Page 1 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

Prologue

I had a headache.

Let me rephrase.

I had a headache that felt determined to split my skull open.

My eyes refused to open. Every muscle in my body stayed stubbornly still. I barely registered the mattress beneath me. All I could feel was the relentless pounding behind my eyes. A jackhammer ripping through my skull without mercy, rattling every thought and every nerve.

The pain spread everywhere. It seeped into my neck, settled in my shoulders, crawled down my spine, and sank into every aching limb until it felt like my entire body had become one giant bruise.

I was going to kill Felicity.

This was, objectively and completely, her fault.

I’d told her not to let me get this drunk.

Apparently, she’d decided to ignore me.

Now I’d reached the point where my body couldn’t decide whether to feel everything or nothing at all. Every miserable second of this hangover belonged to her.

It took three attempts to pry my eyes open.

Three.

The first greeted me with a searing burst of light that stabbed straight through my skull, forcing them shut again. The second left the world swimming in a useless blur. By the third, the room finally stopped tilting long enough for me to focus.

An unfamiliar ceiling stared back at me.

The pounding in my head faded into the background as a new kind of panic settled in.

I blinked.

Or at least, I thought I did.

The movement scraped across my eyes, slow and gritty, sending a fresh spike of pain straight through my already throbbing skull.

Even blinking hurt?

Oh, Felicity had better hope I never saw her again.

Once the urge to squeeze my eyes shut again passed, I took another look at the ceiling.

Plain. Off-white. Painfully boring.

My stomach pulled tight.

Last night surfaced in broken flashes—neon smeared across dark rooms, bass pounding through the floor, Felicity laughing beside me—then nothing. Just this. This aggressively bland void that belonged to absolutely nobody I knew.

Felicity’s ceiling would never tolerate this much emptiness. Even her bathroom had a constellation glowing above the shower, cheap plastic stars she’d stuck up at two in the morning. Three years later, they were still dusted with glitter.

She couldn’t leave a blank surface alone. Give her a blank wall and she’d have fairy lights, photographs, a ridiculous quote in cursive, and probably a tiny plastic flamingo taped to it before dinner.

This place had none of that.

My fingers curled into the sheets.

Okay.