The Ex Games(42)
Author: Jennifer Echols

I woke, but I didn’t want to be awake. I kept my eyes closed and listened for what had changed to wake me. The gunshots and explosions in the movie had grown surprisingly soothing after a while. Now they’d given way to the sweeping theme song as the credits rolled, and soft voices around me.

“Is she still asleep?” Liz asked from somewhere across the room.

Closer by, Gavin answered, “If she wasn’t, there’s no way she could have been quiet this long.” A smack sounded as Chloe slapped him for insulting me.

Nick’s voice was closer still, down at my feet. He was sharing the sofa with me. There must have been nowhere else for him to sit in the room. “I knew she broke her leg before she moved here, but I never realized it was that big a deal.”

Oh, no, I really had spilled all that to him while woozy! Stupendous. Luckily, I was lying on my side with my face to the back of the sofa, so I wouldn’t give myself away with fluttering eyelashes or a grimace. Chloe and Liz confirmed and cooed, and I felt myself drifting off again.

Then something moved on my ankle. I nearly jumped out of my skin. And still another wave of adrenaline rushed through me as I realized what was happening. Nick wasn’t just sharing the sofa with me because there was nowhere else to sit in Liz’s den. My feet were in his lap. His hand was around my ankle. He was rubbing my ankle, his fingertips tracing slow circles around my ankle bone.

Technically, he wasn’t even touching me, unless you counted the pressure of his fingers through my sock. It was ridiculous for me to go tense under his hand, hardly daring to breathe, waiting for the next stroke of his fingers. Except that this meant something. I doubted anyone could see Nick touching me from across the darkened room. Nick wasn’t doing this for his friends, showing them how he could tease me to get the upper hand with me. He wasn’t even doing this for me. He thought I was asleep. He was doing it for himself. He was stroking me, comforting me, putting a protective hand on me, because he wanted to. Even after he’d said he was finished with me.

The conversation moved on to Will Smith and the movie. The TV switched from teen drama to basketball and back as Chloe and Gavin snatched the remote away from each other. I tried to relax a bit and enjoy Nick’s hand on my ankle while I had it, because I might not ever experience this strangely intense connection with him again. But I resigned myself to the torture of remaining wide awake and perfectly still for a few more hours until everyone went home.

I started awake, jerking upright this time. The shadowy room was empty. They must have turned off the satellite box but not the TV, and after a few minutes of silence it had burst into static and had woken me. I relaxed against the pillows on the sofa, but the static wouldn’t let me ease back to sleep. It was like my brain, loud and scrambled and panicky.

I peeled myself from the sofa, switched off the TV, and padded through the silent house to the hall bathroom. I squeezed my eyes shut and flicked on the light. Then I opened my eyes slowly to protect them from the glare, but also because I dreaded seeing what I had looked like to Nick while he lugged me around all evening. I couldn’t avoid the mirror right in front of me.

My face was pale, my eyes smudged with dark circles underneath, as if I’d spent the last few hours fainting and then sleeping fitfully. Go figure. My normally straight hair had been so teased by hats and goggles and pillows and Nick that it had grown big and frizzy. And my ear—I pushed back my hair to examine the tiny bandage on my earlobe. This had caused all the trouble? I felt like a fool.

Frowning at myself, I reached up and fingered my other earlobe and the one lucky earring I had left. I wasn’t a fool. Hysterical, yes. Maladjusted, definitely. But not a fool. My broken leg had been a devastating injury. So had my encounter with Nick four years ago. I’d known this, but only now was I realizing just how badly I’d been hurt.

Sighing, I washed my face. I was squeezing toothpaste onto the toothbrush Liz’s mom kept there for me, because I always forgot mine, when I heard voices outside. I stepped over to the window and pushed aside the curtain, then backed up a pace when the cold night air leaking around the windowsill touched my skin.

Nick and Gavin were talking at the end of the driveway—or what I assumed, from the tire tracks, was the driveway under a blanket of fresh snow. Streetlights glinted on Nick’s dark and Gavin’s black hair. Then Gavin got into his car, and Nick hiked through the snow toward his SUV.

“Oh, mo,” I mumbled through toothpaste. I couldn’t let him get away. Not now.

I swished, spat, and ran for the front door, pausing only to shove my feet into galoshes owned by some unknown member of Liz’s family. Her stepdad, I decided as I tried to run down the snowy front steps. The galoshes were so big, it was like wading in a Tennessee river.

I was too late anyway. They were gone. Gavin’s tires spun briefly and his car pulled away, taillights reflecting red and long on the snow. But no—Nick’s SUV still sat idling in the street at the end of the driveway. And as I waded closer, I saw he was in the driver’s seat of the dark cab, slowly, repeatedly banging his head on the steering wheel.

He must not have heard me approach over the hum of the engine. I walked all the way up to the passenger-side window and stood there, watching him, waiting for him to notice me. He would see that I had caught him banging his head on his steering wheel, and this was something I could tease him about and hold over his head for the next few months at school.

But I was getting cold in my foreign galoshes and only two layers of clothes in the freezing night. As Nick kept hitting his head, I realized the two of us weren’t in that place anymore, the one where we made fun of each other and had a fight and left it at that. We’d been driving in circles, having wrecks and backing over each other, but somehow we’d come way past that place in the last week. I knocked on the window.

He stopped with his head halfway to the steering wheel for another whack, and he turned to me with his eyes wide behind his dark hair. Immediately, he slid across the seat and pulled the handle to open the door for me.

Leaving the galoshes outside in the snow, I gratefully slid inside the warm cab and shut the door softly so it wouldn’t wake the neighborhood. Nick took off his parka and draped it around my shoulders. He didn’t have to say, “You shouldn’t be out here without a coat,” or “You shouldn’t be awake now after the terrible day you had.” I could see all this in his eyes. He wasn’t concerned with making a joke at my expense. He was concerned about me.