Page 155 of Forbidden You

“Jensen! You asshole! I need to talk to her, dammit! Give me the phone!” I try to get up, but I fall over my own feet before I land on the grass face first.

Oh, damn.That's…wet. But it smells like…fresh grass.

I think my brain is not working very well.

“Fucking hell, Bodi.”

I roll over, crying at the sky while I keep chanting her name like I’m possessed. Because that’s how it feels and it’s tearing me apart. Eating me up from the inside like a parasite I can’t get rid of. I’m merely a shell without her.

“I’m sorry, Keeks,” Jensen mumbles through the phone. “Yeah, he’s alright.”

“No, I’m not!”

Not even a little bit. I’m shivering on the dewy front lawn of my uncle’s home in Maine. Where’s Hunter with my hoodie?

“Or at least, he will be,” he continues. “I’ll take care of him. I don’t know. I’ll ask him to call you tomorrow. Yeah. Sorry.”

No, not tomorrow.

Now.

I need to talk to her now.

But words don’t fall from my tongue anymore.

I close my eyes, sucking in a deep breath of the brisk air of the night before doing it again. The cold gives me chills, but in a good way.

Maybe it will give me some clarity, because my mind is all over the place. Maybe I need the cold to clear the fog. I rest my hands on top of my stomach, the tears still tainting my cheeks until my eyes grow heavy.

Really really heavy.

Slowly, my consciousness simmers away, drifting me off in a dreamless sleep under the star filled sky. It’s deep and heavy, sucking me in like a vacuum, but it feels better than the uncontrollable state I was in when I was awake.

I lie there for I don’t know how long, but it can’t be more than a few minutes because the sky looks exactly the same when Jensen’s foot jerks me awake.

I squint my eyes open and he’s peering down at me, his hands on his sides and a scowl in place.

“You really lost your mind, haven’t you?”

“Pfft, I wish.”

“Get up, Bodi.”

“I can’t.” I roll to my side, placing my palms between my neck and my cheek before I close my eyes again. “Just leave me alone.”

“Guys? A little help?” He shouts after I hear him mutter some words, but luckily for me, the vacuum is strong, sucking me right back to the oblivious state he pulled me out of.

***

When I wake up, my head feels like it’s about to burst any second now. The pounding is excruciating. Like I went to sleep resting my head on African drums.

But the warmth of the blanket covering my body tells me I’m in bed instead of outside on the front lawn where I expected to wake up.

What the fuck happened last night?

Fireball.

Vomit.

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