Chapter 29
I swallowed glass, and it’s worked its way behind my eyes into my brain.
I got run over by a couple of golf carts on my last FroggoDoggo walk and crawled my way home where I then hallucinated an entire conversation between Mike and my brother I wasn’t meant to hear.
It’s the only explanation that makes sense, given how I feel when I stumble from my Bali bed back into my cottage at dusk.
I want to sleep, but I need to take something for this headache.
I grab a warm can of ginger ale from above my fridge and fumble in the fading light through the pills in my medicine cabinet until I find the acetaminophen.
I spill half the bottle all over the zebra cactus next to the sink, but fish two pills out from the pot.
I’ll leave the rest for Future Beatrice to clean up.
Right after she sorts out the rest of this mess that has become her life… my life. Whatever.
I brace myself against the bathroom counter as a shiver spreads down my spine.
Did Mike really call me beautiful? The possibility makes my heart flutter, but that’s got to be the fever.
I need a hot shower, but the thought is exhausting.
I pop the acetaminophen, down half my ginger ale, and shuffle back to my bed.
But I’m too miserable to sleep. If I could find my phone, I could play an audiobook, but that will only make me think of Mike.
The man has ruined fiction for me. I still cast him as the leading man in every book I read.
Even if there isn’t major swoon happening in a novel, I wonder what his annotations would be, what he would underline…
Instead of getting lost in a great story, I’m torturing myself with thoughts of Mike.
And why? So I can be heartbroken when he kisses another woman?
I moan. I ache all over, but not because of Mike. He can say and do whatever he likes. It means nothing to me. So what if he called me beautiful? He’s called me a lot of other things besides—difficult, prickly, insane, a cactus. I don’t care. I’m living my best life, and—
Oh, who am I kidding? I am a cactus and a fraud.
You don’t sob all night over a man who means nothing to you.
You don’t feel faint and feverish when you replay in your head the time he called you beautiful.
You don’t fall asleep with his annotated volume of sonnets under your pillow just to feel close to him.
You certainly don’t imagine what would have happened if you’d kissed him that night at the pier instead of running back to Del Mar.
I curl into a ball and whimper, but I know it has nothing to do with my fever.
I, Beatrice Hero McKinney, against my better judgment and last shreds of sanity, am in love with Mike Benedick, whom I cannot stand.
Whom I’ve sworn to the universe many times over and through lots of hysteric sobbing that I hate.
Passionately. And I do. I hate him. And I love him, and I can’t read fiction without thinking of him.
And he called me beautiful and a cactus, and I am literally burning up thinking about it. So why am I so cold?
I pull an extra blanket up to my chin and shiver myself back into a fretful slumber. Maybe it’s not glass lodged in my throat, but spines finally bursting through my skin.