“My dad won’t let me.”
“—or, Jesus, Zoey, talk to somebody at school or the YMCA, something. Every other girl in the universe has a best girlfriend they can talk to about this, but one normal girlfriend has more sense than Keke and Lila put together.”
“So it’s imperative to you that I find a stable person to lean on in this time of strife,” I mused. “Yet the person you steer me toward through various sneaky and downright illegal means is you, who went to juvie!”
He pointed at me. “That was three years ago. And those records are sealed. No one is ever supposed to find out about that, except of course everyone who’s ever known me.”
I put my hand on his good knee to bring him back to me, to ground him. To make that connection with him I thought I’d missed when I put my hand on his forearm at the football game last Friday night. “How far did we go?”
He picked up my other hand. Held it loosely. Pressed it to his lips, watching me.
That didn’t bode well.
“How far?” My voice broke. “Doug, what did we do? Did we go to third?”
He moved my hand away from his mouth long enough to ask, “What’s third?” and then put it to his mouth again.
I jerked my hand back. “Going down my pants. This matters to me, Doug. Does it matter to you?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
Suddenly I understood everything. “Oh my God, we went all the way. It’s like you slipped me a roofie!”
His eyes filled with tears, exactly as if I’d slapped him. “It is not like that,” he yelled back, “and don’t you dare accuse me ever again of pressuring you into doing something you didn’t want to do. You wanted it. You said you wanted it. You asked for it. Don’t you dare accuse me of that.” He panted a few times. “I don’t belong in jail, Zoey. I’ve been there and I know I don’t. This never would have occurred to you if you remembered Friday night. It never would have occurred to me either. Do you understand?” His hands shook on his knee.
I sat back and took in all of him, broken leg extended out, the rest of him curled into a ball, upset. He was telling the truth, now. “Then why didn’t you tell me before?” I insisted.
“I didn’t know you didn’t know! You pretended to remember everything except the wreck.”
“But you figured it out on Tuesday, when you found my earrings in the Bug,” I said. “One of them must have caught on something Friday night, and you watched me take them out and put them in the ashtray for safekeeping.”
“It caught on the zipper of my jeans.”
I gaped at him, picturing what we’d done.
He sniffled and looked away. “I’m sorry. That was very crude of me.”
“You found out forty-eight hours ago, Doug,” I said quietly. “When were you going to tell me?”
He turned back to me, looking haggard and awful. “When I could think straight. When I got off Percocet.”
I shook my head. “Poor excuse. Try again.”
He swallowed. “Considering how you pushed me away when you thought we’d only felt each other up in the emergency room, I wasn’t optimistic about how you’d act if I told you we did it in your Bug at the beach.”
I couldn’t raise one eyebrow like he did, but I approximated that facial expression as well as I could. The meaning was Bullshit.
He winced like I’d punched him in the stomach. “Oh, God, Zoey. I was scared of what you might do, okay? You said losing your memory was like what happened to your mom. I wasn’t sure what you meant by that.” He stared down at his cast.
I watched him for a few moments, this half-Asian intellectual raised by a pirate. I looked around the room at the posters championing sex and violence in another world. My gaze came to rest on the books on his bedside table, both by E. M. Forster. Right now we were reading A Passage to India for English, but Doug was reading two that Ms. Northam hadn’t assigned: Howards End and A Room with a View.
“I want a way out of this,” I sighed, “but there’s no way out. You lied to me.”
He glared at me over his raised knee. “And you’ve told me some choice ones too. Such as, ‘I remember what happened Friday night.’ And, ‘No, I have not passed out on the floor of the bathroom at the pool.’”
“You went way beyond that, Doug. When you found out I didn’t remember, you told Mike and your brother. You asked them not to tell me anything!”
“You’d already made me ask them not to tell anyone that you and I had been together, so Brandon wouldn’t find out,” Doug said. “You don’t mind lies. You just want to be the one to control them.”
