(Never) Again (7 page)

I didn’t get my coffee, but I wasn’t going back out there. I turned the shower on, rid myself of my craptastic pajamas and stepped in. I didn’t need to look good for Zach, but that didn’t mean I wanted him to see me looking horrendous again.

An hour later I evaluated myself in the mirror. Hair straight, but with volume I have no idea how I managed to pull off. A pair of dark-wash denim skinny jeans with a white shirt, a gray three-quarter sleeve grandfather cardigan and a lightweight gray and white scarf. And since the weather was finally cooling down, I was able to wear my gray crocheted slouch boots.

“Much better,” Zach said when I walked into the living room, making me want to dive across the couch and smack him upside his head.

“I’m so happy to have your approval.” I rolled my eyes. “Are we ready or what?” I turned my attention to Josh, who was still playing video games.

“Oh, yeah. I just have to use the bathroom. I’ll be right back.” Josh released the controller from his grasp and left the living room. Since Josh never did anything quickly, I flopped down on the couch in the farthest spot possible from Zach.

I rested my ankle on my knee and leaned back, letting the overstuffed pillows swallow me.

“What the hell are those?” Zach pushed at my foot with his finger.

“My boots.”

“It looks like your foot’s being attacked by a Muppet.” I looked at him and then down at the material wrapped around my leg and laughed. It really did.

“Did I just get a laugh out of Liz Wagner?” His dark eyebrows rose in fake shock.

“It was funny, I’ll give you that, but don’t worry, it won’t happen again.”

With a narcissistic confidence shining in his eyes he flashed a half grin and said, “We’ll see.”

“Get in,” I said to Zach and Josh as I hit the unlock on my keypad ten minutes later.

Zach looked through the passenger side window. “No, I’ll drive. Don’t want the pumpkins to dirty your car and cause you to get your panties in a bunch.”

I rolled my eyes and purposely walked past Zach’s open door and around to Josh’s. I climbed into the Jeep and flopped into the backseat.

Little did Zach know it was hard for a thong to actually bunch. Not that I told him that. As far as I was concerned the less Zach knew about my undergarments the better.

There was a time when I was excited to tell him about my adventures in lingerie shopping. I was young and had a boyfriend I was crazy about and loved nothing more than watching the desire to see said lingerie burn in his eyes.

Some may say I was a tease, but I never thought so. It wasn’t that I excited him with no intention of actually following through. It’s just every time we inched past second base I’d panicked.

I wanted to. There was no denying how much I wanted to. I just couldn’t. I was so young, and I was afraid it wouldn’t be everything I imagined, or worse, everything he had imagined. Everything at that time was perfect, so why would I risk it?

Anyways, it wasn’t like I could change the past, or even like I wanted to. I had already decided I would lose my virginity to Joe. I was just waiting for the perfect time. Joe and I had gotten close so many times, but again, something in the back of my mind stopped me from following through.

I wasn’t scared of losing the perfection Joe and I had because let’s face it, perfection didn’t exist. The naïve little girl I’d once been was gone. I could see the flaws in Joe as well as in our relationship, but for me that’s what made it real. I wasn’t living in the fairy tale. Which is why I couldn’t figure out what it was that kept stopping me from taking the final step.

Out of all my friends I was the only virgin, even though, other than Sadie, they’d all assumed I lost it with Zach, until one drunken night I confessed. Zach and I never actually did it. Now I’m the DV: designated virgin.

My eyes glanced over at the boy I’d once loved. The baby soft skin of his face was no longer: dark stubble had taken over. A year ago he didn’t even need to shave. The breakouts he was so prone to getting on his forehead were a thing of the past. Maybe it had something do with his hair not resting along his forehead anymore.

Either way I couldn’t deny the past year had been good for him. Who would have thought the lanky boy who was basically the football team’s water boy would turn out to look more like its captain?

Zach turned onto a patch of grass where other cars were parking. I wanted to get out on Josh’s side, but my brother being my brother, shut the door on me as I moved towards it. Before I could knock on the window, Zach had his seat up and his hand out to me.

