I was a new version of myself who was more worthy of her. And it was finally time.OneAriana“Oh, it’s going to be a long night,” Sadie, the new bartender at Rebels, muttered as she filled a glass with beer from the tap, her eyes on the sobbing woman two seats down from me.
She’d only started working here a week ago, but she was the shit. Her British accent and wit made me laugh so hard I felt cheated every time I looked down and didn’t see a twelve-pack on my stomach.
“He just dumped me,” the chick wailed loudly, getting the attention of most of the customers in Rebels, the bar owned by my sister-in-law and her dad.
It wasn’t something we hadn’t already heard that night, though, seeing as how she’d been pouring her heart out to Beau for the last twenty minutes.
Glancing at me and raising her eyebrow as she refilled the woman’s glass of wine, Beau nodded sympathetically. “It happens, babe. Men come, men go.”
I couldn’t help the snicker that came out of me at her choice of words. In more ways the one…
Yup, welcome to the lonely girls club. The men we wanted were assholes, so we’d made a pact a year ago to just use them for their penises. Unfortunately, that hadn’t panned out the way we intended it to because my vagina apparently only wanted one man—the asshole himself, Parker Knight. And Beau… actually, why hadn’t she exercised her slut-card? Sure, Rich Suave was her penis kryptonite, but she could still do her thing, right?
“It was all going so great,” the chick whimpered. “We were having some of the best sex I’ve ever had in my life, and then…” she paused, and I’m not at all ashamed to admit that I leaned in closer to hear what went wrong. I mean, if the sex was great, why would he dump her?
“And then?” Beau prompted, filling her glass with the inch of wine she’d consumed as Sadie stopped cleaning the bar and leaned in to listen, her eyes on me to make it look a bit less obvious.
“And then I came so hard I farted,” she finished, just as I took a strong pull on my straw, meaning that I almost inhaled it all when I did a choking laugh.
Here’s something that became brutally apparent as I tried to stop myself from drowning—if it was possible to do it when you inhaled your drink—it’s impossible to save your life quietly. Every time I tried to wheeze it out or cough into my hand, my abdomen would do this weird squeezing thing, and my brain decided I had to start hacking it up.
“Give me a second,” Beau choked out, and then a glass of water appeared under my nose. “Christ, girl, get it together.”
I would have told her it was impossible, but I was too busy trying to breathe. I wouldn’t take it for granted ever again if the oxygen would just go into my lungs.
“Is she okay?” orgasm fart chick asked, passing me a tiny cocktail napkin. “She’s going purple.”
I didn’t hear what Beau replied because just then, a hand started patting me firmly on the back.
“What happened?” a deep voice belonging to the man I was doing everything I could to avoid said, breaking through the sound of my last heartbeats that were audible at high volume in my head now.
“Inhaled her drink.”
“Ari, tip your head back and take as deep a breath as you can,” Parker instructed me firmly, and I was so desperate for oxygen by that point that I did it without being pissed off like I usually was when he tried to boss me around. I mean, Jesus Christ, I hadn’t had oxygen in ten hours, so I’d be willing to take orders from Satan by this point.
Doing as he said, I breathed as deeply as I could, lowering my head back down again to cough and splutter.
“Keep doing it, baby. The more you do it, the better it’ll be.”
Sure enough, within minutes, the dots that’d been dancing behind my eyes stopped, and I wasn’t feeling so lightheaded. I was going to survive.
Breathing in a shuddering breath, I was just readying myself to say thank you to him when the woman who should never eat baked beans before having sex said, “Why are you here? You said it was over, and we shouldn’t see each other again.”
The vice that had only just stopped crushing my chest started up its shit again as I looked up at Beau, seeing her watching something behind me with an expression that screamed I wish I’d brought popcorn. Yeah, probably because it wasn’t Rico Suave who’d fucked a woman so hard she’d farted when she came. Movement next to her caught my attention, and I watched Sadie bring over a bottle of rum, pull the little spout thingy out of the top, and stick a straw in it before placing it on the bar right in front of my face.