Chapter 6: Diamond

Noelle

My head was doing something it had never done before, something between a marching band rehearsal and an incessant bass drop that never fully died out.

I opened one eye and immediately regretted the decision. Sunlight, unbothered by my pounding brain, poured through a gap in my curtains personally gloating.

I groaned into my pillow. My mouth tasted like stale scotch, metal and something much more bitter.

Betrayal.

Right.

Bits and pieces came back to me in the worst possible order.

Clayton's stupid, happy face.

Vivian's red nails.

A wine glass shattering.

My own voice, loud and unhinged, telling an entire restaurant that my ex-best friend knew nothing about being a decent human being.

And then, green eyes.

A ring.

A kiss that tasted like coconut and made my toes curl in a way three years with Clayton never managed.

I sat up too fast, and my stomach whooshed violently in disagreement with the motion.

"Okay," I whispered to no one, "okay, okay, okay."

My hand went instinctively to my chest like I could hold my organs in place through sheer force of will, and that's when I noticed it.

Weight on my finger. Cold, unfamiliar, weight that caught in the light even through my hungover squint.

I observed my left hand like it belonged to a stranger, a specimen too.

The ring was still there.

I shut one eye and opened it to take a sneak peak.

it was really there. I gasped and slapped my ringless hand to my mouth.

I wasn't dreaming and no it wasn't a fever-induced fantasy conjured by heartbreak and cheap wine — wait, no, I didn't have cheap wine.

That wine tasted premium, I'd upgraded my sorrows considerably last night.

The ring was very much still there, sitting heavy and enormous on my finger.

"Oh no," I said out loud. "Oh no, no, no."

I flopped back onto my pillow and pulled the sheet over my face like that would somehow undo the last twelve hours.

It did not and my headache did not care about my emotional crisis. It simply throbbed on, unbothered.

I lay there a while doing the math. Fake fiancé. Real ring. A Maybach. A man named after a fictional wizard who apparently had unrestricted access to luxury vehicles and knew my Wednesday night order down to the side of basil dip. No one knew basil dip. it was so niche and yet somehow green eyed Oz knew it.

None of it made sense in the daylight. None of it made sense with a hangover, either, but daylight had a way of stripping the romance out of things and leaving just the facts, hard, cold and a little absurd.

I needed water. I needed grease. I needed to lie in a dark room for the rest of my natural life.

Instead, I reached for my purse, which someone — presumably me, though I had no memory of it — had set neatly on my nightstand, upright, it was so intentionally placed. That alone should have tipped me off. I never set my purse down like that. I usually threw it somewhere and prayed it landed near a flat surface, most times I did but some other times it knocked things down. whatever, it was still my way.

I unzipped it, halfway out of habit, half hoping my phone was in there and not lost somewhere in the wreckage of last night's madness.

My phone was there. So were my keys, my lip balm, a crumpled receipt from La Vista I never even got to use.

And two things that hadn't been there yesterday.

The first unusual thing was a small white card, cream-colored, thick stock, the kind of paper that could pass as a safe keep, expensive too. No logo, no restaurant name. Just a name, his name Emeric Vaughn Miller in the sexiest cursive i'd ever read, and very legible too— most cursives were a couple of whirl lines bleeding into each other, it made my head hurt— and a phone number, handwritten in small, deliberate script along the bottom edge, different from the handwriting above. very neat and precise. Oz was pretty dexter.

The second thing was a foil packet of hangover medication, the fancy kind, the kind you don't find at a regular pharmacy, tucked in beside a stick of gum.

I stared at both items for a long moment.

"Who are you," I muttered, to the card, to the ceiling, to the universe in general, "and why do you carry hangover cures?"

I wondered for a moment about the save, the kiss and this ring.

I didn't remember him slipping either of these into my bag. I didn't remember much past the second round of drinks and something about wizards and Santa Baby, if my aching brain was serving me correctly, which it currently was not doing a great job of.

I swallowed the pills dry, because I am a woman who makes questionable choices before 9 a.m., and dragged myself into the kitchen for water.

It was there, standing at my counter. I grabbed the water and swigged it, water dropped down my jaw. My reflection came into view from the cabinet glasses, my eyes remained smudged from yesterday's heavy mascara, yes I was a woman who believed in the power of her eyes.

An afterthought crossed my mind.

Oz had seen me like this?

My stomach felt queasy again.

I took a slow turn to really take in my sitting room, a T-shirt I was fairly sure I'd slept in for three days straight before Valentine's ruined my whole week slopped hopelessly over my washed green couch. Green, again. My abode was a hot mess and so was I. The weight on my finger was a stark reminder.

I held my hand up properly to the light.

Not the sad, gray, curtain-filtered light of my bedroom. The real light. the unbiased kitchen light, the tells-you-everything-you-don't-want-to-know and everything you're avoiding light.

The ring caught it immediately.

It wasn't just big, I'd clocked big the second he'd knelt in front of me, big enough that I'd assumed, somewhere in my rattled brain, that it had to be costume. A prop. Something a restaurant kept in a drawer for exactly this kind of emergency, the way some places keep a spare tie for men who show up underdressed. Yup, that kind of stuff.

But costume jewelry didn't do this. Costume jewelry didn't throw actual color, little fractured rainbows scattering across my kitchen wall like the stone had somewhere better to be and was showing off on its way out. Costume jewelry didn't sit that heavy, didn't catch light in layers, didn't look like it had been cut by someone who'd spent their whole life learning exactly how to make a diamond gloat.

I turned my hand slowly, half-scared of what I already knew, half-hoping I was wrong.

The stone caught the morning sun and threw it back at me in a way no cubic zirconia, no pawn shop reject, no restaurant prop drawer special had any business doing.

My stomach dropped straight through the kitchen floor.

"Oh," I said quietly, to my empty apartment, to my ridiculous left hand, to the very expensive, very real problem currently glittering on my finger.

"Oh, no."