After a late night fight between Alex Summers and her ex goes terribly wrong, her parents ship her off to spend a stress-free summer in Los Angeles. But the second she steps off the plane, Alex stumbles into California bad boy Elias King, a too-hot...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Elias
"Mr. King? Mr. King, can you hear me? Nod if you can hear me."
I heard her loud and clear. Problem was, I didn't feel like listening.
"How are you feeling, honey?"
"Like shit."
"Well, things can only get better from here. I'm Stacey, I'll be your nurse this morning--"
Morning? What the hell?
"--So let me know if you need anything, okay?"
How about space?
I hadn't been up ten minutes and not-so-little-miss Stacey was chock-full of questions. Trying to keep my eyes open was hard enough, so you can imagine how much motivation it took to keep up with her blabbering.
I just wanted to sleep, to fall back into medicated meditation and drift. But every time I came close, Stacey would shake me awake or stab me with a new IV, just to "keep me comfortable".
FYI: Nothing she did felt anything close to comfortable, but at least she made things worse with a smile. The hospital probably paid her extra for that.
If I'd been the kind of patient who was into slap-happy, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, Pillsbury Dough-nurses, I would've laughed at the stupid jokes she told to cheer me up.
Nothing was gonna cheer me up except another round of drugs to keep me legally cracked-out for as long as possible. Hanging around laughing-gas-limbo meant not having to deal with whatever the hell happened to me. But my body was starting to kick and scream its way through an ugly come down and the anesthesia wasn't going to leave without a fight.
"Stacey?"
She popped back over to my bedside and handed me four cups of water. Four cups of water? Not good.
"What do you need, hun?"
The ceiling melted into the floor along with everything else in room.
"I don't feel really—"
I spewed six-hour-old pizza over the side of my bed and onto the linoleum floor. Stacey pulled out a pink kidney-shaped plate and handed it to me while she waved over a meathead of a male nurse to clean up my mess.
He introduced himself, but two seconds into the handshake, my stomach volcanoed the rest of my lunch all over his shirt.
"You're alright, sweetheart. It's normal to feel a little queasy the day after surgery."
Surgery? I didn't remember surgery. I remembered headlights, some guy's tires screaming against the asphalt, and a lot of pain, but nothing else after that.
