𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐲𝐧 𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 is far from perfect. Before starting her senior year of college, she's already guaranteed her position as the black sheep of her once prestigious family. To make matters worse, she took up bedding the rival family's eldest...
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𝑩𝒆𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒆 𝑬𝒗𝒆𝒍𝒚𝒏 𝒄𝒐𝒖𝒍𝒅 fully wake, she became aware of the extremely uncomfortable sensations floating through different parts of her body. The oncoming headache waiting to become a splitting migraine as soon as she opened her eyes, the slight clamminess to her skin, the unusually heavy weight to her limbs. She had been hung over before, but this was different. There was an intensity to every symptom and an overall fogginess she couldn't shake, though she couldn't remember drinking much of anything to cause it. She couldn't remember anything at all.
With the speed of dripping molasses, she shifted herself upright, causing the entire room to shift sideways. Everything was slow to come together. Her eyes went out of focus once she pried them open. She felt as though she would fall back over but kept herself steady with a fierce grip on the cotton sheets beneath her palms...
She wasn't in her bed. Or in her home. Her heart began to beat perilously fast for how sluggish she felt. Strangely, the room was familiar with its origination lost in her memory all at once.
Minimal sunlight trickled in between the slit of the floral curtains that rested over the windows above the bed frame, cuing her in on the time of day. Her mind did its best to make sense of the sequence leading up to the morning and where she was laying. She hadn't gone home with a guy as far as she remembered; she ruled out being in the unsettlingly still home of a hook up. Just as soon as she did and in fuzzy fragments, she saw flashes of her Sunday evening replay.
Michael. Those hands. His touch on her back. So gentle. His arms. His body the only supply of warmth against the cold—that was before they began walking somewhere. But where? All that came to mind was a garden. Then there was a couch. Then his warmth again, the closeness. His lips.
It all happened in a swirling blur. Within seconds, Evelyn found herself bent over the side of the mattress, her stomach squeezing with all its might to push its contents up her throat. Her eyes watered and her body retched involuntarily, helplessly even as she heard a door slam and the clatter of metal from the other room.
"Jesus Christ," said a sharp whisper before Evelyn felt a dip behind her on the mattress.
Those hands. They were fighting through her now matted curls to gather them away from her face. She focused on Michael's fingers against her scalp and the pleasant scent of his earthy cologne to try to ward off her hurling. Thankfully, but not without some ten minutes of exhaustive retching, her body gave up the fight against her and produced nothing but an excessive amount of saliva. As she struggled to regain control, she could feel herself trembling and gulping down a jagged rhythm of shallow breaths, every striation of muscle required for the action feeling strained.
Michael seemed to be acutely aware of her condition, those doe-eyes only looking rounder with care as she collapsed back against the bed. "Are you alright?"
Evelyn wished she had the strength to speak, but she didn't so she mustered a nod. She gazed up at Michael's dark head as he hovered slightly over her, his curls particularly shiny likely due to a morning shower or a fresh application of gel during styling. Her eyes then fell to what she had pictured vividly so many times in her most recent dream: his face. Every attractive detail was kissed by the sun but darkened by shadows of gloom, an unusually sullen expression woven into them.