Not that I took it. I was perfectly capable of getting out of his Jeep by myself. I swatted his hand away and moved towards the door at a ninety-degree angle to avoid hitting my head.

My foot hooked the belt, sending me, arms flailing, out the door. I fell into Zach’s waiting arms. As if he somehow knew I would need him to catch me. I didn’t have to look up to know a giant smirk was spread across his face.

Not only did his arms look different, but they felt different too. Bigger, stronger, but just as warm as they always had been. The spicy scent of him entered my senses and memories of the night he’d carried me to bed started to come back.

“I’ll never let go.” His breath shot chills up my spine as the words echoed in my mind.

I pushed my hands against his chest, trying to get as much distance from him as I could. “Now we both know that’s a lie.” With my eyes glued on him and an intensity inside of me I didn’t know I possessed, I shoved past him.

I hated Zach’s ability to not let things bother him. While I eye-rolled and clenched my fists, he goofed off with my brother. Seriously, how could two relatively grown boys find pleasure in racing wheelbarrows?

So what if I was being antisocial? I was pissed. I just didn’t exactly know why. I tried to convince myself it was because Zach had thwarted my plans, but it was more than that. The fact that he whispered those stupid words so carelessly in my ear sparked a fire deep within me. What gave him the right to bring up something from our past like that? Something that had meaning once upon a time?

“Liz, jump in!” Zach yelled as he ran towards me with the wheelbarrow. Was he crazy? There was no way I was getting in that thing. Besides, couldn’t he tell I was pissed at him? He’d just uttered words into my ears that were strictly off-limits. They belonged in the past. And he blurted them out like it was yesterday when we were cuddled up on my bed watching
Titanic
.

He didn’t just let go either. Oh no. He tossed me into the sea to be eaten by sharks. At least in the movie Jack had the decency to die. That’s an excuse I could understand. What was Zach’s? Who the heck knew?

“Come on, get in.”

I kept walking, hoping he’d get the hint and disappear.

Where was Josh when I needed him? Too busy flirting with the girl at the weigh-in station. Of course.

“What happened to the fun girl I used to know?”

You left her behind. You broke her heart and turned her from fun and spontaneous to practical and structured. I couldn’t be taken by surprise when my life was on a one-way track.

“She disappeared, but you know all about that, so maybe you can go find her. Tell you what. You go ahead and let me know how it goes.” I went to turn away, but stopped. “Better yet, I don’t need to know. Just go.”

“Lizzi . . . Liz, come on. Is this how it’s going to be?” His hand rested on my elbow and it took every ounce of my being to ignore the heat that shot through my arm directly to my heart. “You can’t hate me forever,” he said, breath hot against my ear, his cologne invading my senses.

I turned around, ready to tear into him. Tell him I could hate him forever and would because he abandoned me. But my eyes settled on his, and I melted. All anger was lost in the cool autumn breeze as I looked into the eyes of the only boy who I ever truly loved.

It was all Sadie’s fault. It might have been obvious, but I was doing a darn good job of hiding from the truth until she gave me no choice but to face it. Damn her for being too perceptive a friend.

A chunk of hair blew into my face, momentarily obstructing my view of Zach and those magnetic eyes. It was my cue to pull away. The connection was severed and I had my chance to dive into the pumpkin field and hide amongst the families. But he reached his hand out and moved the hair from my face, tucking it behind my ear.

A warm, familiar tingle spread up my neck and into my cheeks. After all this time my body still reacted to his touch in the exact same way it always had. My pulse quickened and my breathing became shallow.

His lips were dangerously close and I wanted to feel them more than my next breath. He ran his hand to the end of my strand taking it in between his fingers and I thought I would combust. “I like the blond streaks. They look good on you.”

I sucked in a calming breath. “Thanks. I just wanted a change,” I said, hoping the words wouldn’t show how he was affecting me.

“Change can be good.” My hair fell through his fingers and he pulled his hand back to his side. Part of me was relieved, but the other part was disappointed. “So Joe Resnick, huh?”

