Only Doug stood aloof from the swim team, stock-still in the midst of the dancing crowd, arms folded across his T-shirt. He'd been to juvie, so no girl at our school wanted to date Doug. He was that hilarious guy with the black hair and beautiful eyes and the temper. Girls kept their distance because he might turn on them and cut them down. Last year there was a rumor he dated a girl who went to high school in Destin. It was only a matter of time until she found out about juvie. Sure enough, somehow Mike spilled the beans to her--which was why Doug and Mike hated each other. I'd overheard half this story on the van last year and mentally cursed everyone for making so much noise that I couldn't hear the rest, but I did not like to pry, and I didn't want to give anyone the impression I cared about Doug's love life.
I was thinking this about Doug, but I didn't realize I was staring at him until he glanced over at me and caught me. He stared hard, expecting me to chicken out and avert my eyes. My heart sped up again and the skin on my forearms tingled. I was that impala making a fight-or-flight decision, targeted by that lion. But I didn't look away. I stared right back at him as Mike sang hateful words about a girl who broke his heart and wasn't worth the trouble. Doug Fox didn't own this football stadium, and I would not show him weakness and open the door for him to hurt my mother. He would not ruin my carefree high school experience, my party, my night with Brandon.
And that's the last thing I remember.
"ZOEY."
"I'm up!" I sat straighter on whatever I'd slumped against. It had a bottom and a high back, so it must be a sofa. Whose sofa? I hoped no one had seen me fall asleep in public. I was captain of the swim team, a school leader. I couldn't go around falling asleep just anywhere. And I wasn't drunk. I never lost control that way, ever.
"Y had a wreck." It took me a second to place the smooth voice: Doug. His voice had the slightest edge, like he'd seen the wreck happen and was a
ou little freaked out but was trying to remain calm. "Y need to get out of the car."
Issuing commands was not Doug's usual style. Getting pissed when other people issued commands, yes. Issuing them himself, no. Now he was telling me what to do, and it scared me.
I was in the driver's seat. I slid toward his voice on the passenger side. He was lying on the ground and leaning through the doorway, half in and half out of the car. Headlights from outside blanked his face like an overexposed photo in shades of white. His hair hung black over his forehead, and his shadowed eyes were two black sockets. Something must be horribly wrong.
"I totaled my Bug," I wailed.
"Y you did," he said grimly.
es,
"Did I total your Jeep?"
"Get out of the car." He nodded toward the empty space beside him in the doorway. "Get out of the car now, Zoey."
I slid farther toward him. When I reached the passenger side, the dashboard leaned so far forward that it blocked my way. To get by, I had to draw my legs up onto the seat. Then I slid them beside Doug on the ground and stood up.
And fell down, splatting into mud.
"That's what I was afraid of," Doug called from several feet away. "Y can't stand up?"
"I can stand up," I protested. It was better to lie down, though. I just wished the headlights from the car I'd hit weren't so bright, streaming into my eyes. Long blades of grass glowed green around us, and white raindrops streaked down on us. Beyond the small circle where we lay, the night was black, and I couldn't see.
I felt him crawling beside me until his face was even with mine. He rose above me. His arm circled me, warm after the cool wet grass. He hoisted me upward and groaned.
"I am not fat," I said.
"Of course you're not fat." Now he sounded like he was talking with his teeth clenched.
"Brandon told me I look like I've gained weight since the summer." He hadn't meant it as an insult. He was just kidding around, flirting with me. I'd actually lost weight since the competitive swim season began. But since Brandon had texted that message to me on Tuesday, I'd skipped breakfast, just to make sure.
"Brandon," grunted Doug as he took a big step and slung me forward. "Can." He took another step and groaned again. "Kiss. My. Broken. Ass." He let me slip through his arms to the ground, and he collapsed beside me.
From this distance, through the bright raindrops in the dark night, I could see the two cars kissing each other with steam rising from their lips. My Bug and definitely not Doug's Jeep. "Whose car?"
"Mike's Miata."
"Mike Abrams ?" I'd wrecked the whole swim team.
"He's not hurt, but he's stuck inside. He's calling 911. We'll get help soon. Don't worry."
I hadn't been worried. But now that he brought it up, the gravity of the situation sank in. It was night. It was raining. We'd crashed head-on. And Doug must be hurt, or he wouldn't be lying down in the grass in a rainstorm. "Doug, I'm so sorry."
"Sorry! It's not your fault. Don't you remember what happened? Y and Mike both swerved to keep from hitting a deer in the road."
No, I didn't remember the deer. "Is the deer okay?"
"Fuck the deer. Hush now." Gently he drew me to him and pressed down on the back of my neck until I lay my head on his chest.
It was totally innocent. Doug was comforting me after we'd been in a wreck together. Brandon still would not approve. But I couldn't do anything about it because I felt dizzy. My hands found Doug's T-shirt, and I gripped fistfuls of fabric to keep from falling off the edge of the earth. I nuzzled his warm chest. He smelled faintly of chlorine.
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.
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.