Forget You (17 page)

15

Leaving his house, I felt seventeen times as lost as I'd felt Tuesday night when I dropped him off at the wharf. I couldn't go home. I couldn't go to the mall in Destin because it would be closing by the time I arrived. And I needed to make the most of the Benz while I had it. My dad would come home to reclaim it the day after tomorrow and I'd be without wheels until further notice. Grounded, as surely as if I'd looked for invisible tape in his office.

I switched on the GPS and typed in
Seattle.

The drive was long and dark and lonely and blank with no exit for miles on Interstate 10 toward Mobile. My body was dead tired but my brain was alert, energized by anger at everything Doug had said.

Was he a liar?

Thinking back, I couldn't put my finger on an actual lie he'd told me. Well, he'd fudged when he explained where he and Mike were going when we wrecked, but even then he'd constructed a lie as close to the truth as he could manage on the fly. He wasn't so much a liar as a withholder of pertinent information. For a talkative boy he could really keep his own counsel.

Except about Brandon, of course. Did I really know in my heart that Brandon was cheating on me with Stephanie Wetzel?

There certainly was evidence he was growing closer to Stephanie and pulling away from me. But when I asked my heart what it thought, my heart didn't respond. It didn't even speed up at the thought of him cheating on me. It raced when my mind wandered through the future, wondering who Doug would end up with if my fate with Brandon was sealed, as Doug had said. I couldn't
stand
the thought of Doug tossing back his head and laughing with another girl.

Had Doug and I used a condom?

Surely we had. As he'd told Officer Fox, he never did anything foolish. Of course, he'd said this facetiously. Fuck.

And this released a flood of questions about the details of what we'd done. Who made the first move? How did we end up going so far so fast? How exactly did my earring catch on his
zipper
, hello? Did I enjoy it? Did he? I could guess the answers to the last two questions by the way we'd acted when we wrecked. We'd definitely enjoyed it. But the rest . . . I had lost my memory. He would keep his forever. It wasn't fair.

Somewhere between Mobile and Hattiesburg, on a pitch-black stretch of highway, I realized the oysters had settled in my stomach and pumped salt and aphrodisiac into my veins until my mouth was on fire. I was rubbing my lips with my fingertips, driving in the wrong direction. And now I was two and a half hours from Doug.

I
N THE DEAD OF NIGHT I EASED
the Benz back down Doug's drive, stopped it in the middle of the causeway, and killed the headlights. I'd feared the salty dogs would still be up and I'd be caught with no safe way out. But the pack had dispersed for the night.

I pressed the button for Doug's cell and listened to it ring. What if he didn't pick up? I would go crazy wondering whether he'd turned off his phone again or he was watching the screen, refusing to talk to me. Either way, if I didn't see him tonight, I would spontaneously combust, I knew it. I felt heavy from the pressure, desperate to get out from under it. At the same time, electricity zinged through me. My every thought zeroed in on the basement windows of the house, his room. I needed release from this. I couldn't go on this way.

"Zoey. Where are you?" Through the phone, his calm voice had that edge I remembered from the wreck. He thought I was in trouble.

It hadn't occurred to me that I would scare him when I called. For the first time I began to doubt this plan. The pressure and the electricity drove me forward. "I'm in your driveway."

"Give me two minutes." The phone clicked dead.

The basement windows glowed with light. Then went dark.

On the side of the house, a basement door that I hadn't seen before opened very slowly. He crutched out and pushed the door closed just as slowly behind him, without a
thunk
his dad would hear. He made his way toward me along the edge of the clearing, under the ancient trees. Then he stepped onto the causeway. Behind him in the distance, the ocean was black with whitecaps rolling slowly toward us. The sky was black, brightening to blue around the full white moon.

On the narrow strip of land, he rounded the car to reach the passenger side. He wore his swim team sweatshirt and gym shorts with the heathered gray waistband of his boxer briefs peeking out. Good. Easy off. He also wore glasses. I hadn't known he wore glasses at all. This was probably the secret behind the green eyes I'd fallen for: colored contacts. What a relief to know his beautiful eyes were fake.