Huh? “Yes! Joe.” My boyfriend, the man I loved in a mature type of way.

“He doesn’t deserve you, you know.”

My eyes shot up, ears burning in frustration. He was unfreakinbelievable!

“No, I don’t know, Zach. But what I do know is he would never leave me. He’d be man enough to come to me and end things instead of just vanishing from my life.” I allowed him one last look at my face so he could read the emotion running through my mind and then I stomped away.

I wouldn’t take any more of Zach’s crap. And the fact that I’d actually thought about kissing him . . . what was I thinking? Apparently I wasn’t.

All I wanted was to spend some time with my brother before he left to go back to his dream school. And I wanted to go pumpkin picking, damn it! Instead I was trying to blend in with the vegetables in the farmers’ market.

Being five foot five, it was kind of hard to blend in with the cucumbers and tomatoes, so I took my pissy self to the corn maze, paid the three-dollar entrance fee and disappeared into the long green stalks.

Zach didn’t even know Joe. What, he’d had a class with him back in the seventh grade? Not exactly grounds for such a bold statement.

Besides, what did he know about what was and wasn’t good for me? He’d been MIA, a complete void in my life for a long time. The cashier at the bagel store had a better idea about what was good for me than he did.

Just because you loved someone once doesn’t mean you know everything about them forever. And to top it off he had the nerve to tuck a piece of hair behind my ear. He lost that right when he stopped calling. But instead of telling him that, I’d fallen under his stupid spell.

I came to a fork in the maze, but before I could choose which path would bring me farther into the stalks I was hit by a corn missile. I bent low and took cover behind a scarecrow. The ground beneath me was littered with discarded corn, perfect to return fire.

An ear of corn struck the scarecrow in front of me. Whoever these kids were, they meant business. With determination running through my veins, I picked up the piece that landed on the ground and chucked it back in the direction it came from.

As it flew through the air, I ran. I found a fork in the maze and hung right.

Loud
thunks
followed me as I maneuvered through the thick stalks. Every now and again when I was brave enough I stopped, turned and launched one back.

Somewhere between the corn missiles and the running for cover, I forgot to be pissed. Everything that happened earlier faded farther away with each twist in the maze.

My mouth twitched, and I started laughing so hard it became difficult to run. Gasping for breath, I stopped, bent over, and let the laughter take over.

“Truce. Truce!” I waved my scarf in the air to signify the end of our game. I wanted to meet the kids that gave me the day I had hoped for. The day Zach had single-handedly ruined.

I’d buy them a caramel apple. They deserved it more than my door-closing, ex-boyfriend-inviting brother anyway.

I saw the shadow first, then the dark brown eyes.

All I could do was smile. Because Zach did exactly what I told him he wouldn’t be able to do again.

He made me laugh.

I watched as my peers turned their heads, putting hands to their mouths as each image of my plastic pollution presentation appeared on the screen. Zach didn’t react. He just sat back, shaking his head with anger in his eyes.

In high school he’d wanted to be a marine biologist. Had that changed?

So much had happened in our time apart, I felt like I didn’t know Zach anymore. But for the first time since he came back, I wanted to.

After the slide show, we headed out to West Shore Beach armed with garbage bags. I led the way with Tanya and Vicky, while Zach walked behind us with Chris D’Angelo.

We started along the dunes, spreading out to cover more area in a shorter amount of time. Tanya and Vicky detached from me and went off into their own world, like they always did.

“Hey.”

I was sick of keeping up the I-hate-you façade so I turned when Zach’s voice reached my ears.

“Hey back.” A cluster of cigarette butts were inches from where we stood. I bent down and placed them in the garbage bag with my gloved hand. “What’s new?”

“Do you really want to know, or are you just trying to be polite?”

“You know I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t want to know.”

“True. You’ve never been overly polite before. I don’t know what would make me think that changed,” he said, helping me pick up the remainder of the cigarettes.

“I’d have you know I can be very polite and charming.” His eyes narrowed in on me until we both laughed.