He had me there.
“And you told me the biggest lie of all. You told me you loved me.”
It was my turn to wince like he’d slapped me. “I don’t remember saying that.”
“You would if it had been true. You would feel something.”
“I do feel something,” I protested.
“You just don’t care.”
“I do care,” I insisted. “Doug, you don’t understand how badly I want to care about you. But for the past few days, you’ve controlled every move I’ve made.”
“Of course I haven’t,” he said. “I know how you are. That’s the worst thing anyone could do to you.”
I watched him, waiting for him to understand the depth of what he’d done to me. Doug was one of the smartest people I knew. Even through the alcohol, he would get it. It took about ten seconds, and then his lips parted. Now he would say something remorseful, but I wouldn’t be able to accept his apology. Ever.
He said, “I love you.”
I stood. “Guys only say that when they want to get laid.”
“Zoey!” he shouted after me, but I was already out the door.
I galloped up the stairs, out of the house, and crossed the shadowy yard to my car. Officer Fox’s police car was gone. I worried briefly. But the men cackled around the fire with nary a wolf whistle in my direction as I skipped to my dad’s Benz and settled into the cold leather.
I executed a very careful three-point turn that would not draw the derision of the salty dogs, and cruised up the driveway crackling with shells. Just before the live oaks closed in around the house behind me, I glanced in the rearview mirror, half expecting to see Doug crutching after me through the dark. But he didn’t appear.
Doug had finally taken no for an answer.
15
Leaving his house, I felt seventeen times as lost as I’d felt Tuesday night when I dropped him off at the wharf. I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t go to the mall in Destin because it would be closing by the time I arrived. And I needed to make the most of the Benz while I had it. My dad would come home to reclaim it the day after tomorrow and I’d be without wheels until further notice. Grounded, as surely as if I’d looked for invisible tape in his office.
I switched on the GPS and typed in Seattle.
The drive was long and dark and lonely and blank with no exit for miles on Interstate 10 toward Mobile. My body was dead tired but my brain was alert, energized by anger at everything Doug had said.
Was he a liar?
Thinking back, I couldn’t put my finger on an actual lie he’d told me. Well, he’d fudged when he explained where he and Mike were going when we wrecked, but even then he’d constructed a lie as close to the truth as he could manage on the fly. He wasn’t so much a liar as a withholder of pertinent information. For a talkative boy he could really keep his own counsel.
Except about Brandon, of course. Did I really know in my heart that Brandon was cheating on me with Stephanie Wetzel?
There certainly was evidence he was growing closer to Stephanie and pulling away from me. But when I asked my heart what it thought, my heart didn’t respond. It didn’t even speed up at the thought of him cheating on me. It raced when my mind wandered through the future, wondering who Doug would end up with if my fate with Brandon was sealed, as Doug had said. I couldn’t stand the thought of Doug tossing back his head and laughing with another
girl.
Had Doug and I used a condom?
Surely we had. As he’d told Officer Fox, he never did anything foolish. Of course, he’d said this facetiously. Fuck.
And this released a flood of questions about the details of what we’d done. Who made the first move? How did we end up going so far so fast? How exactly did my earring catch on his zipper , hello? Did I enjoy it? Did he? I could guess the answers to the last two questions by the way we’d acted when we wrecked. We’d definitely enjoyed it. But the rest . . . I had lost my memory. He would keep his forever. It wasn’t fair.
Somewhere between Mobile and Hattiesburg, on a pitch-black stretch of highway, I realized the oysters had settled in my stomach and pumped salt and aphrodisiac into my veins until my mouth was on fire. I was rubbing my lips with my fingertips, driving in the wrong direction. And now I was two and a half hours from Doug.
IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT I EASED the Benz back down Doug’s drive, stopped it in the middle of the causeway, and killed the headlights. I’d feared the salty dogs would still be up and I’d be caught with no safe way out. But the pack had dispersed for the night.
