This isn't weird.

Comfy

Millie didn't remember being hit by a train, but she supposed that getting hit by a train wasn't something people tended to remember, on account of all the dying. Was she dying? If so, there probably wasn't a train involved. Death by train would be more or less instantaneous, right? Or maybe it had been instantaneous, and this was hell. Plausible. Very plausible.

Unfortunately, opening her eyes to assess her surroundings was not currently an option. Relaxing her eyelids by even a fraction of a micron let in enough light to commit unspeakable acts of violence against her eyes; parting them outright would definitely allow it to sear right through them and repurpose her skull into an urn for the cremated remains of her brain. Hellfire? Not just plausible. Likely.

As Millie scrunched her eyelids tighter, a terrible question hit her like a hypothetical death-train. If she couldn't open her eyes, then how would she know where to throw up? God, she wanted to throw up. Her entire digestive tract was poised for revolt, and rallying the rest of her organs to follow suit. La révolution was miserably literal. If the room started spinning any faster, she might just become the first person to successfully achieve anti-gravity. Maybe she'd win a Nobel prize.

She'd much prefer a brief foray into the nearest available woodchipper.

The onslaught of mixed metaphors was only making the nausea worse, so she drew in a careful breath and tried her hardest to clear her mind. She searched her senses for something, anything, that wasn't a source of sheer torment. That was when she became aware of the smell. It was a good smell. Like, really good. Her next breath was greedier, filling her lungs and holding it there as if it might try to run away. It was a warm, complex scent, a medley of aromatics and salt, pleasantly balanced between sweetly chemical and sharply organic. It was familiar. It was... safe.

Focusing her full attention on this soothing olfactory input relaxed all those queasy, stabbing feelings momentarily into the background; her stomach remained in a state of unrest, but now it flipped in an entirely different, almost pleasurable way. Slowly, she regained some measure of ability to detect less hostile sensations. Beneath her various physical miseries, she was surprised to find herself otherwise surprisingly comfortable—cozy and secure, tingling with an unlikely buzz of oxytocin that made realize that she was cradled against another human body, held fast by a pair of arms that were distinctly male in size and weight.

What she knew for certain was that this was not Genevieve's bed.

Her eyes fluttered open in alarm, revitalizing the mass of blazing agony where her brain was supposed to be as they adjusted to an assault of blinding daylight, until at last, vision returned, and she knew exactly where she was.

This was... Ben's room. Ben's bed. Ben's arms wrapped around her.

Millie jolted fully awake and tried to sit up, but, unprepared for the way it made the room lurch, she accomplished little more than a few inches of elevation, and only with the truly heroic efforts of her elbows to prop her up. Looking down, she found her body covered by a long black t-shirt also easily recognizable as Ben's. Was she wearing underwear? Her fingertips ventured a wary prod against the side of her hip. Yes. But nothing else.

The sudden movement stirred Ben from his own sleep. His arms fell away from her as he sat up with infuriating ease, leaving her with a strange, naked feeling in the places they had rested. "You're up," he mumbled, rubbing his eyes.

Millie stared at him, her face reddening. "What happened—oh my god—did we—"

"No! Definitely not," Ben assured her quickly. While she was significantly less clothed than she last remembered, he was still fully dressed in his same clothes from last night, though his suit coat had been draped over a chair and his black button down had wrinkled in the night. He grinned. "I promise, I protected your virtue with my life."