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Chapter eight: diver down
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The next morning, Aspen felt a throbbing pain on the right side of her head. And she wasn't talking about a hangover. It was much, much worse. Incomparable even. Like she had been hit in the head with a golf club. The girl hissed as she rubbed her patched up temple.
She opened one of her eyes carefully, making sure everything was clear before opening the other one, feeling like she had entered the gates of heaven when the sunlight behind the sheer curtains shone into her irises.
"You might wanna take it easy." She heard someone say beside her, finally getting her eyes focus on the person next to her. It didn't come as a surprise to her when she recognized it was JJ.
"Where the fuck-" Ace began, looking around the foreign room in confusion. Upon further inspection, she realized she wasn't on John B's couch. Nor was she in JJ's room—or her own for that matter. She was in the hospital, a set of white walls closing her into a place she didn't want to be in.
"We brought you in after you fainted. There was a lot of blood." JJ's head hung low in embarrassment. "I'm sorry I didn't come get you out of the water sooner."
The boy plunged his hand into the back pocket of his cargo shorts, fishing out a partly squished blunt, swinging it around before placing it between his lips. He lit it with the familiar silver lighter he carried with him everywhere he went incase he needed a smoke.
"How long have I been in this shit-shack?" Ace questioned him. She had always despised hospitals.
"Through the night, so..around nine hours." JJ breathed in the smoke, exhaling it out into the painfully white hospital room.
"Can I have a hit of that?" Ace asked innocently, making the boy nearly choke as he coughed out a laugh.
"Ace, you're in the hospital for a head injury."
"So?" She tilted her head, taking the blunt from his lips anyway and inhaling it herself.
As the smoke entered her lungs, she felt her body relax into the soft cushions and the tention within her disappear. Hospitals stressed people out, and that's precisely why it was the perfect place to smoke.
JJ stared at her in pure amusement. Never had he met a girl who smoked weed in her hospital bed. Ace, in turn, had never met a boy who successfully brought weed into the hospital in the first place.
"What?" she asked without looking at him, feeling his stare lingering on her. The joint hung between her middle—and index finger.
"Nothin'." He shook his head at her, moving the curtains to the side slightly to peer outside. Ace squinted, the sunlight now entering the room fully with no restrictions.
