Waking up with Renata

The ceiling was wrong.

That was the first thought — flat, observational, the kind of thought that floats up before the body fully commits to consciousness. The ceiling was wrong because it wasn't hers. Hers had a water stain shaped like a boot. This one was smooth, off-white, and too clean. A hairline crack ran diagonally from the corner to the light fixture, which was a ceiling fan she didn't recognize, with one blade slightly warped.

¿Dónde carajo...

The second thought was pain. A thick, pulsing ache behind her left eye that radiated down into her jaw and settled in her molars like a second heartbeat. Her tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth — dry, furred, tasting something foul and chemical, like copper pennies dipped in cheap gin. She tried to swallow and couldn't. Her stomach lurched sideways in a slow, oily roll, and she breathed through her nose until it passed.

She was on her side. The mattress under her cheek was firm and good — better than hers, honestly — and the pillow smelled like laundry detergent and something faintly woody. Cedar, maybe. Clean. The sheet draped over her was soft, thread count higher than anything she owned.

Then the sheet shifted as she breathed, and cool air touched her stomach, her chest, her hip, and Renata understood with a sudden, lurching clarity that she was not wearing a single thing.

She didn't move. Her eyes swept the room without turning her head — peripheral vision, careful, cataloging. Unfamiliar nightstand. A glass of water (half-full, no ice) and two white pills sitting on a napkin beside it. A phone charger plugged into the wall, no phone attached. A door, slightly ajar — bathroom, maybe, based on the tile floor she could see through the gap. Morning light pressing through blinds she hadn't opened, casting pale horizontal bars across a floor she didn't recognize.

Her hoops were still in her ears — she felt one pressing into the cartilage where she'd slept on it. Her hair was destroyed. She could feel it, a crushed and tangled weight against her neck and the pillow. Her skin felt gritty, salt-stripped, the remnant of dried sweat.

Okay. Okay. Think.

Last clear memory: the bar. The one on Sixth, with the exposed brick. Maribel had ordered round after round, and Dev had been trying to talk to that guy with the beard, and Renata had done another shot — amber, warm, maybe whiskey, even though she knew she'd had enough about 4 rounds ago — and raised her glass and said something she couldn't remember to someone she couldn't see, and then it was dark. Static. A couple of sensory flashes: cold air on bare arms (she'd gone outside at some point), a car door, someone laughing — her own laugh, too loud, bouncing off something close and enclosed.

Nothing after that.

Her stomach clenched again — not nausea this time. Something sharper. The cold understanding that she had no idea where she was, whose bed this was, or what she'd done in it.

Renata pressed her palm flat against the mattress and pushed herself up — slowly, because her head punished every degree of elevation with a fresh throb. The sheet pooled at her waist. She was definitely naked. Fully. Her clothes were — she scanned the floor — nowhere visible from this angle. She grabbed the sheet and held it against her chest, knuckles white, and looked toward the bedroom door.

It was closed. But she could hear something beyond it — faint, rhythmic. A cabinet closing. Running water. The quiet clink of a mug.

Someone else was here.

The water on the nightstand gleamed under the bars of light from the blinds. The pills sat on their napkin like an offering — or a message. Someone had put them there. Someone had thought about her headache before she'd even opened her eyes.

That detail snagged in her chest, complicated and uncomfortable.

Renata pulled the sheet tighter, dragged her back against the headboard, and waited — jaw set, pulse ticking visibly in her throat — for whoever was on the other side of that door to open it.