Forget You (5 page)

And that's the last thing I remember.

"Z
OEY
."

"I'm up!" I sat straighter on whatever I'd slumped against. It had a bottom and a high back, so it must be a sofa. Whose sofa? I hoped no one had seen me fall asleep in public. I was captain of the swim team, a school leader. I couldn't go around falling asleep just anywhere. And I wasn't drunk. I never lost control that way, ever.

"You had a wreck." It took me a second to place the smooth voice: Doug. His voice had the slightest edge, like he'd seen the wreck happen and was a little freaked out but was trying to remain calm. "You need to get out of the car."

Issuing commands was not Doug's usual style. Getting pissed when other people issued commands, yes. Issuing them himself, no. Now he was telling me what to do, and it scared me.

I was in the driver's seat. I slid toward his voice on the passenger side. He was lying on the ground and leaning through the doorway, half in and half out of the car. Headlights from outside blanked his face like an overexposed photo in shades of white. His hair hung black over his forehead, and his shadowed eyes were two black sockets. Something must be horribly wrong.

"I totaled my Bug," I wailed.

"Yes, you did," he said grimly.

"Did I total your Jeep?"

"Get out of the car." He nodded toward the empty space beside him in the doorway. "Get out of the car now, Zoey."

I slid farther toward him. When I reached the passenger side, the dashboard leaned so far forward that it blocked my way. To get by, I had to draw my legs up onto the seat. Then I slid them beside Doug on the ground and stood up.

And fell down, splatting into mud.

"That's what I was afraid of," Doug called from several feet away. "You can't stand up?"

"I can stand up," I protested. It was better to lie down, though. I just wished the headlights from the car I'd hit weren't so bright, streaming into my eyes. Long blades of grass glowed green around us, and white raindrops streaked down on us. Beyond the small circle where we lay, the night was black, and I couldn't see.

I felt him crawling beside me until his face was even with mine. He rose above me. His arm circled me, warm after the cool wet grass. He hoisted me upward and groaned.

"I am not fat," I said.

"Of course you're not fat." Now he sounded like he was talking with his teeth clenched.

"Brandon told me I look like I've gained weight since the summer." He hadn't meant it as an insult. He was just kidding around, flirting with me. I'd actually lost weight since the competitive swim season began. But since Brandon had texted that message to me on Tuesday, I'd skipped breakfast, just to make sure.

"Brandon," grunted Doug as he took a big step and slung me forward. "Can." He took another step and groaned again. "Kiss. My. Broken. Ass." He let me slip through his arms to the ground, and he collapsed beside me.

From this distance, through the bright raindrops in the dark night, I could see the two cars kissing each other with steam rising from their lips. My Bug and definitely not Doug's Jeep. "Whose car?"

"Mike's Miata."

"Mike
Abrams
?" I'd wrecked the whole swim team.

"He's not hurt, but he's stuck inside. He's calling 911. We'll get help soon. Don't worry."

I hadn't been worried. But now that he brought it up, the gravity of the situation sank in. It was night. It was raining. We'd crashed head-on. And Doug must be hurt, or he wouldn't be lying down in the grass in a rainstorm. "Doug, I'm so sorry."

"Sorry! It's not your fault. Don't you remember what happened? You and Mike both swerved to keep from hitting a deer in the road."

No, I didn't remember the deer. "Is the deer okay?"

"Fuck the deer. Hush now." Gently he drew me to him and pressed down on the back of my neck until I lay my head on his chest.

It was totally innocent. Doug was comforting me after we'd been in a wreck together. Brandon still would not approve. But I couldn't do anything about it because I felt dizzy. My hands found Doug's T-shirt, and I gripped fistfuls of fabric to keep from falling off the edge of the earth. I nuzzled his warm chest. He smelled faintly of chlorine.

He stroked my hair, which had fallen free of the bun I'd knotted. He stroked from the roots all the way past my shoulders to the ends, firmly, with both hands, in a way I hadn't even known I'd ached for Brandon to touch me. Lightning flashed, thunder rolled, and the dull roar of rain grew louder.

Doug sucked in a slow breath through his teeth and let it out just as slowly. At first I thought he was doing a deep breathing exercise we'd learned on the swim team, and I was going to joke that we didn't have nearly enough water for swimming, even with all this rain. As I opened my mouth to murmur against his chest, I heard the shudder in his exhalation. He must be dizzy like I was, trying to keep control. He needed comfort, just like I did. I put one hand in his hair. It was soaked. His hand massaged the back of my neck. His chest rose and fell under me, like waves as I swam in the ocean.

