What a way to go.
By the time I got my discharge paperwork, it was just after eight o’clock. I’d been in the hospital for nearly ten hours, most of it spent waiting. My injuries were minor, but I was ready to collapse in bed.
Tomorrow, I’d deal with the fallout. The job search. The rebuild.
The hospital bill.
I’d had a lovely conversation with the hospital’s insurance representative when I was lying in a bed waiting to get stitched up. And by “lovely,” of course, I mean “short,” because I didn’t have insurance, and I’d made too much money at my old job to qualify for Medicaid.
Now, falling between the cracks of two jobs, I was screwed.
I didn’t know how much the bill would be, but I knew I couldn’t afford it. Hell, I couldn’t even afford to live. And how would I find a new apartment if I couldn’t show proof of employment or old paystubs? How could I pay off my stupid, idiotic loan without an income?
Three stitches and a cheap plastic splint on my finger were going to put me in more debt than I’d been in my entire life.
Stupid Jared Branson and his stupid perfume penis. Buff and polish the giant glass dildo, they said. Do it out of the way so we can keep shooting, they told me.
I’d worked for less than seven full days at that place, and it would cost me all my financial stability. I’d been a placeholder and a fool.
The glass doors whirred as they opened for me, a tired-looking doctor brushing past me as I stepped outside. Cool, damp air surrounded me, but I couldn’t take a deep breath. I couldn’t seem to think straight.
Apparently, this would be the thing that sent me over the edge. I sank onto a bench under the hospital’s high awning, white, fluorescent lights spilling onto the pavement around and in front of me. The emergency department wasn’t far away, just on the other side of the parking lot, and I watched an ambulance come in with lights and sirens blazing.
I saw the shape of a person on a stretcher, and I hoped for their own sake they had insurance.
I tried to pull myself back from the brink. It was just a bill, and I didn’t even know how much it would be. For all I knew, by the time I got it, I’d have a new job and a new apartment. At worst, it would be a debt that would take me a few years to pay off. I could handle that. Logically, I knew.
But my eyes stung, and, horribly, humiliatingly, I felt myself begin to cry.
It was getting fired from the vintage clothing store, and then getting the notice to vacate my home, and then getting broken up with, and then the stupid giant dildo-that-wasn’t-a-dildo, and then getting fired again. And now this.
How could I ever get ahead? I didn’t even know what that meant! Getting ahead? Ahead of who? I didn’t want to be ahead of anyone. All I wanted was a bit of stability. As I leaned back against the cool metal of the bench, watching the paramedics close up their ambulance to make space for the next arrival, I wondered how everything had become so bleak.
The logical thing to do would be to ask one of my friends for money. Penny had married a man who made a fortune in tech, and she ran a successful small business of her own making dog clothes. They could probably pay my hospital bill with the loose change from their couch cushions.
Besides, Penny would understand. We’d reconnected a few years ago, and she hadn’t been much better off than I was now.
There was Dani and Layla, but I wasn’t that close with them, and I hated asking them for money. Then there was Bonnie, but Bonnie was in just as much of a bind as I was. She’d had to take a job as a nanny for a man she’d slept with years ago at a business conference. The only silver lining for her was that he hadn’t remembered her.
She wouldn’t have the means to help me. The logical choice was to call Penny for help. I’d known her since college, and we were close.
But I stared at the blank screen of my phone, and it wasn’t the hour that stopped me from messaging her.
It was the fact that I was the placeholder.
What if I was a placeholder for her too? What if this friendship had blossomed again after we’d lost touch after college, but if I asked her for this favor, she pulled away? What if we’d reconnected but she didn’t really care about me, not enough to mix money with friendship?
Then I’d lose her. And I’d lose my friendship with Bonnie and Dani and Layla by association. Sure, we didn’t spend as much time together as we did a few years ago, since most of my girlfriends had their children and husbands now. But maybe the gulf between us would just be a little bit too wide to bridge if I pointed out how broke I really was.
It would kill me to realize I was a placeholder for them too.
So I couldn’t ask them for money. I couldn’t even ask to crash on one of their couches-and by one of their couches, of course, I mean one of the multitudes of luxurious guest rooms they owned in various buildings dotted around Manhattan and beyond.
Asking for help would be tantamount to plastering a big neon sign on my forehead that said, I DON’T BELONG HERE.
A hot tear rolled down my cheek, and I brushed it angrily away, jarring the edge of my splint on my face. Pain lanced through my sprained finger, and I let out a whimper.
Panic and heartbreak and despair whirled around me like I was the eye of the hurricane, and my emotions were the wind and rain wreaking destruction on the life I’d carefully built. I sat in the eye of the storm, dead inside, waiting for the hurricane to flatten me.
That’s why I didn’t hear his approach until I saw a pair of shiny black shoes come to a stop in front of me.
My gaze traveled up, up, up. Up the perfectly tailored pants with the quarter-break and crisp center pleat. Up the bespoke shirt-white again-that was now without a tie and open at the collar. Up the strong jaw and the hard male lips, until my gaze came to a stop on glittering blue eyes.
We stared at each other for a moment.
“You’re crying,” Jared Branson told me with a frown.
“No, I’m not,” I replied, stupidly, because I definitely was.
“Did they not give you enough pain meds?” He shifted to look at the sliding glass doors behind me, like he had half a mind to march in there and demand I be treated again.
Maybe I’d hit my head, and I was hallucinating. Why else would the billionaire in charge of the company that had just fired me be standing there?
His jaw clenched, and he returned those thick-lashed eyes to me. “Why are you sitting here on your own?” he demanded.
I reared back. “Why are you here at all?”
He blinked slowly, ignoring my question. I arched a brow, but I was fragile. I didn’t have it in me to resist, so I answered his question first. “I was just enjoying the evening air before I head home,” I told him, not mentioning the pit of despair I’d accidentally fallen into. “Now it’s your turn. Why are you here?”
He nodded to the black sedan idling behind him. “I’m here to take you home.”
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.