Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 80495 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80495 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
In short, this morning, I feel like an epic death, but I’m still alive. Hell must have been closed for business last night and I got denied entry.
I’m kidding. Goodness. Hell is more of a metaphor for people these days, even if they are religious, and I don’t believe in it.
Now that Ignacia’s heard I’m awake, I hear her steps on the stairs. I don’t have an alarm set, but normally, I’m up at the butt crack of dawn. Jesus. I’m starting to use her words.
I’m pretty good at sleeping for ten minutes here or there and being awake on my internal clock just fine. But not this morning. This morning, I feel like a bunch of ground-up bones dumped into a sack. Taking a dive off that roof was about as fun as tweezing out all my pubes.
I’m sitting on the edge of the bed and debating how I’m going to get downstairs to get dressed and showered and become the tough as ass—fucking again, damn it—bodyguard I need to be and how I’m going to finish this job with a barely functioning body when Ignacia appears holding a vintage tin tray heaped with food.
“What are you doing up? Get back into bed!” she chastises.
“Oh, lovely. Breakfast in bed. Thanks, but no thanks. You don’t need to treat me like I’m an invalid.”
“Your tongue still hurls out insults just fine, I see, and the fall didn’t affect your lovely, sunny personality.” She sweeps the tray onto her side of the bed, which is neatly made. “I made it all healthy. Oatmeal, a banana, and chai tea because I know how much you love it.” She winks. “Kidding. It’s coffee. I went out and got some.”
“You went out?” No! No, no, no. This is what happens when I let my guard down.
“I did, yes. To the grocery store in town. A very small, perfectly safe town.”
“You’re not supposed to go anywhere without me,” I grit.
She lifts a shoulder, and her brows shoot to her hairline. “Umm, have you noticed that you’re barely alive? You look like you went out to the woods and got into a fight with a trollicorn.”
For the love of all the hairy beasts, I can smell the coffee, and it’s temptingly delicious. “A what?”
“Like a mix between a troll and a unicorn. Except the troll was the dad, and he was kind of nice, but the unicorn was the mom, and she wasn’t nice at all. I think those things are terrifying, actually. They’d mean so much business with that horn. Trolls just get a hard time because they’re not so easy on the eyes, which is plain mean. I think they’d be okay, or at least, there should be good ones in the world.”
“You do know trolls are a fictional invention, right?”
“That’s what you think,” she huffs. “You could be wrong, you know.”
“I think their existence would have been proven true by now if it was ever going to happen.”
“They could just be hiding,” she insists.
I scoff. “Not many places to hide with the rate humanity is destroying the planet.”
“Goodness. So crabby this morning when you’re hurting.”
“I am not—”
She chuckles, cutting me off. Shaking her head, she walks around the bed and touches my cheek. Not the scraped-up one, but the other one. Then, she tilts my face to the light, and I’m so shocked that I just sit there and let her. “Ouch. I’ll get you some more ointment for the scrapes. How’s your side doing?”
“It’s fine. And the bandages are still okay. No more bleeding after last night.”
“You’re sure nothing is broken? Would you tell me if it was?”
“No, but I would call in a doctor, and I haven’t yet.”
“Your pump isn’t here yet,” she points out.
“It’s not nine yet.”
Her eyes drift to the ancient digital alarm clock on her nightstand. Hers. God. They’re both hers. This isn’t my bed, this isn’t my house, and Ignacia isn’t mine in any way.
Her fingers skim down my cheek, making me shiver and ache worse than the bastard roof. Then, she grasps my chin. “You’re going to let me take care of you today. I want you to stay in bed.”
“There’s zero chance that’s going to happen.” Gross. I can’t think of anything worse or more humiliating than being taken care of.
“Do you ever think a hug might fix a lot of things? Like a real one? That if someone cared about you, it might actually fix the things inside you that hurt instead of tearing you up even worse?”
Sweet, innocent, lovely Ignacia—the woman with the pealing laughter and the joy and the sunshine where none should exist. She still believes there’s good in the world, and for her, there can be. But she wants to convince me that, for me, it’s possible, too.
“No.” My voice is flatter than my body after the impact of hitting the ground and also deader than I should be right now.