Some time must have passed, because the police couldn't have materialized from thin air. The siren shrieked in one of my ears. Doug's heart throbbed under my other ear, and his voice rumbled in his chest. He talked to a policeman somewhere above us. I didn't bother looking. The blue lights were too bright. I squeezed my eyes shut against them.

"She hit her head," I heard Doug say.

"I didn't hit my head," I corrected him. I didn't remember hitting anything.

"She hit her head," Doug repeated, "and my leg's broken."

"Oh." I tried to roll off him. I'd known he was hurt, yet I was lying on top of him like I needed coddling when I wasn't hurt at all. But his arm tightened around me, and I couldn't move. Well, fine then. I was still dizzy, and Doug was a warm blanket.

"Then how'd you get over here?" asked the policeman. I opened one eye. With the headlights shining on his back and the blue lights circling him, I couldn't see his darkened face. "Did you carry her over here with a broken leg?"

"More or less," Doug muttered. His fingers stroked my wet hair.

I jerked alert when the policeman asked, "What the hell for?" His tone and his words didn't sound official and coplike. It was Doug's brother, Officer Fox. "Jesus, Doug," he said, "you probably screwed your leg up for nothing."

"I had to get her away from the car in case it exploded," Doug snapped. "Can you shut up and go do your duty and let Mike out of the Miata before it bursts into flames? Thanks."

"You dumbass," Officer Fox said. "Cars don't explode on impact."

I giggled. "Doug, you're my hero." Then, hoping I hadn't offended him, I hugged him hard and whispered in his ear, "It's the thought that counts." I wasn't sure whether he laughed with me, but he did hug me back, and he never took his hands out of my hair. I laughed myself to sleep.

4

"Zoey."

"I'm up!" Sitting up in my bed, I blinked at the pain in my forehead and the daylight streaming through the windows.

"Your boyfriend's here," Ashley called softly. Almost
motherly,
except nothing could sound truly motherly coming from a chick only seven years older than me. "You feel okay?"

I nodded. As my brain sloshed around, the throbbing started--and I remembered the wreck. I must have hit my head after all, like Doug had said. Painkillers please! There was no prescription bottle on my nightstand. "Ashley?" I called. Too late. She was only a long, tanned leg leaving the doorway of my bedroom.

Well, painkillers could wait. Brandon was here to see me! And I needed to get all the good out of his visit before I left for this afternoon's swim meet.

I rolled off the bed, head splitting, eyes sticky. I'd worn my contacts to bed. I'd also worn my wet clothes to bed, I realized as the air-conditioning turned them from moist to clammy. Everything was still damp: jeans, underwear, bra, shirt. Of course my dad was hands-off as far as parenting went, and Ashley was a strange twenty-four-year-old living in my home. But I would have thought
someone
would figure out
some
way to prevent me from sinking into a coma while wearing my contacts and wet clothes.

I staggered into my bathroom to peel the contacts off my eyeballs and brush my teeth to spare Brandon my morning breath. I stopped with my toothbrush in midstroke when I saw the strangest bruise on my forehead. Toothbrush sticking from my foamy mouth, I fumbled in a drawer for my glasses, then leaned toward the mirror for an examination. The bruise formed three sides of the outline of a rectangle: top, side, and bottom. Green at the center of the lines, it faded through brown to purple at the edges. Like my head had taken out the rearview mirror of my Bug.

From the geometric bruise, my gaze sank to my earlobes, left and then right. I fingered the empty holes. I didn't remember removing the diamond earrings my parents had given me for my seventeenth birthday last January.

Come to think of it, I didn't remember what I'd done between the end of the football game last night and the wreck.

Or how I'd gotten from the wreck to my bed.

But Brandon was waiting for me, and he knew.

I spit toothpaste, splashed water on my face, and desperately drew my bangs over my forehead to hide the bruise. They wouldn't cooperate, cowlicking too far to one side, leaving the bruise bare. But with my panic rising about my missing night, I hardly cared about my looks. I didn't even bother to hide my glasses from Brandon. I schlepped into the living room in cold jeans and bare feet.

Doug sat on the sofa.

I stopped short and scanned the huge room of polished wood. Brandon wasn't here. Only Doug. And there was no way Ashley should have made this mistake, calling Doug my boyfriend. She'd hired Brandon to work at Slide with Clyde. When I'd told her last Tuesday that I was going out with him, she'd said she remembered him and even acknowledged his hotness. I wasn't making this up. I wasn't
that
crazy.

