This girl is a black eye, she's a bruise on your knee
She's the ashes of the people that you really meant to be

-Thea Gilmore, This Girl is Taking Bets

Awkwardness Better Coalessing Definitively Even From Gasping Hardily

Awkward.

But better than the time when she woke up in her ex-boyfriend's roommate's bed naked.

Couldn't be that awkward ever again.

Definitely awkward though.

Every muscle in her body ached, her head was pounding like a jackrabbit in heat, and her stomach was doing its best impression of a cartwheel.

Fuck was the only word that occurred to her for what seemed like several minutes in a row. God help her. Hedonist that she was God was going to ignore her, or possibly revel in her despair and misery.

It wasn't the overbearing hangover rampaging through her body that was awkward—it was fairly typical for the amount of legal and not so legal substances she'd ingested—it was her neighbor and her neighbor's dog staring at her that was awkward. Just a mite more awkward because she was naked. Kinda made things worse—being naked always seemed to make things more awkward.

Like that time in Jason's bed. Maybe if she'd woken up in her own clothes, even Jason's clothes, it wouldn't have been so bad. Naked was the absolute worst way to find yourself, your ex-boyfriend staring at you, in his roommate/best friend's bed. Oh-so-much worse made by your total lack of memory of the night before.

Prone on your front lawn watching your neighbor and his dog—the latter squatted to poo near your head—stare agape and abashed at your full-figure in the grass was up there on the list though.

Quickly assessing the fastest route to her front door, she realized making a break for it would only make her look more embarrassed and pathetic than she already did—and it's amazing that it was at all possible.

Reasonably, slowly, as if there were stitches of fabric covering her body, or at least parts of her body, she stood and brushed some of nature's debris from her thigh then her shoulder with some flourish. She smiled at her neighbor, commented on the loveliness of the morning, turned towards the house and sauntered inside. Totally aware with every jiggle of her flesh of her cellulite, the twig in her hair and the imprint of grass on her face. Undulating her hips, tossing her hair over her shoulder, she swung around to smile at the awed man on the sidewalk. Varying degrees of shock began to register on his face before she was safely inside the front door of her townhouse.

Wiping the tears from her face she stood, her back to the front door, seeing herself in the mirror in the hall: mascara smeared across her nose, lipstick staining her cheek, the stick in her hair, the puffy redness of her eyes, the dirt across her breast, the grass clippings in her bush hair, and the bruised handprint on her thigh.

Xenon was a planet, right… in another solar system, somewhere far, far away…maybe even in the galaxy with Luke and Darth and that hottie-pants Han, right? Yoda would be there and teach her to use the force so she could come back and kill that horrible man on the sidewalk and his little dog too.

Zoning-out in bed was high on her list of things that would help get her through this shitter of a day, at the top though was a nice, fresh mimosa with a healthy dash of rum, just a bracer, to get her over the worst of it.