It had been spectacular.
Augustine had been spectacular, and as a part of a last, hedonistic few days before she changed her life, he had been perfect.
She could limp around Paris and do the next couple of things on her napkin-based bucket list with a grin on her face.
The plan had been one night, and then he would leave.
She was not going to feel bad about it.
Even if she kind of wanted to see him again, hear him talk again, and lick his hard, hot skin again.
But no. That was not the plan.
She would stick to the plan.
She stumbled to the kitchen area and chugged a glass of water straight out of the tap, then another. Dehydration was the enemy. Getting over a hangover migraine required water.
Back in nursing school, she and her friends had given each other the ultimate cure for a hangover: eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen, a liter of lactated Ringer’s saline solution delivered intravenously, and ten minutes of breathing pure oxygen. In half an hour, that would entirely cure even the worst hangover.
Damn, she really needed an IV and some O2 just then.
A can of coffee grounds stood beside the coffee maker, and she thanked St. Augustine and all the other saints that the B and B had supplied her with coffee. Last night, after she’d gotten off the plane, ridden the subway, and found her room, she’d just kind of dumped everything and thrown on her one good dress to go to the Buddha Bar in a fit of blind rage and despair.
Packets of sugar lay on the counter beside the coffee pot, so she dumped three of them into a cup and added coffee to it. No milk, but she wasn’t picky.
Maybe that’s what Dree’s problem was.
Maybe she should be pickier.
Or at least a whole lot less gullible.
At the thought of just how damn gullible she was, another horrible possibility occurred to Dree.
Shock slammed her, and her heartbeat battered her temples.
She grabbed her purse, frantically praying that even though she’d been hopelessly stupid and naïve, maybe she’d escaped the consequences this time.
Probably not. Probably not.
She opened her purse and shook it hard.
Her wallet fell out with a heavy plop on the kitchen counter. She scrambled while opening it anyway, and a wad of pastel-colored euros scattered on the white Formica. She spread the bills out, frantically counting them, but it looked like all her one hundred fifty-two euros were still there.
Her heart was still slamming in her chest, and she braced her arms on the counter and gulped air with relief.
How stupid was she for picking up some guy, bringing him back to her hotel room, and then passing out drunk while he was there? He could have stolen all her money—which was everything she had left in the world—and walked out while she’d slept it off.
With her luck, she was surprised he hadn’t stolen all her money and her clothes and left her literally naked without a shirt on her back.
But she was okay.
She wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
No more trusting people with her money or her heart.
And today, her goal was to figure out how to put her life back together and go on. She was going to live a whole new kind of life, one where she was smart and had adventures and didn’t get taken advantage of.
Yep, today was the first day of the rest of her life, and she was a whole new person starting it. From now on, Dree was the kind of woman who would travel to Paris by herself or fuck a gorgeous man if she wanted to.
There was nothing she wouldn’t do.
She even had a napkin that mapped out her new life.
Dree picked up the cocktail napkin from the countertop and smoothed it out to look at what was written there.
A threesome.
A foursome with three guys.
A gang bang.
Three distinct feminine handwriting styles filled the fragile paper, forming a list of adventures. Some of the writing was her own, and some belonged to the two women she’d met at the Buddha Bar when she’d first gotten there. They’d insisted that Dree join them for supper and drinks so adamantly that Dree had suspected they were planning to dine and dash and stick her with the bill, but they hadn’t.
On the napkin they’d written:
Fuck a man against a wall in an alley.
An incredible night on the beach by the sea.
Ménage a whole bunch.
Dree laughed. God, she’d almost done it. She’d had so much tequila to drink last night that a gang bang had seemed like a good idea.
Instead, she’d had:
A one-night stand with a beautiful man who you’ll never see again.
She’d done it.
She’d done one item on the list.
Dree hunted through her duffel bag lying on the floor, which held three changes of workout clothes that needed washing, some random make-up products, her hospital ID badge, a set of clean scrubs, a curling iron with an American-style plug that wouldn’t work in France, and a cheap ballpoint with Good Samaritan Hospital stamped on the side.
Dree uncapped the pen and carefully drew a line through the item A one-night stand with a beautiful man who you’ll never see again.
One item down, about fifty to go.
She perused the rest of them idly because not all of them were sexual in nature.
Do fun and wonderful things.
Dance in a parade on the Champs-Élysées.
—London, Amsterdam, Monaco, and Nepal.
The countries were a list of places she should visit or, ideally, live for a while.
Dree couldn’t even imagine going to or living in those places, but maybe.
Maybe today she would make a plan so that it would be possible.
It was funny how losing everything had opened her up to new possibilities like living in
