, Oliver Smith wasn’t lacking down below. My cheeks felt as if they’d been set on fire.
I turned my stare away from his body, trying to shake off the awkwardness of the whole situat
ion. “Well, uh, perhaps we should get you to sleep. You can crash on the couch if you want and—” I glanced back toward him, and my eyes widened when I saw that now not only was Oliver showing me his lower half, but he seemed to have taken off his T-shirt, too, revealing his shredded abs. It turned out even whiskey couldn’t take those away.
And somehow, Oliver managed to slip completely out of his pants and boxers, so now there he was. Standing butt-ass naked in my living room with his hands on his hips like Superman, still swaying back and forth.
Just how I envisioned my first-ever night alone with Oliver—having him stand as a drunken, naked superhero.
“What are you doing?” I gasped, trying not to look at his penis, but still, kind of looking at his penis.
“Let’s do this,” he hiccupped, wiping his penis hand against his mouth again.
“Do what?”
“The sex.”
The sex?
He actually said “the sex.”
“What? No. We aren’t having sex, Oliver. Put on your clothes.”
“Why are you naked in my house if we aren’t having sex, then?” he asked, hiccupping as he gestured toward me.
“Um, what?”
I legit had to look down at my body to make sure I was still fully dressed and hadn’t accidentally tossed my clothes to the side of the room due to my idol standing before me.
It was clear that he was so far gone that he hadn’t even a clue what he was saying. I wondered how embarrassed sober Oliver would be when morning came and he realized his actions—if he’d even remember them.
I cringed at the uncomfortable sight taking place in front of me. “Please just put on your clothes, Oliver.”
“You put on your clothes first,” he argued.
I glanced back and forth around my apartment, somewhat thinking I was oddly being Punk’d. Or perhaps I’d slipped into a coma somewhere along the line, and all of this was a very weird manifestation of my mind.
Either way, I needed Oliver to put on his clothes, because the longer he stayed naked, the more uncomfortable it all became. Yet he seemed determined to not get dressed until I put on my clothes first.
So, like a complete weirdo, I began putting on invisible clothing in front of him.
“Okay, all dressed,” I stated, placing my hands on my hips.
“All right, I’m going to bed.” He lifted up all of his clothes and headed to Reese’s bedroom. Before I could stop him, he was already crashed headfirst into her twin-size bed.
And there he was, folks. My Prince Charming, butt naked, passed out on my daughter’s Disney princess bedsheets.
Oh, was it a sight to see. I had to say, his butt was quite plump in all the right ways.
I closed the bedroom door and headed straight for my kitchen for the bottle of two-buck wine I kept in the top cabinet for emergencies.
After that night, I needed a drink.
Or maybe the whole bottle.
5
OLIVER
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I awakened with the strongest pounding to my head, completely unaware of what had taken place the night before to get me to that level of pain. I groaned as I felt a repeated poking feeling in my left side.
I groaned again as I sat up on my elbows. My head felt as if it was splitting into two from the simple sitting-up motion, so I lay back down. Why did my face hurt so much?
“Hey, mister, are you dead?” a voice asked.
A small, tiny voice.
Why would I be in a place with a small voice? I opened my eyes and looked over to the tiny figure standing beside me. A young girl stood there repeatedly stabbing me in the gut with a Barbie doll.
“What are you doing?” I muttered. “Where the hell am I?” I asked, swatting my hand toward the doll for her to stop.
Her mouth dropped open. “You owe a quarter to the swear jar!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“That’s two quarters!” she exclaimed before stepping back a little. “Hey, mister. Are you dead?”
Based on how my body felt, there was a solid chance I had died at some point the previous night. The verdict was still out if I’d gone to heaven or hell. “If I were dead, would you be able to talk to me?”
“I don’t know, maybe. I never talked to a dead person before.”
“What is this, The Sixth Sense? Am I Bruce Willis?” I groaned, pinching the bridge of my nose. As I touched my face, more pain shot through me. I’d had rough nights before, but never one so painful.
“I don’t know what any of that means,” the kid remarked.
“Then, yes. I’m dead.”
She gasped and then hollered, “Mom! The man in my bed is dead!”
I opened my eyes once more and looked around. Why was I in a child’s bedroom? What happened to me the night before? What was going on? Who would put a stranger in their child’s bed?
Then it all started flooding back to me. The show last night . . . the show I abandoned. I ditched the performance last minute and wandered off to some random hole-in-the-wall bar to get plastered. Everything after that was a blur, including how I ended up in the bed of a child.
