Page 31 of Tell Me It’s Right

“I’m good, Liam. Really.”

“Oh, come on. There has to be something you use to help you feel better.”

“Ice,” I admit.

“Ice…”

“Like an ice pack.” I wave a hand around. “I put them on my head.”

“Right.” He pauses with one foot on the stairs. “You want heat too? Is this an alternating kind of thing?”

“I doubt Leo has a heating pad,” I mumble. Keava, maybe. But I don’t want to go through her stuff.

His only response is the sound of him jogging up the stairs.

I dig around in the box beside my bed while he’s gone until I find my medication, though it’s probably pointless. It never makes a difference unless I take it within the first half hour or so.

Liam’s quieter when he returns, like he’s being careful with his footsteps. “Here we are.”

I squint one eye open as he kneels beside my head, an ice pack in each hand. My vision has cleared enough to make out his facial features, at least. But that only means things will get worse from here. After my vision clears, that’s when the pain really starts to set in. I prop one behind my neck, then use the other to press against my forehead.

He sets a heating pad on the nightstand. “I’ll hold off on warming this up for, what do you think, twenty minutes? Twenty ice, twenty heat?”

He says that like he’s planning on staying that long.

“Liam…I can take it from here,” I say slowly, not wanting to sound ungrateful, but my confusion pulls heavily at my voice. “And I’m sure you have more important things to do. Appointments. Clients.”

“You trying to get rid of me? I’m hurt.”

“No—I just—I?—”

He lets out a soft chuckle and sits on the edge of the bed. “Gracie. Don’t make it so easy, remember? Besides, a few of my other artists have clients today. They can manage without me for a bit. I don’t have an appointment until later.”

I scowl even though he can’t see my face beneath the blankets. “You can’t make fun of me right now. Haven’t you heard you’re not supposed to kick someone when they’re down?”

“Gracie, I’d never make fun of you.”

I scoff, then wince at the pain that shoots through my temples. “Liam, that’s all you’ve done my whole life.”

There’s a pause. “I teased you growing up,” he says quietly. “I never made fun of you.”

I’d roll my eyes if that wouldn’t hurt too. “There’s a difference?”

“Yes.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I opt for nothing and adjust the ice pack to my eye sockets. I don’t know if it actually helps with the pain, or the different physical sensation is just a nice distraction, but either way, it makes it more bearable. There’s nothing worse than lying here with nothing to focus on but the pain.

“What does it feel like?” Liam asks after a while.

“Like I want to take an ice cream scooper and carve out my own eyeball.”

“These usually last all day, don’t they?”

I hum.

“What do you do then? Because you can’t look at anything, right? So no TV or whatever.”

I sigh. “If I’m lucky, I sleep through some of it. That’s unlikely since this one started so early in the day. Quiet sounds don’t bother me nearly as much as light, so I can listen to stuff to try to distract me. Music. Podcasts. Books. But sometimes even trying to process what I’m hearing hurts my brain too much. So I usually just lie here.”

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