Nobody Looks Good in Leather Pants (or bowties), Dear Professor Book #1

Part 13

We drank the entire box of wine.

And then I drank the vodka. Because I was still sad after the wine. Go figure.

Not surprisingly, it was a mistake.

A terrible, terrible mistake.

I had very strange dreams. Dreams of me rocking out to I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance. Dreams of me crying on the phone. Dreams of me destroying one of my framed jigsaw puzzles.

In the morning, instead of going for my walk, I knelt at the altar of the porcelain gods and prayed for the continued health and function of my liver. Then I went back to sleep only to be awoken by Emily setting a plate at my bedside with a loud clatter.

"Wake up, sunshine. I made you greasy food."

I moaned into my pillow. This was the third time in my life I'd had a hangover; I could always count on regret and feeling like death.

"Must you be so loud? Why you hate me so much?"

"I'm whispering."

"You're a witch. Burn in a fire."

She cackled softly, but it sounded like a witch.

"Bacon, eggs, and toast. Get up and eat. Also," she called over her shoulder as she left my room, "your cell is on the pillow next to your head."

I moaned again, turning away from her offerings and dozing until my phone buzzed, sounding like a swarm of angry bees.

Someone was calling me, probably work asking me to fill in a shift.

Groaning, I blindly reached for the phone, my hand finding it instantly. I accepted the call, but then fumbled to bring it to my ear, finally answering with a pathetic, "Hello?"

"Anna?"

I paused, confused, because the voice on the other end didn't sound like Pedro from the restaurant.

"Who is this?" I croaked, lifting myself to an elbow and cracking an eye to check the caller ID; it read, Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky.

I scrunched my face, blinking several times at the nonsensical entry.

"You're awake," the man said, sighed, then asked, "Are you sober yet?"

I'm not going to lie, I recognized Luca's voice almost instantly.

But I was also in denial, and denial is a blissful path on which to travel, the view is almost as nice as Ignorance Avenue.

And so, I decided the man on the phone couldn't possibly be Luca because Luca didn't have my phone number. The man must've just been someone who sounded a lot like Luca.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the ticket.

I was allowed to inhabit this fuzzy limbo of obliviousness for precisely three seconds, until he said, "We need to talk about the emails."

And that was just the adrenaline shot needed to push me out of denial.

"What?" I shot up in my bed, immediately regretting this automatic response as a wave of nausea met a stab of pain and they became best friends. "Ugh . . . what emails?"

"The emails you sent me last night."

He did not sound happy.

"Don't— I mean how—" I gripped my head. I couldn't think, partially because I was hungover, but also partially because I was panicking. "I just sent one email."