He tried the door of the Benz. Locked. He pounded once on the door in frustration.

I unlocked it with the button on my door, then leaned over to open it for him. It wouldn't do for him to lose his balance and tumble off the causeway, into the surf.

The breeze and the roar of the ocean came in first. Then his crutches, narrowly missing my head. He tossed them over the headrests into the backseat. He smelled like toothpaste, exactly what I must have smelled like when he woke me up last Saturday morning and I thought he was Brandon.

He closed the door behind him and turned to me. Behind his glasses, in the moonlight, I could see his eyes were the same green-blue as ever. They really were the color of the sea. "You rang?" he asked, dry and sober.

"Did we use a condom?"

"Is that all?" he asked, disgusted. He put his hand on the door to open it.

"It's important, Doug."

He sighed impatiently. "Of
course
it's important, which is why you had a freaking crate of condoms in the trunk of the Bug. Of
course
we used a condom. If that's all, I'll get back to my nightmares." He put his hand on the door again.

"That's not all," I said quickly. "I don't think my memory of that night is ever coming back."

"Do you want me to hit you on the head with a coconut? It works on
Gilligan's Island.
"

"I want you to reconstruct the night for me."

He looked at me over the rims of his glasses. That must be the origin of his hottest expression, chin down, lashes long. "You want to have sex again?"

"Yes."

"No." He turned, and this time he opened the door.

"Why not, if we did it before?" I called over the noise of the surf.

"Because you've been all Brandon, all week. You can't snap your fingers"--he held his hand out toward me and snapped--"and expect me to perform for you."

"You owe me," I said. "You've lied to me and manipulated me. This one time, you do what I tell you."

He paused for five seconds more with his hand on the open door. Then he slammed the door shut and leaned back against it, watching me. "Well?"

"Well, what?"

"Well, I didn't have sex by myself."

So
I
made the first move? I tried to visualize myself reaching out to him, like Coach told us to visualize ourselves winning swim heats. But Doug looked so distant, staring me down from across the car with his eyes sexy and his arms folded.

"Maybe you could set the stage," I suggested. "Was the moon bright like this?"

He shook his head. "It was raining hard. I got a little worried."

"Then why didn't we leave?"

"There wasn't a tornado watch. There probably should have been, but there wasn't. I thought it was safe. I was wrong." He sighed, and his voice softened. "Anyway, I wasn't exactly thinking straight. I was so full of you."

I slid across the seat toward him. He watched me. I stretched up to kiss his neck, just where the collar of his sweatshirt ended. I kissed my way up under his hair, toward parts of his neck I only saw when his hair was tucked under a swim cap in the pool. Then his chin where his stubble started. I felt him shudder, but he didn't touch me, and when I pulled away he was still staring at me, almost angrily.

"You did it before," I protested. "What's the difference?"

"It meant something before. Now it's all scientific. You're recovering data."

"You owe me." I slid my hand onto the front of his shorts.

His eyes widened. And in one motion he took off his glasses, tossed them onto the dash, and put his hands behind my head, drawing me closer. His mouth hit my mouth and opened me. His tongue swept inside me.

Doug was a great kisser. I knew this right away. And I wasn't surprised, because he
looked
like a great kisser. The girls on the swim team had talked about this before. We didn't want to mess with juvie, but we knew sooner or later whomever Doug finally hooked up with was going to get a mouthful.

Instead, I was the one who got his mouth. His lips were soft. His tongue was firm. His teeth were sneaky, nipping at me when I didn't expect it. We kissed for long minutes as our bodies slowly intertwined. My hand slipped between his shorts and the heathered boxer briefs. His hand shoved past my shorts and panties, onto my bare skin. Finally I was out of breath. I pulled a few inches away from him and gasped.

He wouldn't let me get away. He put his forehead to my forehead and chuckled. "That's exactly what you did before."

I rubbed the tip of my nose back and forth across his. "How did my earring get caught on your zipper?"

"Hm." He laughed. "I just said that to make you mad. We didn't do anything like that. We wanted to save something for later. Your earring came out when I put my hands in your hair. Like this." He wove the fingers of both hands into my hair and held me firmly as he kissed me.