I pressed the button for Doug’s cell and listened to it ring. What if he didn’t pick up? I would go crazy wondering whether he’d turned off his phone again or he was watching the screen, refusing to talk to me. Either way, if I didn’t see him tonight, I would spontaneously combust, I knew it. I felt heavy from the pressure, desperate to get out from under it. At the same time, electricity zinged through me. My every thought zeroed in on the basement windows of the house, his room. I needed release from this. I couldn’t go on this way.
“Zoey. Where are you?” Through the phone, his calm voice had that edge I remembered from the wreck. He thought I was in trouble.
It hadn’t occurred to me that I would scare him when I called. For the first time I began to doubt this plan. The pressure and the electricity drove me forward. “I’m in your driveway.”
“Give me two minutes.” The phone clicked dead.
The basement windows glowed with light. Then went dark.
On the side of the house, a basement door that I hadn’t seen before opened very slowly. He crutched out and pushed the door closed just as slowly behind him, without a thunk his dad would hear. He made his way toward me along the edge of the clearing, under the ancient trees. Then he stepped onto the causeway. Behind him in the distance, the ocean was black with whitecaps rolling slowly toward us. The sky was black, brightening to blue around the full white moon.
On the narrow strip of land, he rounded the car to reach the passenger side. He wore his swim team sweatshirt and gym shorts with the heathered gray waistband of his boxer briefs peeking out. Good. Easy off. He also wore glasses. I hadn’t known he wore glasses at all. This was probably the secret behind the green eyes I’d fallen for: colored contacts. What a relief to know his beautiful eyes were fake.
He tried the door of the Benz. Locked. He pounded once on the door in frustration.
I unlocked it with the button on my door, then leaned over to open it for him. It wouldn’t do for him to lose his balance and tumble off the causeway, into the surf.
The breeze and the roar of the ocean came in first. Then his crutches, narrowly missing my head. He tossed them over the headrests into the backseat. He smelled like toothpaste, exactly what I must have smelled like when he woke me up last Saturday morning and I thought he was Brandon.
He closed the door behind him and turned to me. Behind his glasses, in the moonlight, I could see his eyes were the same green-blue as ever. They really were the color of the sea. “You rang?” he asked, dry and sober.
“Did we use a condom?”
“Is that all?” he asked, disgusted. He put his hand on the door to open it.
“It’s important, Doug.”
He sighed impatiently. “Of course it’s important, which is why you had a freaking crate of condoms in the trunk of the Bug. Of course we used a condom. If that’s all, I’ll get back to my nightmares.” He put his hand on the door again.
“That’s not all,” I said quickly. “I don’t think my memory of that night is ever coming back.”
“Do you want me to hit you on the head with a coconut? It works on Gilligan’s Island.”
“I want you to reconstruct the night for me.”
He looked at me over the rims of his glasses. That must be the origin of his hottest expression, chin down, lashes long. “You want to have sex again?”
“Yes.”
“No.” He turned, and this time he opened the door.
“Why not, if we did it before?” I called over the noise of the surf.
“Because you’ve been all Brandon, all week. You can’t snap your fingers”—he held his hand out toward me and snapped—“and expect me to perform for you.”
“You owe me,” I said. “You’ve lied to me and manipulated me. This one time, you do what I tell you.”
He paused for five seconds more with his hand on the open door. Then he slammed the door shut and leaned back against it, watching me. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Well, I didn’t have sex by myself.”
So I made the first move? I tried to visualize myself reaching out to him, like Coach told us to visualize ourselves winning swim heats. But Doug looked so distant, staring me down from across the car with his eyes sexy and his arms folded.
“Maybe you could set the stage,” I suggested. “Was the moon bright like this?”
He shook his head. “It was raining hard. I got a little worried.”
“Then why didn’t we leave?”
