What I Did for Love by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

pillow.
    A cruel blade of afternoon sunlight seeped through the draperies and picked out her lacy white bra lying on the bedroom carpet of her suite at the Bellagio. One of last night’s heels peeped out from beneath a pair of men’s jeans.
    Please, oh, please, let those jeans belong to that sweet basketball player.
    She buried her face in the pillow. What if they didn’t? What if they belonged to—
    They couldn’t. She and the basketball player…Kerry—his name was Kerry…They’d flirted up a storm over the craps table. It had felt so good to flirt. So what if he was a younger man?
    Okay, she was naked, and this was awkward. But now Lance was no longer the last man she’d slept with, and that was a sign of progress, right? Her stomach rumbled unpleasantly. She peeled her eye open again. She’d suffered through a few hangovers, but nothing like this. Nothing that had ever wiped out her memory.
    The thigh rubbed against her bottom. It felt exceptionally muscular, definitely an athlete’s thigh. But no matter how hard she concentrated, the last thing she remembered was Bram dragging her away from the party.
    Kerry must have come after her. Yes, she was sure she remembered him stealing her from Bram. They’d come back here where they’d talked till dawn. He’d made her laugh and told her she had more fortitude than any woman he knew. He’d said she was intelligent, talented, and a lot prettier than most people realized. He’d said that Lance had made himself look like an idiot walking out on a woman like her. They’d started talking about having children together—beautiful biracial babies, unlike Lance’s future pasty-faced kid. They’d agreed to sell the photos of their beautiful baby to the highest bidder and donate the money to charity, which would be especially touching after the Drudge Report dug up news that Jade Gentry had used all the charity money she’d raised to buy herself a yacht. Then Georgie would win an Oscar, and Kerry would win the Super Bowl.
    Okay, wrong sport, but her head was hammering, her stomach churning, and a hard knee was trying to wedge deeper into her bottom.
    She had to put herself out of her misery, but that would involve turning over and dealing with the consequences of what she saw. She needed water. And Tylenol. An entire bottle.
    It began to dawn on her that liquor didn’t give a person total amnesia. This was no ordinary hangover. She’d been drugged. And she knew only one person corrupt enough to drug a woman.
    She drove her elbow into his chest with as much force as she could muster.
    He gave an oof of pain and rolled over, taking the sheet with him.
    She buried her face in the pillow. Soon the mattress sagged as he got up. She heard the muffled sound of his footsteps draggingtoward the bathroom. When the door shut, she fumbled for the sheet and made herself sit up. The room tilted. Her stomach roiled. She wrapped the sheet around her, wobbled to her feet, and staggered to the second bathroom, where she leaned against the sink and buried her face in her hands.
    What would Scooter do if she’d been drugged and woke up naked in bed with a stranger? Or not a stranger. Scooter wouldn’t do anything because nothing this horrible had ever happened to her. It was easy to be all feisty and optimistic when you had a full-time writing staff protecting you from the real crap life tossed out.
    As she let her hands drop, a horrifying image greeted her in the mirror, like early Courtney Love. A witch’s brew of tangled cherry-cola hair didn’t hide the beard burn on her neck. Blotches of old mascara smudged her green eyes like mud around an algae pond. Her wide mouth sagged at the corners, and her complexion was the color of bad yogurt. She made herself drink a glass of water. All her toiletries were in the other bathroom, but she washed her face and swirled some hotel mouthwash.
    She still didn’t feel capable of coping with whatever lurked on the other side of that door, so