The Rhythm of Love

Chapter Six

Retching; also known as heaving, throwing up, up chucking, vomiting, puking, spewing, hurling, barfing and the act of emptying out the contents of your stomach. No matter what you call it, how you say, or who does it, it sounds miserable and disgusting first thing in the morning. Lucky for me I wasn’t the one paying homage to the porcelain god, but Vince? Well, needless to say he wasn’t so lucky.

His body was rebelling against him, punishing him for a night of way too much alcohol. I hadn’t seen him that hungover since high school when we raided his mother’s liquor stash.

“Never. Again,” he groaned during the short period of respite his body granted him from being a human water fountain. It felt so wrong, but so right, that I was kind of laughing at him in my head. Yes, I felt sorry for him, because I’d been there, done that, but I found it funny that it looked like he was peeing from his mouth. Last night’s shots had all been the amber color of whiskey and rum. Watered down by his stomach acid, it literally looked like pee. The more I thought it over, the funnier I found it, but the less I understood why I thought it to be so funny in the first place.

“Yeah, you might want to think about following through on that particular declaration, because there were other ‘declarations’,” I said using air quotes, “that were just dying to get out last night.”

He sat back on the cool tile of his bathroom floor, reclined against the cabinetry below his sink and scrubbed his face lightly with his palms. “Oh dear God, please. Please tell me I didn’t call Alison.”

“Alison? Baby? Do you want the world? Because I’ll give you the world,” I mocked.

“Holy shit I didn’t… holy shit.” He banged his head against the wall a few times, cradling his head in his hands afterword.

“Banging your head against the wall? Not going to fix things. If anything it’ll just make your headache worse.”

“No shit Sherlock, but a headache is the least of my concerns right now. Why the hell did you let me drink so much?”

“Don’t blame me because of your inability to say ‘no’!”

Vince let out a string of curses, banging his head each time as if to emphasize them. It was fortuitous that he didn’t look up and see the expression my face, because I didn’t need to see my reflection to know I was grinning like a fool.

“I’m just kidding. You didn’t call her. You called me by accident. Sam and I tag teamed you and he took your phone before you could do something really stupid. Payback’s a bitch, bro!”

With narrowed eyes he opened his mouth, prepared to chew me out, when his body lurched toward the toilet for another round of purging. He moaned pathetically into the toilet, the perfect picture of misery and said, “If I wasn’t so hung over I’d kick your ass for making me think I’d called her, but since I am, I’ll just skip to the part after the ass kicking and say, ‘thank you.’”

“And if you weren’t so hung over this would have been the part where I kicked your ass for changing your ring tone to ‘Oops, I Did It Again’ and drunk dialing me when I had Jasmine right where I wanted her.”

“But I did-”

“Morning all. How’s the hangover Vince?”

Sam materialized behind me in the mirror before walking past to sit on Vince’s sink.

“Like Hell.”

“You tried calling Allie last night,” Sam commented casually.

“Nice…” Vince heaved a little more, took a deep breath and then continued where he left off. “Try. Brad already told me of my failed attempt to embarrass myself.”