Page 116 of Grumpy Sunshine

There was a temperature on the camera feed that read 103.

“Dang, it’s hot,” I said.“It’s only eight in the morning.”

“Gonna be a scorcher,” he teased as he shoved the phone into his pocket, cutting off the feed of a rocking limousine.

“What about the other guy?”I asked.

He winced.“Nothing that a little talk with the police didn’t fix.”

I leaned into his big body and said, “A police officer brought me my phone.I had the weirdest voicemail from the sexiest sounding man.”

His chuckle was deep and seductive.“Is that right?”

Twenty-Seven

Me realizing that 4 chips equals one tortilla…and I’ve had 87 of them.

—Aella’s secret thoughts

AELLA

8 days later

“Here, baby.”

I smiled, then groaned.

“Thanks,” I muttered, lips barely moving, as I popped the pain pill in my mouth.

If I’d thought that the gunshot wound to my face had hurt a couple of days ago, it was nothing compared to now.

I woke up every morning expecting the pain to feel better but was displeased to find out that it wasn’t.

Though, my doctor assured me that I was healing normally.

The problem was that as I “got better” I started to move around, talk, and eat a lot more.

And, since the bullet I’d been shot with traveled from underneath my eye in a downward path to lodge near my spine, it’d passed through several muscles that were pivotal.I couldn’t eat, sleep, talk, breathe, or even think without causing the healing muscles pain.

Hence the drugs that Chevy had gotten up to get for me.

Chevy caught a call, and he answered it before heading out onto the back deck, likely unable to hear over the loud announcer’s voice on the television.

It’d been eight days since I’d been shot, and Chevy hadn’t left my side a single second of it.

My dad was on the couch next to me.

My sister was in the recliner to the right of me.

Chevy was outside talking on the phone to someone at work, discussing tomorrow’s surgeries.

And my life was…perfect.

Tomorrow I’d be returning to school.

The pain was awful.

Despite it hurting to eat anything, I’d still stuffed my face with not one, not two, but three baskets of chips.

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