Page 24 of Wait for Him

Impressive, really.

She might as well kick me while I'm down.

Fucking hell.

2022

Rose

Sunlight filters through the blinds as I blink my eyes open, and my first coherent thought is that I really regret not putting up curtains yet. The second is that everything fucking hurts.

God, what time is it?

I reach for my phone on the floor beside the air mattress and squint at the screen until the numbers stop swimming. Eleven a.m. Damn it. I should've been at the office hours ago. Somehow, I slept straight through all three of my alarms, which has happened approximately never in my adult life, and judging by the collection of missed calls and messages lighting up my screen, people have noticed.

I'm covered in sweat, enough that the T-shirt I slept in is sticking to my skin. Didn't I adjust the thermostat before I lay down? I vaguely remember doing it, but most of last night is champagne and exhaustion and moving boxes, so maybe I only thought about it. I push myself onto one elbow to check, and the entire room tilts violently to the left while a throbbing pain blooms right between my eyes.

Nope.

I lower myself back onto the mattress and close my eyes until the apartment decides to hold still again.

We just moved into this building, and I was dead set on spending the first night in my first high-rise apartment, even if that meant sleeping on an air mattress surrounded by bare floors and eating takeout off a moving box. We bought the tower months ago, renovations finally wrapped a couple of weeks back, and now the place is ours. Headquarters downstairs, our homes above it, and floors of units we'll sell and lease besides. The Sullivan & Bennett name on a building. Something we made real enough to stand inside, even though I keep waiting for that fact to settle into my bones.

Maybe we celebrated too hard last night, and this is just a hangover with ambitions.

Because, holy mother of shit, I feel like hell.

I lie there staring at the ceiling, negotiating with myself over whether I should suffer through it and get downstairs to the office or close my eyes for another hour. I never take the second option. I don't have a second-option kind of life. There is always somewhere to be, something to fix, somebody waiting for an answer, and I've spent too many years making myself dependable to suddenly become the woman who sleeps until noon on a workday.

Then my body starts shuddering. It begins somewhere deep enough that I can't control it, a shiver rolling through me from my teeth all the way down to my toes, even though I'm sweating beneath the blanket. I pull it tighter around myself and curl onto my side, telling myself that one more hour isn't going to kill anyone.

That's all the permission my body was waiting for.

Sleep takes me before I can even put my phone down.

***

I need to pee.

That's the thought that drags me awake, urgent enough to cut through whatever thick, ugly sleep I've fallen into. At least the sun has stopped assaulting me, although I have no idea whether that's because the day has moved on or clouds have rolled in. I don't care. The bathroom is twenty feet away and somehow looks like it's in another fucking zip code.

I try to throw the cover off and immediately know something is wrong.

They're too heavy.

Not actually heavy, obviously. They're blankets. Blankets don't suddenly gain fifty pounds while you're asleep. But my arms don't seem to understand that, and peeling them away from my body takes enough effort that I have to stop afterward and breathe.

This isn't a hangover.

That realization should scare me more than it does, but I need to pee so badly that fear is currently losing to my bladder. I manage to slide off the air mattress onto the floor, where I stay for a moment with my forehead resting against the cool wood, gathering enough strength to get onto my hands and knees.

Standing isn't happening. Fine. Dignity is negotiable.

I crawl.

One hand. One knee. Then the other. Slow enough that the bathroom doesn't seem to get any closer, while sweat runs down my back and my arms shake beneath my weight. Somewhere past the halfway point, they simply decline to participate anymore. There isn't even a warning. One second they're holding me up, and the next they fold.

My face hits the floor.