“There wasn’t a tornado watch. There probably should have been, but there wasn’t. I thought it was safe. I was wrong.” He sighed, and his voice softened. “Anyway, I wasn’t exactly thinking straight. I was so full of you.”
I slid across the seat toward him. He watched me. I stretched up to kiss his neck, just where the collar of his sweatshirt ended. I kissed my way up under his hair, toward parts of his neck I only saw when his hair was tucked under a swim cap in the pool. Then his chin where his stubble started. I felt him shudder, but he didn’t touch me, and when I pulled away he was still staring at me, almost angrily.
“You did it before,” I protested. “What’s the difference?”
“It meant something before. Now it’s all scientific. You’re recovering data.”
“You owe me.” I slid my hand onto the front of his shorts.
His eyes widened. And in one motion he took off his glasses, tossed them onto the dash, and put his hands behind my head, drawing me closer. His mouth hit my mouth and opened me. His tongue swept inside me.
Doug was a great kisser. I knew this right away. And I wasn’t surprised, because he looked like a great kisser. The girls on the swim team had talked about this before. We didn’t want to mess with juvie, but we knew sooner or later whomever Doug finally hooked up with was going to get a mouthful.
Instead, I was the one who got his mouth. His lips were soft. His tongue was firm. His teeth were sneaky, nipping at me when I didn’t expect it. We kissed for long minutes as our bodies slowly intertwined. My hand slipped between his shorts and the heathered boxer briefs. His hand shoved past my shorts and panties, onto my bare skin. Finally I was out of breath. I pulled a few inches away from him and gasped.
He wouldn’t let me get away. He put his forehead to my forehead and chuckled. “That’s exactly what you did before.”
I rubbed the tip of my nose back and forth across his. “How did my earring get caught on your zipper?”
“Hm.” He laughed. “I just said that to make you mad. We didn’t do anything like that. We wanted to save something for later. Your earring came out when I put my hands in your hair. Like this.” He wove the fingers of both hands into my hair and held me firmly as he kissed me.
A long time later, his mouth had done everything it could possibly do to my mouth, twice. My hands were growing restless. I whispered agains
t his lips, “Is this when we moved into the backseat?”
He breathed rapidly through his nose and blinked at me. He seemed to have a hard time focusing on me, but maybe that was because he was missing his glasses. “Yes, but—”
“But what?” I slid over the console into the backseat and opened the back door for him, holding out my hands to steady him as he leaned on the Benz and hopped from the front door to the back. As I pulled him inside I said, “This has got to be a lot more comfy than the backseat of the Bug.”
“More roomy,” he acknowledged as he closed the door. “But I didn’t have a broken leg before. Equally awkward.”
I pressed him backward until he lay on the seat and I lay on top of him. Not too different from the way we’d lain together in the back of the swim team van and the back of the police car, except this time I was in control. I kissed his mouth, his neck, and felt a new rush every time he moaned.
I tugged at his sweatshirt until he relented and helped me take it off him. I smoothed my hands across his lean chest and strong arms. I kissed from his neck down his sternum to the inny belly button I’d found so fascinating in the van. His belly button was mine for tonight. I dipped my tongue into it, licked the circumference and let my tongue trail down, just to get revenge for that joke about my earring getting caught in his zipper.
As my mouth reached the waistband of his shorts, he gasped, “Okay.”
“Okay.” I laughed, straightening so I could pull off my shirt. “Is this when you took off my bra?”
He squinted at me through the black hair in his eyes. “Yes, but—”
“Is this the same bra?”
He propped himself up on his elbows. “No, it was blue with white polka dots, and it had a blue bow right there.” He poked me between the boobs. “So you still don’t believe we did this?”
“I believe you.” I’d had some lingering doubts, but I believed him now that he’d correctly identified the bra. “I still don’t understand how I ended up in the car with you when I’d wanted to go parking with Brandon. But I understand completely how, once I was here, things snowballed and we went all the way. I’ve lived all my life in Florida and I have no experience with snow.”