Forget You(13)
Author: Jennifer Echols

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. "Y sister seems pretty cool. Isn’t she staying with you while your dad’s gone?"

our

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? Y are not sarcastic." He detangled his fingers from my hair and put his hand on the knee of my

ou 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. "Y and that damn deer. Y and Mike both missed it and hit each other."

ou ou

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: Y ou’re late for swim practice.

Doug: Y ou’re not the boss of me.

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