Heartbreak Highway 1 by Harper Whitmore Read Free Book Online Page A

when she opened her mouth. Her stomach felt like it was on fire and her head felt like it had been emptied of brains and stuffed with rocks. Every time she moved it, they rolled around and put an unbearable pressure against the back of her eyes. She couldn’t open them without that pain and someone was making an ungodly noise somewhere in the suite. It sounded like they’d put boulders in the blender and were trying to grind them up. Eva thought she may just be reacting a bit dramatically to her first hangover, but the truth of the matter was, she wished she were dead.
    “Good morning, sunshine.”
    “Oh no, please, no pleasantries. I can’t take it.” Her eyes were still closed tight against the offending daylight but she could feel Marshall standing close to the bed. She tried to imagine what she must look like, but her imagination must somehow be linked to her hangover center because even that, hurt.
    Marshall laughed and if any of her muscles had worked voluntarily and without coercion from her currently inoperable brain, she may have hit him, or kicked him…or shamelessly, even bit him. She finally wrenched open an eye and endured the pain long enough to look at him standing next to her bed having the audacity to look like a million bucks. He was holding some terrible looking green concoction in one hand and a bottle of Ibuprofen in the other.
    “Amused, are we?” she asked.
    “A little bit, yeah,” he admitted. “Here, I made you my sure-fire hangover remedy and brought you some Ibuprofen. You’ll be good as new in no time.”
    “Why are you yelling?” she said, the sound of her own voice an intrusion on her senses.
    He laughed again, the miserable bastard….”I’m not yelling. Drink this and take these, you’ll feel better, I promise.”
    Eva used the one open eye to shoot a dagger at him. He still looked amused. He sat the glass and the pills down and took her under the arms, helping her to sit up against the pillows behind her. Then, he handed her two of the pills and the glass. She put the Ibuprofen in her mouth and put the glass close to her lips. Whatever was in it smelled worse than her breath and that was a wretched position to be in.
    “Can’t I just have some water?” she asked.
    “Sure,” Marshall said, “As soon as you drink that up.” He was evil, that was all there was to it. Eva put the nasty stuff to her lips and sipped at it. She felt the bile rising up in her throat like it had the night before and then suddenly she had a terrible thought…what if this was her bile? What if Marshall had hidden from her all of these years that he was a serial torture-ist and he’d concocted a drink for her made of her own discarded body fluids.
    “What’s in this?” she asked in a dry, raspy voice.
    “You don’t want to know,” he said. “Just drink it.”
    Eva decided that the sweet death the drink might bring about would be preferable to the chaos the hangover was wreaking on her body. She closed her eyes and tried to hold her breath and she drank it down, emptying the glass completely.
    “Good girl,” he said.
    Eva pulled open the other eye and looked at him. “How long until I die?” she asked. Marshall laughed again,
    “You crack me up,” he said.
    “It’s what I live for,” she told him, sarcastically. “Can I have some water now?”
    Marshall handed her the bottle of water in his hand and said, “Drink it slow, I don’t want you to get sick again.”
    “Humph!” she said, “Then I might vomit out the poison you put in the drink too soon, right? Well, I have news for you; I’m looking forward to death.”
    “Shut up,” he told her. “I’m going to turn on the shower for you. Once you’ve had a shower the drink will have had time to work and you’ll feel like a new woman.” Eva only grunted at him, but once he’d helped her into the bathroom and she was standing underneath the warm soft spray of the shower she realized he was right, and she was grateful. By