Layla

“Define okay. If it’s even close to—do I feel like I’m going to pass out, or am I seeing double? No. But if it’s closer to being in agony and wondering if death would be a kinder alternative? Kind of.”

I was definitely worried now. “How is the second one better than the first?”

“Dude, I just head-butted a counter! Why are you even expecting me to make an iota of sense?”

She had a point.

Deciding it’d be okay to look at where she’d hit her head, I gently pulled her hand away. There wasn’t any blood, but there was an ostrich egg and a bruise forming.

“Don’t move. I’ll get you some ice.”

I was just at the fridge, opening the freezer door, when she muttered, “Don’t have ice. The machine broke, and then the freezer broke.”

“So what do you have that we could put on it? It’s already bruising.”

Opening up the door to her fridge, I came across an alternative.

Layla

“If you need me to pick you up, just text or call me, okay?” Mark said from the doorway as I walked slowly to my car.

Each footstep jarred something inside my head, and if it hadn’t been for the amount of time I’d already had to take off, I’d have called out for the day.

I couldn’t do that to my patients, though. I took my job seriously, plus today’s were all facials, chemical peels, and things that didn’t involve needles and something that could go horribly wrong. Well, a chemical peel could go wrong, but I wasn’t that injured that it’d happen. Thank God for small mercies.

Turning around slowly, I smiled weakly. “Thanks for helping me this morning.”

His eyes slid to look at something behind me, and I carefully turned around to see what’d gotten his attention. Cole and Ren were standing behind my car, watching me with angry expressions on their faces.

“Why are you holding a block of cheese on your head?”

This wasn’t a bad question because I was indeed holding a block of cheese against the area I’d hurt.

Although, if they wanted me to be honest about it, I’d set them straight about one thing. “It’s actually half a block.”

Yes, the best thing I’d had in my fridge had been one of those massive blocks of cheese from Costco. I’d bought it a couple of weeks ago when I was on my period and had somehow forgotten to eat it. I now had half a block in a Ziploc bag that I was going to have to eat soon, or it’d go weird, and I didn’t like weird cheese.

When Mark had reached in and shown it to me, I’d initially told him to pass me the pack of Velveeta I’d bought at the same time, but that’d been too hard and painful, so the cheese it was.

And let’s face it, it wasn’t a hardship having to eat half a Costco block of cheese. I felt it was pertinent to continue stressing to myself where I’d bought it from so that I had enough time to mentally prepare myself for the amount of the stuff I would end up consuming later. Was it possible to become lactose intolerant by overdosing on it?

Ren’s scowl intensified. “Why have you got half a block of cheese—which, FYI, is the equivalent of two of the blocks I bought from the store just yesterday—on your forehead?”

Leaning against the side of my car, I held a finger up. “First, you’re being ripped off. Come with me to Costco next time and get one of these bad boys. Second, I bumped my head on the countertop in the kitchen this morning, and because my ice maker and the freezer are on the blitz, I only had this or Velveeta to put on it.”

Cole, the one who’d probably done something similar at least fifty times in his life, motioned at me to lift the cheese and immediately motioned for me to put it back down again.

“Why didn’t you use the Velveeta?”

The question was random and unexpected. “Out of that story, that’s what you decided to focus on?” When he just shrugged, I snapped, “Because the box hurt my head when I tried to put it on it.”

“Did you open it to see if it was in a foil wrapper?”

Shit.

However, the response I was about to give him was honest. “Well, if I get hungry later, I’ve got a snack to munch on, don’t I?”

Ren hadn’t focused on the cheese at hand—literally—because he was standing at the bottom of the stairs muttering something only Mark could hear.