Page 98 of The Don's Virgin Obsession
That was more than a hangover.
Laila kept talking beside me about furniture deliveries, but I barely heard her.
By Friday, Vaughn still hadn’t shown up.
That man worked too much to disappear for days straight.
I tried calling him once around lunch.
Straight to voicemail.
I hung up before leaving a message.
Marcus came over that night with food and to watch a movie. He was lying back on my couch, talking about some business deal he had with his brother they were working on, while I stared at the TV, pretending to pay attention.
“You listening?” he asked finally.
“Hm?”
He laughed. “Exactly.”
“Sorry.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
He looked at me for a second before nodding.
Marcus pulled me into him and kissed my forehead while the movie played in the background, but my mind kept drifting somewhere else.
Vaughn.
Everything about him seemed off lately, and now he was gone.
Marcus eventually left around midnight.
I hugged him at the door and watched him drive off before closing it.
The second the lock clicked, I grabbed my keys. I had to check on Vaughn.
V Saint
“I spent seven days hiding from the world while my mind kept dragging me back to her.”
The first two days at the Ritz felt good. No work. No people. No fake smiling to mask my pain. Just me, weed, and silence.
That was always my thing when life started getting too hectic for me.
By day three, my stomach was fucked up.
I woke up throwing up again, stomach cramping, while sweat ran down my chest and face. I flushed the toilet, rinsed my mouth out, and rolled another blunt anyway.
Dumb.
I knew it was dumb.
The doctor already warned me before that weed was fucking my stomach up, but once my mind got bad enough, I stopped caring what it did to my body. At least it wasn’t cocaine, that's what I kept telling myself.
