I press my head back into the pillow and grimace. “I think it will stop when the elephant gets off my head.”
She smiles at my lame joke. “How about nausea?”
The queasiness seems less now that the alarm isn’t blaring in my ear, but I nod anyway.
“That’s not unusual with a concussion as severe as yours, love. The doctor left orders. I can up your pain meds and give you something to settle your stomach.” She gives the machine at the head of my bed a once-over, then turns for the door. “I’ll be right back.”
I look at the clock over the door as she pushes through it. Almost eight. I’ve been out for seven hours.
There’s grumbling to my right and I turn my head gingerly in time to see Dad’s bloodshot eyes blink awake. He gives them a quick rub with the pad of his thumb and forefinger and straightens up some in his chair. His white dress shirt is rumpled and his salt and pepper hair is disheveled.
He lifts his hand and taps his forefinger on his head. “What happened?”
With the words, a gust of stale whiskey breath leaves his mouth and turns my already touchy stomach. “I’m going to throw—” But that’s as far as I get before I’m puking down the front of my green hospital gown. The effort sets my brain on fire and the pain makes me heave again.
I remember the reason this all happened was because I forgot to eat when nothing but yellow slime comes up. But the acid taste of it makes me gag harder.
Just when I’m 98.2 percent sure I’m dying, the door swings open. I’m mid-retch, and praying for the nurse, since Dad has backpedaled his chair across the room at this point. So when I see six foot four of hot water polo coach, it cements that last 1.8 percent.
I am totally dying.
He’s got a brown paper coffee cup in his hand and he looks nearly as rumpled as my dad…which on him, only makes him hotter.
“Jesus, Addie,” he says, lunging across the room. He sets his coffee down and grabs the semicircular barf bin off the nightstand, about an inch from where Dad had been sitting, and hands it to me. I heave into it, but there’s nothing more to come up but a horrible, retching sound. But then, as if I wasn’t already humiliated enough, to my total mortification, Marcus bolts to the bathroom, comes back with a towel, and proceeds to start pressing it to my chest and stomach to sop up the mess.
So now my head is splitting, my stomach is heaving, and my puke wet hospital gown, that was paper thin to start with, is stuck to my chest like some sick wet T-shirt contest. And there’s no way Marcus can miss that, despite everything, my nipples are starting to poke into the wet fabric as he mops up said puke.
This is the total opposite of invisible.
I grab his wrist to make him stop and yank the stupid monitor off my finger in the process. The machine over my head starts screeching again and I have never wanted to be more dead than I do right this second.
Marcus stops mopping and his expression shifts instantly from “man on a mission” to “look at that poor injured puppy.”
“Hey,” he says, lowering himself to sit on the side of my bed and repositioning the finger monitor. A second later, the machine stops its auditory assault. “Is it your head? Are you in pain?”
I’m not sure what prompted the sudden switch in gears until he lifts a hand to my face and thumbs a tear off my temple just before it rolls into my ear.
Damn.
I’m crying. The only thing that could make this more mortifying. But now that they’re flowing, I can’t stop the tears. I roll onto my side away from him. “Will you just go?” I whimper. “Please.”
“You heard her. She doesn’t want you here.”
All my insides contract at Dad’s gruff growl and I feel like I’m going to heave again, but I swallow it back.
“You’re going to be okay?” Marcus asks, his voice full of concern. He doesn’t add the “with him,” but I hear it anyway. My dad’s state of drunkenness clearly hasn’t escaped his notice.
And then it occurs to me…I’ve been out for seven hours. Have they been talking?
Oh, God.
This feels like that classic walking-down-the-hall-naked nightmare. The universe has just sliced me open and laid me out for Marcus to see. And I know those piercing eyes of his don’t miss a thing—all the dark sludge that I’ve tucked away in the hidden corners of my soul.
“Please,” is all I can manage as the tears flow thicker. I pray for the bed to open up and swallow me whole. But, of course, it doesn’t.
Nothing is going my way today.
Chapter 3
Marcus
I’ve known this girl for, like, five minutes. She’s asking me to leave. Begging me, really. I should just go.
But I don’t trust her father.