He was hot. He was complicated. But Garrett Evans brought something into my fucked up life that made it tolerable again, almost like the last one and a half years had been a bad dream.
Chapter One
Zuri
Eight months later…
Throwing my arm out in the direction of where the alarm on my phone was screeching at me, I slammed my palm down, praying that the screen acknowledged I was aiming for the snooze button on it.
It didn’t.
Instead, the sound of something moving across wood, followed by a crash as it fell off the bedside table and hit the floor, sounded with the irritating noise still coming from it. There was also that telltale crack every person prayed didn’t mean a shattered screen when they had a phoney go dropsy moment.
I knew it meant at least one crack because apparently, I was a dick who needed to invest in an alarm instead of just replacing phone screens. It was a problem!
With a groan, I went to turn over to pick it up and silence it, but a sharp pain in my ear and heaviness attached to it stopped my head from moving.
The panic hit instantly. I worked at Piersville Hospital, and I wasn’t a doctor or specialist, but I knew that things happened all the time medically that we didn’t know about before… And a heavy weight and pain in my head—was it a stroke?
I’d never had a stroke before. What if this was what some people felt when they had one?
People could have a-typical symptoms with things, too, and that shit ended up in medical journals and papers that were released to hospitals. Those things always got discussed at length in the doctors' break room, who all claimed it had to be bullshit or a freak occurrence.
Oh my God, was I a freak of medical science?
I had the shittest luck in the world, always had, hence why I was now going by a name that wasn’t mine and couldn’t relax. Well, that wasn’t my fault, but it totally fit with my luck. So this being a stroke and me ending up the topic of a medical journal that doctors laughed at? Totally my luck.
More than likely, none of this irrational panicking would have lasted more than a minute if I hadn’t just have woken up from a deep sleep, by the way. But seeing as how I had, it stuck with me that bit longer.
Seeing as how my brain hadn’t woken up properly, though, I decided I needed to call for help, so I focused hard on turning over, wincing when the pain started again, and then stopped when it got too much.
This time when I moved, I got my elbows under me, bracing them on the mattress so that I could try and lift myself up—relieved when I realized I could move said arms—and pushed up with ease. The pain was still there, as was the heaviness on that side, but at least I was moving.
Being able to do that was good, right?
Sitting up fully, something hit my back, and other sensations kicked in, along with my common sense starting to come back online. And what was registering at that moment was something I’d never felt before in my life, almost like I had a gentle chimpanzee laying on my back.
Reaching around, I tugged on whatever was there and squealed when it pulled on my ear, because something was wrapped around the flower-shaped stud through the piercing in the cartilage at the top of my ear.
And, suddenly, it all made sense.
My new pillowcases had a top layer of pink fabric with cute shapes cut out of it, showing off a white layer underneath. They came with a matching duvet, and I thought they’d look cute in my bedroom. Apparently they weren’t copacetic with my piercing, though.
After some wiggling and squeals when I tugged too hard, I finally freed my ear from the stitching and flopped back onto the mattress, rubbing my face and breathing a sigh of relief that no one had witnessed it.
Even though it hadn’t taken long to sort out, I was exhausted again. Since I’d moved here, I was a slow to sleep—slow to wake up girl, so I usually only got four hours sleep a night because it took me all day to wake up. How weird was that? I was exhausted all day long, then as soon as bedtime came and I got comfortable, I was wide awake.
And that’s absolutely what I was blaming for this morning’s reaction.
I also blamed it for yesterday morning, when I’d shuffled through to the kitchen to make some coffee, with my eyes still mostly shut, and something had dripped onto my neck. Most people would probably have looked up, but because I’d only achieved just over an hour of sleep, I automatically pictured something out of Alien spitting at my back and had turned around to look for it.