[wattpad editor's picks, nov-dec 2023]
After a one night stand in Monaco between a fallen from grace championship surfer and an up and coming Formula One star, the two are sure they'll never see each other again...but what happens in Monaco doesn't...
I'd been hungover plenty of times before. At my 21st birthday in Las Vegas, I was up for 32 hours straight and fairly certain I didn't spend a minute of that weekend sober, but somehow drinking two bottles of wine alone in my childhood bedroom gave me an emotional hangover that outdid all of that.
Morning sunlight poured into my room, and I knew without even having to look that I'd slept through my dawn patrol alarm. I checked my phone, even though I feared my head was going to implode if I looked at any bright lights. I had a text from Gemma that she knew I'd read whenever I woke up. I also had an unusually large amount of new Instagram DMs, and typically they were just robots or a random surfer bro here or there, but something was off. My profile was public, but I'd also seen a weird influx of followers in a short period of time. I was a fairly big name in the surfing community thanks to my championship winning past-self, but outside of that sphere of influence, I was a mere speck of a star in the swirling galaxy of famous athletes. Nothing like the supernova that was Atlas Vaughn.
Still bleary eyed, I swiped my messages open, and I nearly dropped my phone on my face as the reality of the situation set in. I let out an audible groan, which prompted Sam to lift his head.
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There were a dozen of them, and they all had one thing in common - they followed Atlas fucking Vaughn. Maybe Atlas wasn't a supernova at all. He was a planet, and I'd just been sucked into his orbit for everyone with a god damn telescope to see and analyze and make attempts to identify.
I bit down on my thumbnail as I scrolled through the rest of them, feeling my stomach churn at the thought that there were actually people like this out there - wild and shameless and possessive of someone they didn't even know. But then I saw it - all the way at the bottom was the worst message of it all. Maybe it was just the hangover, but I wanted to puke.
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Suddenly every other message in my inbox faded into the background. Even though his first message was time stamped 1:00 AM my time, through some slightly shameful research I learned Monaco was exactly 9 hours ahead of me. Although with Atlas, he could have been anywhere in the world at any given moment.
