Living With The Bad Boy [COMPLETE][VERSION ONE]

Chapter 27

Sienna

I don't wake up for another two hours but when I do, there's a throbbing pain in my head and the room around me is blurry and unfocused- but at least I can somewhat think straight. That's a small miracle after everything that just happened.

Everything that just happened...

"Oh my god!" I bolt upright, seeing Jase, who's sitting on the ground next to me, turn around, startled.

"Are you okay?" he asks, giving me a worried stare. "You were pretty out of it before."

Oh no. Oh no no no no no no no no. I was hoping that it was somehow some sort of strange concussion-induced hallucination or dream, but no. I really did ask Jase Turner to kiss me.

"Uh... yeah, sorry about that," I mumble, looking down. There's no need to recount any of this now, especially when Jase obviously doesn't feel the same. "I don't really remember what happened. One second I was chasing after Evan, and the next I woke up here. Everything in between is just a blur."

I see the relief on Jase's face and know instantly that I made the right choice. He clearly doesn't want to talk about... that... as much as I don't.

I'm not disappointed. At all. Because Jase and I are just friends. And both of us want to keep it that way. Right?

Jase spends the rest of the day in the TV room with me, though he's as moody and quiet as he was this morning, almost like something's been weighing on him. He barely looks at me in the eyes at all until my mom and Lizbeth get home when he abruptly leaves, not even casting me another glance.

I try to persuade my mother not to take me to the doctor, that I'm fine, but she ignores me- which is how I come to be sitting in the waiting room chair of Glendale County Urgent Care while my mother finishes talking the doctor's ear off about the adequate amount of rest for a concussed person and whether or not I'll ever recover and how much Advil is reasonable to take for a 5'2 teenage girl.

Finally my mother stops talking to the doctor and we leave, but I can't seem to get that god-awful smell of antiseptic and plain, scratchy soap out of my nose- the smell that brings me back to that night, three years ago. To all of the nights in waiting rooms in the year before that, pacing back and forth as calm doctors in white lab coats told us that everything would be fine.

Ha. Fine- with a kind of cancer that only had a 30% survival rate.

But he did survive. Within months, the cancer growth had started to regress, the doctors we saw ones with bright smiles on their faces, not the calm, serious look we'd almost grown accustomed to.

He and I were driving to his last round of chemo. Think of that. If we'd left just 5 minutes earlier, if I hadn't taken so long to find my earbuds...

No. This isn't my fault, I remind myself, though guilt still creeps through me. I really thought I was past this, thought the therapist I had for a few months directly after had done a good enough job convincing me that what happened really and truly was an accident.

But being in the doctor's office brings it all back.

My mother mistakes my silence on the drive home for tiredness and turns off the radio, leaving me to stare out the window, but really I'm just not in the mood to talk. Though that might just be the concussion. Apparently what started out as a very mild concussion from hitting my head on the floor of the Physics room has now become a lot worse- not severe enough for me to have permanent brain trauma or anything like that, but bad enough that I've been instructed to stay home and rest for the next week and "avoid mentally strenuous activities." My mother's already confiscated my phone.