“Reese! What are you doing? I told you to stay out of here,” a woman’s voice whisper-shouted as she walked into the room. She grabbed the little girl by the shoulders and ushered her out as she complained the whole way.
“But Mom! There’s a dead man in my bed!”
“He’s not dead!” the woman remarked; then she glanced at me with a raised brow. “You’re not dead, right?”
I shook my head slightly.
“Oh, thank goodness. I couldn’t survive being responsible for that.” She breathed a sigh of relief. “See, Reese? He’s not dead. Now go brush your teeth. I don’t want to be late dropping you off at camp.”
She complained the whole way out of the bedroom. Seconds later, the woman reappeared in the doorway with a plate and a glass of water. On the plate sat a doughnut and a bottle of ibuprofen.
I pushed myself up to a sitting position and gripped the side of the twin-size mattress. The back of my hand brushed against my mouth as I looked up at the woman. She was stunning. Beautiful, without any effort at all.
Her dark kinky hair was pulled up in a thick messy bun with a few strays framing her face. Her eyes were wide as a doe’s. Her skin tone was a deepened brown that glowed all on its own. She was in an oversize Elton John–concert T-shirt and yoga pants. Her socks were mismatched, and she appeared as if she hadn’t slept a wink the previous night. The bags beneath her eyes revealed that fact.
Her brown eyes were beautiful. They were the best feature on her face, with a close second being her full lips. It was a shame I didn’t remember those lips sitting against my own.
Still. I hoped I hadn’t slept with her. Even though Cam and I weren’t a thing except on a surface level, I didn’t want to be that guy who stepped out on her—even if she stepped out on the regular. It wasn’t in my character. At least when I was sober.
“Here you go. I figured you could use this,” she said, handing the plate and water to me. “I would’ve made you coffee, but I’m all out right now.”
Without thought, I tossed the pills into my mouth and swallowed.
I cleared my throat. “What happened last night?” I pushed out, my throat dry and hoarse.
The woman raised an eyebrow. “You don’t remember anything from last night?”
“No, and other than my face feeling like complete shit, I have nothing to go on. I’m sorry—uh—I forgot your name.”
“No, you didn’t,” she mentioned, walking over to her daughter’s desk, where she picked up a handheld Disney princess mirror. “I never gave it to you.” She walked over to me and passed me the mirror, but I shook my head and pushed it away.
“I’m good,” I muttered, not wanting to face my reflection. I hadn’t looked in the mirror in the past six months. I didn’t want to start now. “I’ll take your word on what happened. So . . .
what exactly happened?”
“Well, you got a bit wasted last night. A crowd formed. You got into a fight with a giant. You lost. Which explains . . . ,” she said, gesturing toward my face. “Speaking of, do you want ice for your eye? I have an ice pack I can grab if you need—”
I shook my head. “Do you have my phone?”
She walked over to a dresser drawer, picked up my cell phone, and then handed it over to me. “It’s dead. I tried to turn it on last night to call someone to get you, but it had already died.”
“Do you have a charger?”
“No. I have an iPhone, not an Android.”
Of course she did. Not that it was her fault. I put myself in this position, being a complete dumbass. I bet my manager and publicist were having meltdowns.
I massaged my temples, hoping the medicine would kick in sooner rather than later. “Listen, about last night, and, well, us . . .” I looked up toward her, and she had the blankest stare as she waited for me to continue. “Did we . . . ?”
She nodded. “Did we what?”
“You know.”
“I know what?”
“You know,” I urged. “Did we have sex?”
“What? No! Of course not!” she whisper-shouted again, slightly closing the bedroom door so her daughter wouldn’t hear too much. The way she grew flustered made me feel like an idiot.
“We didn’t?”
“Trust me, you weren’t in any shape to perform any kind of act like that. Plus, I’m not going to take advantage of a person who’s that messed up. Plus plus, my biggest concern was to get you to stop peeing in my houseplant.”
I peed in her houseplant? Way to be a drunk idiot, Oliver. “If we didn’t sleep together, then why am I at your house?”
“Like I said, you got wasted at the bar I work at, and the paparazzi crashed in and tried to bombard you. I was your only saving grace to get you out of that place after you got your butt kicked by the Incredible Hulk for being a smart-ass.”
“I was a smart-ass?”
“You told a guy you could screw his girlfriend better than he could.”
The Mixtape Page 5