Chapter One
Everyone always thought pain was the worst part of a migraine.
That is, if they even believed migraines were real. The idea that literal head pain was justfigurativelyin the sufferer’s head was a lot more widespread than I’d have believed without proof.
Proof like my ex-boyfriend, whose voice grated even more over the phone than it had in person during the year I’d wasted trying to live up to his expectations. It’d taken me that long to figure out that he couldn’t live up to mine, either, no matter how moderate I kept them.
“It’s seventy-five degrees out, David,” he said—shouted—into my ear, and I winced, panting through the wave of nausea brought on by the spike of pain. “No one could possibly be cold. I’m not going through all my stuff today, I’m busy. Suck it up. Use some willpower, gods.”
Willpower. Yes, of course. I counted down from five.Four, three, two, one…
“Men don’t feel pain they don’t want to feel,” he said, right on cue. “It’s biological. So like, go to your therapist, or something. I don’t even know what fucking heating pad you’re talking about, okay? Just buy one or something. I have to go.”
“Hello? Kenny? Please don’t—damn it,” I moaned, moaning again when the first moan sent a throb through my right eye, slumping down into the couch with a final, hopeless whimper.
Gods, I was like those knights in the Monty Python movie who kept saying the word that hurt them over and over again, until they were caught in an infinite feedback loop of screaming and flailing and covering their ears.
Except that for me it was moaning.
And calling my ex.
The heating pad. Ugh. I curled into a shivering ball, dropping the phone on the coffee table next to the couch and wrapping my arm around my head. Migraines made me so cold. The pain was seriously the least of it, even though that sucked giant swinging balls, too. It was the shivers. The queasy tilting of my stomach.
What had possessed me to think that Kenny would a) remember that we’d owned a heating pad when we lived together, b) try to find it in the stuff he’d taken from our closet without my permission, or c) spend thirty seconds of his day thinking about someone other than himself? Maybe if the heating pad had come equipped with a mirror, a set of weights, and a flirty personal trainer named Scotty, it’d have been of some mild interest to him.
Kenny and Scotty. They probably didn’t need a heating pad at all in their migraine-free, perfectly fit and toned existence, unless it was useful for muscle aches from too much lifting.
Or no, sorry. Men didn’t feel pain unless we wanted to.
And yet they couldn’t bother to give the stupid heating pad back to me.
Buy one. Thanks a million. I’d never have thought of that on my own.
As if I could leave the house like this. Someplace might have one available for delivery, but it’d hurt too much to try to use the app I had for groceries and stuff. Looking at my phone was agony when the headache had really gotten its claws into me, and anyway, my vision blurred so that I couldn’t see the screen.
It made me weepy, too. Not always. But this one was turning into a real tear-jerker.
Like, how had I not known Kenny was cheating on me? When he’d been turning me down for sex for—well, most of our relationship, actually. And when he spent four hours a day “at the gym”? Although sadly, they were such gym rats that they probablywereworking out in the traditional sense most of the time rather than having sex at Scotty’s place.
Tears trickled down the side of my nose and spread all wet and slimy over my cheek, gluing it to the tweedy fabric of the couch cushion and sticking strands of my overlong blond hair to both.
I could do better than Kenny, right? Of course I could. Not that I had either before or after, or anything. I had no idea why we’d been dating in the first place except that he’d suggested I blow him when we were standing near the same bar, and then we’d kind of kept hanging out, and eventually moved in together, because we both liked action movies and me blowing him. Also, his lease had expired.
But any second now, a better guy would come along, and my lack-of-love life would take a dramatic turn for the better.
Yeah. Aaany second now.
After hours, or maybe an eternity of shivering on the couch and crying, I lapsed into something like unconsciousness.
When I woke, I blinked into blurry gloom. Somehow night had fallen. Light from the walkway outside my apartment shone in through the gaps in the vertical blinds, letting me see slivers of my living room. I fumbled for my phone and squinted in the sudden glare of the screen. Nearly eleven, which meant I’d been out for…a bunch of hours. Who fucking cared.
The throbbing had died down to a sullen, lurking echo of my previous misery, but I knew from experience that one wrong move would have it roaring back. Moving like a creaky geriatric, I pushed myself up, swung my feet to the floor, and slumpedthere, panting. Migraine hangovers were such a bitch—and yet another thing people didn’t believe existed.
My stomach lurched, but I needed to eat, or at least drink water, to get some strength back.
Kitchen. That meant standing up and crossing the room, but I managed it.
Turning on the kitchen light left me temporarily blind, and I staggered around with a hand shading my eyes, getting the water (which I spilled all over myself before the cup made it to my mouth), putting on the kettle (the lid clattered to the floor, reverberating in my skull, and bounced painfully off my toes), and finding a mug for some tea.
