Part of the Degraded Series
I look up from the Tequila Sunrise that I’ve been nursing for the last half hour and smile when I see you enter the bar. Ever so vaguely I remember the night before, your helping me out of the restroom and taking me to a cab to get me safely home, but not much else, although the tequila in the Sunrise is beginning to sober me up, or so it seems.
“I wasn’t sure you were going to call,” I say, then catch myself, hoping that I don’t come across as being so sarcastic.
You stop short in your tracks, give me a mock shock look of surprise, then smile as you seat yourself next to me at the bar. “Don’t I always do what I say I’m going to do, Tessa?” you ask, motioning to the bartender to bring you a gin and tonic and to re-fill my drink.
I return your smile and wince, my head still aching from the night before, our night before. I remember the sound of the alarm going off banging and bouncing through my brain making it feel like some kind of human pin ball machine. When I woke up I had a migraine that wouldn’t stop and my mouth felt like the entire Russian army had shot their rocks off in my mouth, the taste a disgusting combination of vomit and alcohol and sperm, though I had no memory of where the latter might have come from. In short, I felt like shit.
I reached over to the nightstand to slide the alarm clock lever off, managing to knock over the half-filled glass of rancid beer that I’d used to wash down my sleeping pills the night – wait, make that early this morning – before. The big hand was on the 12 and the little hand was on the 4 and I realized that it’s four-fucking-p.m. in the afternoon.