Doug stared up at the vaulted glass ceiling. This feature was common in the newer beachfront houses, but it probably seemed impressive to Doug if he lived a few miles inland where the houses were less expensive, like most of the people in our high school.

Then his eyes fell to me, flashing green even across the shadowy room. He leaped to his feet like a polite Southern gentleman. On crutches. With a brace on his lower leg. He lost his balance, pitched forward, and caught himself just in time on one crutch.

"Sit down!" I gasped, running toward him. My first instinct was to force him down by reaching up and pulling on his shoulders until he sat. But I hesitated. I didn't know how vulnerable his leg was inside the brace. I didn't want to hurt him. My hands fluttered around his chest.

One crutch bounced off the sofa and clattered to the hardwood floor as he leaned over to hug me. I stepped closer before he fell. Why was he so intent on hugging me that he risked life and another limb? Maybe he thought we needed to hug because we'd been in the same wreck. We'd shared a traumatic experience. Actually I didn't remember whether it was traumatic or not, but logically the wreck should have been traumatic and we should hug.

His arms were around me. My arms were down by my sides. So I brought my arms up and slipped them around his waist, trying my best to steady him as he swayed on one leg. He solved this problem by shifting his center of gravity down. He slid his hands to my butt and pressed his face to my neck.

Brandon would not like this.

My dad might not like this either. The cameras already rolled, recording everything that went on inside his house. When he logged on to the internet later, he could watch a video of what Doug and I did.

And Doug and I were about to do something. Now his warm hands slid under my shirt, pressing my back, with his fingertips just inside the waistband of my jeans. His face moved at my neck. His caress would transform into a kiss any second.

Strangest of all, I felt myself arching into him, pressing my chest into his at the same time I lifted my butt to keep his hands on my back. I tilted my head to give him better access to my neck. This was the boy who'd saved my life last night, or at least intended to.

This was also the boy who, at the football game a few hours before the wreck, had stared down at me with cold green eyes while he called me a spoiled brat and told me my boyfriend didn't care about me. Almost like he knew exactly what would hurt me worst.

Just as his lips brushed my neck and sent a zap of electricity along every inch of my skin, I pulled back from him. His hands slid around to either side of my waist where he could hold me more firmly in place. I wanted to let him hold me, to find out what he would do next to my neck. But it was too weird and made no sense. I croaked, "My dad can see us." When Doug glanced down at me, I nodded toward a camera in the corner of the ceiling.

"Let's move out of view," Doug told the camera.

Gazing up at his chin--he'd shaved since last night--I wanted to kiss
his
neck. Which would mean I was cheating on Brandon. Even as the urge to give up and make out with Doug spread across my chest, the thought of Brandon knocked like a golf ball on the inside of my skull. "Let's sit down," I said again.

"Oh, sorry." He eased onto the sofa and held out his hands to me. I collapsed beside him. He put one hand to my forehead above my glasses, brushed my bangs away, and traced his thumb around the outline of my bruise.

Maybe he thought I'd meant we should sit down to duck out of the sight line of the camera. He certainly seemed intent on touching me. God, this was so weird, and the golf ball banged inside my head. "There are cameras all over the house," I clarified, nodding toward another above the entrance to the kitchen. "This morning my dad's going to Hawaii for a week. I won't be eighteen until January, and he didn't think it was proper to leave me alone for that long until I'm a legal adult. So he had the cameras installed as babysitters."

Doug kept tracing around the very edge of too much. His fingers slid past my bangs to my ear and found the back of my hair, usually smooth and straight, now hopelessly tangled with rain and sleep. He didn't mind. Stroking there, he whispered, "How about your bedroom?"

"No cameras in my bedroom. There's just one trained on the door so my dad can see if someone goes in there besides me." My dad wasn't a perv. Well, I guess he sort of was, doing it with a twenty-four-year-old. But he wasn't a perv to
me.
And then, by degrees, I realized what Doug was getting at. He wanted to go into my bedroom with me.

I should have been outraged. I wasn't. I gaped at him, wondering where in the world this desire for him had come from, and blinking hard every time the golf ball whacked the inside of my skull.

"Damn," he said, like it was a bummer we couldn't sneak into my bedroom together.
Not
like this was a bizarre proposition for him to make in the first place. "Your sister seems pretty cool. Isn't she staying with you while your dad's gone?"

I laughed, which made my head hurt worse. "Ashley? That's my dad's girlfriend. She lives here."

"Oh." Doug's hand stopped in my hair.

