Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 69847 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69847 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
When I arrived at the hospital it was to find the entire freakin’ thing in a flurry.
Apparently, a popular Chinese food restaurant had served an entire truck of bad chicken, causing about half the county to come in complaining about stomach cramping, diarrhea and fevers.
Which was how I got parked in the hallway under a light with nothing to occupy my time but the thoughts of how much the light above me sucked.
Tired of this shit, I reached for the neck brace and nearly had it halfway off when a nurse happened to catch me—though I’d like to point out that it was the first time that I’d seen a nurse in my entire time there.
Of course she’d come by when I was pulling it off.
“Oh, no, no, dear,” she said as she patted my chest. “You can’t take that off.”
I groaned. “I’m fine.”
“You may not be,” she said. “Would you like to be paralyzed for the rest of your life? Because that’s exactly how you get paralyzed for the rest of your life.”
I sighed. “How much longer do you think I’ll have to sit here?”
She looked at me apologetically. “I don’t know.”
I sighed. “Can you turn the light off above me?”
She was already shaking her head. “No, because if I turn this light off, it turns off the entire hallway’s lights.”
“What about something to cover my eyes?”
“If I had it to spare, I would.” She patted my chest. “I’ll go check on the doctor.”
I doubted that, but I let her leave anyway.
I was fiddling with the blanket covering my body when an idea occurred to me.
Thinking it was perfect, I pulled it up over my head, and had the first relief I’d had in an hour.
Blissful darkness.
I don’t know how long I sat like that when I heard the first mutterings of a dead person in the hallway.
“I can’t believe they’re so busy that they’ll just put dead people in the hallway,” someone whispered as they moved in the hallway. “That’s horrible.”
“That poor person probably didn’t have any family. I mean why else would they be left alone in the hallway?” another replied.
Why indeed.
That poor person.
Another person whispered, and then another.
“At least it’s only food poisoning,” I heard said. “It could be worse. We could be dead like that person.”
Was this person close to me or something?
Not that I could look or anything.
I was practically strapped down to the bed.
All I’d accomplish by pulling the blanket up was binding it tighter around me.
I hummed to myself as to not think about that poor dead person likely only feet away from me, and instead tried to think about what I would say to Slone if I ever saw him again.
I’d broken up with him.
In fact, I’d done it so spectacularly over the phone that I was embarrassed with myself.
My sister had laughed about her antics later—my god, who the hell showed their twin sister photoshopped photos of their possible boyfriend and thought it was a good idea?—but I wasn’t laughing.
Instead, I was fuming.
I was also seconds away from leaving the circus and never coming back, and fuck their inheritances.
I loved my sisters.
Truly, I did.
But Hades was pushing my buttons.
In fact, if I didn’t see her again for another two months, that would be too early.
I couldn’t believe that I’d been played by her.
I also couldn’t believe that my rash behavior had ruined a relationship I was really beginning to think might be ‘it’ for me.
I mean, it took a lot to deal with the things wrong with me, yet Slone had all but shown that he could handle that and more.
It wasn’t every day that you could find someone to make love to you with the possibility of you falling asleep on them in the middle of the deed.
There was a rush of whispered conversations, and then a ‘Oh my God!’ and ‘It’s him!’
I wondered who ‘it’s him’ was.
The doctor, possibly?
Because I knew I’d been sitting here long enough that I might get excited and say that if one actually acknowledged my presence.
I mean, seriously, it’d been at least an hour of me lying there.
Surely a possibly broken neck trumped someone with food poisoning, right?
“She’s in the hallway, sir.”
CHAPTER 19
Ari is equal parts ‘fuck around and find out’ and ‘please don’t yell at me or I’ll cry.’
-Slone to his mother
SLONE
The drive to the circus in the middle of nowhere, Kentucky, was endless.
I’d gone over the conversation I was about to have with her about a thousand times on the drive over. I’d rented a truck. I’d flown on a commercial flight for three hours. And now I was here, less than ten minutes away, and nervous as fuck.
Sometimes, I really, really hated the media.
I could see the good it did.
But I also saw all the harm it inflicted.
How many times had I been in the headlines for shit that didn’t have anything to do with football? Hundreds.