Total pages in book: 191
Estimated words: 182070 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 910(@200wpm)___ 728(@250wpm)___ 607(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 182070 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 910(@200wpm)___ 728(@250wpm)___ 607(@300wpm)
There was no ambulance. He’d driven me himself. After he’d reminded everyone that he’d had much worse happen when he used to fight. Asshole.
“Be there in no time,” Zac told me. “Let me know if they take you to the back so I know where you’re at, all right?”
He was coming. God, he really was the best. “Okay, I will, but if you can’t come, I promise I’ll be fine. I just didn’t want you to wait around to eat with me.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” my friend said before ending the call without a goodbye.
I sighed and set my phone down on my thigh, staring at the black screen.
“Boyfriend?” came Gunner’s question out of nowhere.
I slid up a little straighter in the barely cushioned chair of the waiting room of the urgent care facility he’d driven us to. “No, my friend. He’s on his way if you’d like to leave. He should be here in a little bit.”
And actually, I really would prefer for him to leave. I had asked if Deepa could just drive me instead of him, but he’d said someone had to stay and work the juice bar since we were going to have to leave the front desk empty, so no, Deepa couldn’t drive me. This man needed Jesus. And maybe an exorcism.
And apparently, he was going to ignore my request again. “I’ll wait,” Gunner said, sounding like he would rather be just about anywhere else.
He was doing this to spite me.
“It’s all right though. I know it was an accident. I can give you the bill when I get it. I’m sure they won’t give it to me tonight,” I told the man who I did actually hold responsible for all this shit.
All because he hadn’t listened.
And he knew damn well it was his fault too.
“No, I’ll wait,” Gunner repeated himself, sounding annoyed. Like I wanted to be here. Like I’d wanted to slice my elbow open.
Like I’d wanted any of the shit that had happened today to happen.
I just wanted to crawl back into bed and start the whole day over again.
It had started with a phone call from Deepa while I’d been getting dressed to go into work for a few hours. Her mom was sick, she had stage three breast cancer, and she was going to go back home to help her out. She’d apologized over and over again for deciding to leave, and for moving out of the house she was splitting with two roommates—a house she’d offered to let me come live in while I figured out what I was doing. She had offered to let me take over the bedroom she rented, but I didn’t want to live with people I barely knew. My assistant, my friend, was leaving, and I had no idea what the hell I was going to do or who was going to help me from now on. I was going to miss her a lot, but at the end of the day, what really mattered was that Deepa was there for her mom, and that the other woman fought as hard as she could for her health.
So there was that.
And then there was the second thing. The email that started it all. Another stupid, stupid thing I’d done.
I’d only been holding it together because I was at work when the emails had started coming through from my viewers. I’d read their messages and checked my WatchTube channel on my own to confirm what they’d been trying to tell me during my brief breaks in between members and Gunner’s loops of terror around the building.
My viewers hadn’t been lying. The profile on my channel had been changed to some bogus person.
And maybe I’d been pretty distracted over that when I’d busted my ass and landed myself at urgent care, waiting to see a doctor so I could get stitched up or glued back together or whatever it was they were going to need to do. I was pretty sure I’d stopped bleeding finally, but my elbow was just throbbing like crazy to the same beat as my pulse.
Squeezing my eyes closed, I tried to tell myself it—everything today—wasn’t the end of the world. That I hadn’t actually lost anything. That I could get it all back. Most of it. Not Deepa. I needed to make some phone calls, fill out a form or two, and then everything would go back to normal, which had been my plan the instant I’d realized what had happened.
I had just been formulating a plan to start pretend-gagging to try and leave work early when this shit had happened.
How the hell did I let this happen? I asked myself as I shifted around in the uncomfortable chair and made eye contact with a woman across the room who was leaning her head against the wall and genuinely looking like shit.