"But he's making an honest woman out of her. Next Wednesday at exactly eight
P.M.
, she'll become my stepmother. She figured out the time change from Oahu for me so I can think of them and celebrate simultaneously. I am so thrilled."

Doug raised one eyebrow at me. "Is that sarcasm? You are not sarcastic." He detangled his fingers from my hair and put his hand on the knee of my damp jeans. The warmth of his body soaked through the fabric and started me tingling again. "I woke you up coming over, didn't I? I wanted to make sure you were okay.
Are
you okay?" He looked straight into my eyes.

I wasn't sure of the answer to this question. So I asked, "How about you?"

He extended his leg with the brace and gazed ruefully at it. "It was just my fibula, the smaller bone, which they said only bears ten percent of the weight in your leg."

"That's lucky," I sighed, feeling a lot less guilty. "So you got a brace instead of a cast."

"No, the splint's on just until the swelling goes down. They'll put a cast on it in a few days. I should have it off again in six weeks."

I ticked off calendar days in my head. "Six weeks! That's a few days before State!" Doing well at the State swim tournament was the only way for Doug to get his scholarship to FSU.

He shrugged, but I saw the tension in his shoulders. It crackled down his arm to his hand on my knee.

I asked, "Did you hurt your leg worse by pulling me out of the car?"

He shook his head no without looking at me, so I knew the answer was yes. "And Mike's okay. They didn't even take him to the hospital."

"And the deer?"

He smiled and squeezed my knee. Again I was struck by how weird it was that he touched me like this. But I got lost in his green eyes that crinkled at the edges as he grinned. "You and that damn deer. You and Mike both missed it and hit each other."

Leaning closer, he rubbed my knee. Hard. A deep-tissue massage. Sparks shot through my thigh. "We're safe from killer ruminants when we stick to the coastline," he said. "This morning we can crash together, ha ha." Here was something I'd never seen: Doug nervous. He made jokes all the time, but he never looked nervous when he did it. "Then later, if you're feeling better, we could get some dinner, go see a movie, hang out after." His eyebrows went up briefly like
hang out after
held hidden meaning, but I figured this was a tick of his that I hadn't noticed before. I'd hardly exchanged a word with him since the ninth grade except this week:

Me: You're late for swim practice.

Doug: You're not the boss of me.

And in years past, before we were on the varsity swim team together:

Me: Stop copying off my math test.

Doug: You think awfully highly of your math skills, Miss Commander.

"I can't drive until I get my cast off," he went on. "You can drive my Jeep. I feel stupid asking you to drive, but I really want to see you. Or we could stay in and watch TV if you're not up to it. Zoey?"

His tone had turned to concern because I'd closed one eye against the throbbing in my head. I was a bit slow on the uptake this morning. But I finally understood. Strange as the last twelve hours had been, they'd just gotten a lot stranger. Doug Fox was asking me out.

Something didn't add up. I fished for more information. Pressing my fingertips to my eyebrow above my glasses to keep my brain from spilling onto the upholstery, I asked, "If you can't drive, how'd you get here?"

I felt terrible about Doug essentially giving up his chance at State by saving my life (or not). I felt almost as guilty about him losing his ability to drive. Most things to do in our town were lined up along the beach where the tourists could reach them in the summer. Because the beach houses and condos were so expensive, the population of our town was centered a few miles inland where the land was cheaper, along with downtown and the high school. And though thousands of tourists swelled the population in the height of the season, now that it was September and they'd left, the town was small. Too small for public transportation. Not a bus or a subway or a taxi in sight. If Doug couldn't drive, he was stuck.

"My brother brought me," Doug said.

I leaped up, snatching my knee away from his hand. I crossed the room and heaved open the heavy front door.

Our porch looked over our garden, which my mom had hired a landscaper to design with native grasses and flowering vines that could survive the hot summers. Six other houses had similar porches and gardens sloping to a common courtyard paved with local stone. In the center of the courtyard idled a pickup I recognized from around town, with a man's bare feet sticking out the passenger window. Not the police car I'd expected, but after a long night of responding to his brother's wrecks and patrolling for rogue deer, Officer Fox must be off duty.

And suddenly, staring at that pickup, I understood all the problems that were throwing the golf ball as hard as they could at the inside of my skull. Last night Doug had rescued me from my car, feeling like a hero to my damsel in distress. I'd lain on top of him in a thunderstorm and snuggled with him and let him put his hands in my hair. And he'd taken that
seriously,
even though this had happened just a few hours after I very possibly had sex with Brandon for the second time.