Page 26 of Filthy Rich

Being sedated, the way they said it, felt like a terrible threat.

Now, I realize I should have insisted on it. Because their little scales that went from one to ten were insufficient. Even now, with the faces? They’d need a drawing of someone writhing in agony to represent how I felt when they scraped the burned flesh off of my face, my neck, and my arm.

If you’d asked me for a number, it was a twenty-seven.

During those weeks, I got really, really good at ignoring pain.

Even so, there was one pain I couldn’t ignore. During my first weeks at the hospital, my mom never came. She didn’t hold my hand. She didn’t lie next to me and tell me stories. She didn’t tell me that my hair would grow back where it had melted off, or that everything would be okay.

She wasn’t there at all.

Only my dad came.

He’s the one who held my hand when they did grafts from other places to get the hair back. He’s the one who held my hand. He’s the one who told me it was going to be okay. When I begged him to get my mom, he told me that she’d come as soon as My Fair Lady was over. She had finally gotten the part she wanted, and she wasn’t going to let that chance pass her by, wasted.

I wished I hadn’t ever made the dumb deal.

If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have worn the wig and gotten burned. And I wouldn’t have been sitting in here alone all day while my dad went to work. Unlike me, my mom never seemed to struggle with regret. She took her shot, no matter what. But at the time, it felt like she cared more about that cursed play than she did about her daughter.

That thought hurt.

It hurt more than the pain of debridement.

And it hurt more than the looks of pity I got from the hospital staff while they worked on my face. It even hurt more than the recovery from repeated surgeries, including the one that failed after they tried to expand my existing flesh.

I learned that it hurts to feel like you don’t matter.

I knew then and there, I never wanted to feel like that again.

So when Jake kissed me—I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more special than I did in that moment, but that was terrifying.

Jake Priest—when I first met him, I was absolutely starstruck.

The Jake Priest.

Then I became friends with his sister, and I realized he was a real person, like any other. Even so, the more time I spent with him, the more I realized that he is a person, but he’s also like a walking Adonis kind of person.

He’s handsome.

He’s hilarious.

He’s clever.

He’s brave and he defends what he thinks is right.

And he can act.

He sings pretty darn well, too.

When his mouth presses against mine, and it feels like that scene in every single romance I’ve ever read, I realize that I’m not just starstruck.

I like Jake Priest.

Like, I really, really like him.

And that’s bad, bad, bad. The reason it hurt me so much when my mom didn’t come to the hospital is that I cared, deeply, about what she thought. I cared whether she loved me. I cared whether she was willing to sacrifice for me.

So when she wasn’t. . .