Chapter 18

I shouldn’t be hungover but I was. I was sprawled out on the bathroom floor, swallowing down the urge to hurl. I hadn’t even drunk the whole bottle. Hell, I don’t think I’d drunk half.

Why was I constantly getting sick? Was I fucking cursed?

“Babe.”

I felt a hand come and check my forehead. I opened my eyes, my vision a little blurry, and found Wes looking down at me. It was weird seeing him in a t-shirt and jeans all the time now that he’d graduated from residency and wasn’t working in a hospital anymore.

“Hey,” he said softly, giving me a small smile.

“Hi,” I replied, coughing to cover the gag from needing to throw up.

“Am I really that disgusting to look at?”

I rolled my eyes.

“No fever, at least,” he murmured. “Was it something you ate?”

I shook my head. “Drank,” I croaked.

“Too much whiskey?”

Fuck, he knew me. He read the look of shame on my expression and laughed.

“Come on, let’s get you to bed,” he said, gently taking me into his arms. He lifted me off the floor and carried me back to my room.

“What if I throw up on you?”

“There’s this great invention I have to tell you about, Celie,” he said, pressing his lips to my temple. “It’s called a washing machine.”

I punched him in the chest.

“Don’t call me that,” I grumbled.

“It’s been over a year now and I still don’t have the right to give you a nickname?”

“I don’t like nicknames.”

“And I don’t like Mondays, yet here we are.”

I snorted, but it was replaced a moment later with a groan. “I should be at work,” I complained. “I can’t keep slacking off like this.”

“Slacking off? Celine, that company runs just fine because of you. Give your employees some credit. They know what they’re doing.”

“Really? That’s why we’re six points behind goal in quality assurance?”

“No idea what that means. Don’t speak call center to me this early in the morning.”

“Well, you’re always speaking hospital to me so this should make us even.”

“Actually, I changed my mind,” he said. “You talk call center, I talk hospital, and we drive each other up the wall.”

“What the hell does that achieve?”

“Mind-blowing make-up sex.”

I laughed, and immediately my head throbbed. Ouch.

Wes grinned, gently setting me down on the bed. He took the hair tie from my bedside table, putting it between his teeth as he carefully braided my hair. Yeah, my boyfriend knows how to braid hair. Give a man a little sister and a job working with kids, and he’ll learn how to braid hair. I didn’t really mind at all, considering how good it felt to have his long fingers brushing through my hair. I sighed in relief when my hair was finally out of my face. If I had to throw up again, at least my hair wouldn’t be getting in the way.

“I’m going to go make us some breakfast.”

“Wes, I’ll throw up,” I protested.

“You’ll like it,” he said. “You need a hangover meal.”

“You don’t know what I need.”

“I’m a doctor. I know exactly what you need.”

“If you could stop shoving that in my face, that’d be great.”

He laughed. “What’s the matter, baby? Medical degree too stiff for you? I’ve got something else a whole lot stiffer if that’s what you’re into.”

“Disgusting.”

Wes went to go make the hangover meal, whatever the hell it’d be, and I slid my phone over from across the bed. A few missed calls from work, a text each from Addie and Rita asking after me, and one from Janie asking if I’d help her convince her mom to let her go on a trip to Big Bear with some friends for a week. At seventeen? If I was her mother, I sure wouldn’t let her go unsupervised to the mountains either.