Forget You(12)
Author: Jennifer Echols

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."

"Y 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.

"Y boyfriend’s here," Ashley called softly. Almost motherly, except nothing could sound truly motherly coming from a chick only seven years older than

our me. "Y 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.