“Uuuuuuuuhhhhhg. Sienna, do you have to do all of that now?” I spoke, my face still buried into the pillow.
“Yes, Nolan. I do. It’s 11:30 in the morning. I’m hungry, and I’m sick of watching you twitch and wail, and flop around my living room couch. I want to watch TV, so sit your ass up,” she was bullying me. It was a side of her I’d never seen, and I both admired and hated it.
She was flipping cushions up to move me now, so I slid to the end of the couch to curl up in a ball, and keep my face buried in the covers and my hands. “Stopppp, I get it. I’m moving,” I said, my voice defensive, like I had some right to be. I had no idea what events led up to me being here, but I knew that there were at least 7 or 8 ounces of vodka involved. My stomach felt like a tar pit, bubbling and full. I left my arm wrapped around my chin, my nose covered and protected from any smells. I hoped this would keep me from vomiting.
“Noles, I swear to God, if you throw up on any of my shit, our friendship is over,” she said, flipping through the channels and not even looking at me.
“Geeeeeeze, what the hell crawled up your ass?” I rolled my eyes, or at least the one that was open.
At that, Sienna shut the TV off again and got up off the couch to return to the kitchen. I had pissed her off, and I knew I was acting like a major bitch, but I was so miserable that I couldn’t seem to turn it off. “I’m sorry…” I half-heartedly grunted from my sofa corner.
She just scoffed. I listened to her bang around the kitchen some more, before I drifted back into a light sleep. I slipped in and out of it over the next two hours. When I heard the unmistakable sound of Sarah’s voice added into the mix, I finally rose from the dead, my body a little more prepared to sit upright…and possibly take in some liquids.
“Jesus, Noles. You look like shit,” Sarah said, tossing a clean T-shirt at me from the chair on the other side of the room. On instinct, I pulled my night-before top off and put on the one she’d thrown to me. When I saw the small traces of vomit on my new blouse, I realized how bad the situation probably had been.
I finally got up from the couch and slid into the kitchen to pour myself a giant cup of coffee and sift through Sienna’s cabinets for aspirin. “You won’t find it in there. Hang on, I’ll get the bottle from my bathroom,” Sienna said from behind me. I hadn’t seen her and her words startled me a little. She came back seconds later with two pills, and I took them quickly, thinking the faster they were in my system, the faster the nail pushing into my skull would go away.
“Thanks,” I said, sheepishly. I was embarrassed now, both because I remembered how I behaved to Sienna just hours ago, and because I couldn’t remember much before that. “So…how bad?”
Sienna sat there on a stool, staring at me for a few seconds before she spoke. “Epic,” she said.
Sarah chortled a little, causing Sienna to toss a wad of wet paper towels at her. “Fuck! What was that for?” Sarah said.
“That was for leaving me last night…in charge of…this!” Sienna said, waving her hand up and down the length of my body.
My mind raced, “Oh god, what had I done to make her this mad?”
“I’m sorry,” I started right away, my instinct to repair things kicking in. I leaned my face into my hands and rubbed my eyes before settling back on Sienna. “What…did I do?”
She and Sarah just looked at one another for a little while, almost like they had some shared secret that they were terrified to tell me. The longer it took them to give me words, the more I worried and let my imagination fill in the blanks. Had I gone to Gavin’s? Did I kiss him again? Did I kiss someone else?
“You called Reed,” Sienna said, taking a slow drink from her coffee, her eyes watching me for my reaction, which was devastated. My stomach felt as if I’d just dropped from the highest point of a roller coaster, and suddenly, I knew I was going to be sick. I sprinted to Sienna’s bathroom, and dry-heaved for about 10 minutes, my stomach clearly empty from whatever I had turned over the night before. My equilibrium finally giving me a break from the spinning apartment walls, I came back into the kitchen with Sarah and Sienna.
“What did I say,” I whispered, staring at the floor, because I couldn’t bear to see any more disapproval on Sienna’s face.
“You weren’t very coherent,” she started. “You had slipped away from me, for just a few seconds. It was the end of the night, and you were confused. You thought we were fighting, because I wanted to go home and you wouldn’t leave the damn bar.”