But with every word Weston said to me, it became increasingly harder to bite my tongue.
“Your words make you all the more guilty,” Weston sneered.
I didn’t know what happened then, but a wave of fury hit me all at once. My water bottle fell from my hand, thudding to the floor before it rolled a few feet away from us. Weston’s threat was very obvious and hung in the air right in front of my face.
His words broke the camel’s back and found a way into my heart, finishing off the cracks that Lennon started. Maybe if I looked at it from another angle, I’d realize that Weston was only trying to protect his brother. In the wrong way, no doubt, but still. He was telling me he cared about him and that he didn’t want to see him hurt.
It was another reason why I believed he really did have a heart. It just didn’t exist when it came to me.
My mind, body, and soul tried to go on the defensive, but my movements were sluggish, my words trapped in my throat as I tried to speak them. My body broke out into a cold sweat, every part of me turning clammy.
What the hell was happening?
My lips parted slightly. Weston stood there, his eyes downcast and settled on me. His face was expressionless, but then those thick, dark brows of his twisted into a line of concern.
Weston’s voice sounded a million miles away when he said my name.
My eyelids fluttered, my sight waning in and out as this intense feeling of nausea claimed my stomach. I tried toblink, tried to push through it, but anything I did, including my breathing, turned suspiciously snaillike.
“Oliv—” he said again, but I didn’t get to hear the end of it.
My entire body tightened with unease and then that woozy, lightheaded feeling that came whenever I had a migraine with an aura episode crashed into me. My body morphed into a thousand pounds, my arms and legs turning super heavy as my peripheral vision blurred and merged into my surroundings.
And everything…
in the room…
faded.
5
OLIVIA
Itried to blink through the fog that took over my head, but my eyelids were heavier than what I expected them to be. My throat was dry. I worked to swallow down the little bit of saliva that was in my mouth to offer it something.
My eyes cracked open a breath later, and this achy sensation blossomed in my hip. It spread over my skin to my outer thigh, but I couldn’t focus on that right then. First, I had to figure out what the hell happened. Why I fainted and?—
A dull throb echoed in from behind the background noise in my head. My headache was back. Or maybe it hadn’t entirely gone away. Either way, my body felt heavy and lethargic. The way it always did after bearing the stress of a migraine for too long.
A groan worked up my throat as my eyelids opened wider to make sense of the room. In the lack of light, a face glared down at me from above with one wrinkled brow drawing close to the other.Weston.His gaze flitted over my face, bouncing from my lips to my cheeks before finally looking directly at me.
Those eyes—steely, hard, and unrelenting—stared downat me. They were right there, making it hard to focus on anything else. The expression on his face was worse than what I remembered. He almost looked…pained.Like he was hurt. Not physically but emotionally.
My vision blurred when another ache streaked across my skull. I squeezed my eyelids shut.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Weston murmured, his rough palm coming up to my cheek. He ran it over my smooth skin until his fingers tickled the top of my ear and teased the strands of my chestnut hair.
I forced myself to swallow again, but it only reminded me of how uneasy my stomach felt. It was as if it was a waterbed and someone plopped down on it without knowing there was liquid inside of it.
“Olivia,” came Weston’s stern voice. “Open your eyes.”
I couldn’t.
“I-I can’t,” I stuttered out, barely shaking my head.
“Yes, you can.”
“No, I?—”