A long time later, his mouth had done everything it could possibly do to my mouth, twice. My hands were growing restless. I whispered against his lips, "Is this when we moved into the backseat?"

He breathed rapidly through his nose and blinked at me. He seemed to have a hard time focusing on me, but maybe that was because he was missing his glasses. "Yes, but--"

"But what?" I slid over the console into the backseat and opened the back door for him, holding out my hands to steady him as he leaned on the Benz and hopped from the front door to the back. As I pulled him inside I said, "This has got to be a lot more comfy than the backseat of the Bug."

"More roomy," he acknowledged as he closed the door. "But I didn't have a broken leg before. Equally awkward."

I pressed him backward until he lay on the seat and I lay on top of him. Not too different from the way we'd lain together in the back of the swim team van and the back of the police car, except this time I was in control. I kissed his mouth, his neck, and felt a new rush every time he moaned.

I tugged at his sweatshirt until he relented and helped me take it off him. I smoothed my hands across his lean chest and strong arms. I kissed from his neck down his sternum to the inny belly button I'd found so fascinating in the van. His belly button was mine for tonight. I dipped my tongue into it, licked the circumference and let my tongue trail down, just to get revenge for that joke about my earring getting caught in his zipper.

As my mouth reached the waistband of his shorts, he gasped, "Okay."

"Okay." I laughed, straightening so I could pull off my shirt. "Is this when you took off my bra?"

He squinted at me through the black hair in his eyes. "Yes, but--"

"Is this the same bra?"

He propped himself up on his elbows. "No, it was blue with white polka dots, and it had a blue bow right
there.
" He poked me between the boobs. "So you still don't believe we did this?"

"I believe you." I'd had some lingering doubts, but I believed him now that he'd correctly identified the bra. "I still don't understand how I ended up in the car with you when I'd wanted to go parking with Brandon. But I understand completely how, once I was here, things snowballed and we went all the way. I've lived all my life in Florida and I have no experience with snow."

"Me neither." He lay back on the seat again, then reached up with both hands and framed my bra with his fingers. "Zoey, if we do this, what does it mean?"

"We
will
do this, and it means you owe me this memory."

He dropped his hands. "If it doesn't mean more than that, I don't want to do it."

I leaned forward until I was on all fours, face-to-face with him, hovering over him. "You
will
do it."

His eyes narrowed. I'd pushed him too far, telling him what to do. He shifted, feeling on the floor for his sweatshirt.

"Did I do this?" I asked quickly as I smoothed my hand inside his boxer briefs.

He said, "Mmmmmmmm," and then reached up with both hands again and pressed my head down until our lips met. We kissed so deeply that I hardly noticed when he unhooked my bra after all and unlooped it from my shoulders.

Eventually he slid lower on the seat and took my breast into his mouth. Every move my hand made on him, his mouth echoed on me, until I was buzzing with tension and eager to offer him everything.

We stayed just this way for long minutes, poised on the edge. I wanted to do more. I was afraid if I stopped what we were doing, I would lose it all. But after his tongue on my breast made me cry out, my fingers found a condom packet tucked into the seat. I'd let the gargantuan box of condoms lie on the floor of the car with a few packets scattered around it since I threw it there Tuesday, for the viewing pleasure of anyone who peeked into the Benz. Even my mother could have seen this Wednesday night if she'd had her faculties.

I'd never opened a condom packet before in my life. I sat up on Doug's hips and held the packet up to the light to tear it.

"Zoey."

"What. Am I doing it wrong?"

Breathing hard, he reached up with one hand and took the packet from me. "It's almost two thirty. You have an appointment to narrowly miss a deer and crash into Mike."

Coaxing had worked before, so I coaxed him again. I lay down on him, my bare breasts to his warm bare chest, skin to skin, such a strange sensation. I brushed his stubbly cheek with the back of my hand and ran my thumb across his soft lips, echoing caresses he'd given me during the week, which he must have given me Friday night but I hadn't understood until now. I whispered, "You owe me."