Me: Stop copying off my math test.
Doug: Y think awfully highly of your math skills, Miss Commander.
"I can't drive until I get my cast off," he went on. "Y can drive my Jeep. I feel stupid asking you to drive, but I really want to see you. Or we could stay in
ou and watch TV if you're not up to it. Zoey?"
His tone had turned to concern because I'd closed one eye against the throbbing in my head. I was a bit slow on the uptake this morning. But I finally understood. Strange as the last twelve hours had been, they'd just gotten a lot stranger. Doug Fox was asking me out.
Something didn't add up. I fished for more information. Pressing my fingertips to my eyebrow above my glasses to keep my brain from spilling onto the upholstery, I asked, "If you can't drive, how'd you get here?"
I felt terrible about Doug essentially giving up his chance at State by saving my life (or not). I felt almost as guilty about him losing his ability to drive. Most things to do in our town were lined up along the beach where the tourists could reach them in the summer. Because the beach houses and condos were so expensive, the population of our town was centered a few miles inland where the land was cheaper, along with downtown and the high school. And though thousands of tourists swelled the population in the height of the season, now that it was September and they'd left, the town was small. Too small for public transportation. Not a bus or a subway or a taxi in sight. If Doug couldn't drive, he was stuck.
"My brother brought me," Doug said.
I leaped up, snatching my knee away from his hand. I crossed the room and heaved open the heavy front door.
Our porch looked over our garden, which my mom had hired a landscaper to design with native grasses and flowering vines that could survive the hot summers. Six other houses had similar porches and gardens sloping to a common courtyard paved with local stone. In the center of the courtyard idled a pickup I recognized from around town, with a man's bare feet sticking out the passenger window. Not the police car I'd expected, but after a long night of responding to his brother's wrecks and patrolling for rogue deer, Officer Fox must be off duty.
And suddenly, staring at that pickup, I understood all the problems that were throwing the golf ball as hard as they could at the inside of my skull. Last night Doug had rescued me from my car, feeling like a hero to my damsel in distress. I'd lain on top of him in a thunderstorm and snuggled with him and let him put his hands in my hair. And he'd taken that seriously, even though this had happened just a few hours after I very possibly had sex with Brandon for the second time.
Or, in an alternative scenario so awful that I hardly dared consider it, Doug's invitation for a date was some kind of blackmail. He sure was being nice to me after my dad's threat to his brother. And his brother sat in his pickup in the center of my neighborhood's courtyard. He had come to our home and stuck his feet into the ocean breeze as if to say I know everything about your mother.
The door banged shut behind me. Only then I realized I'd left it open. Doug and I stood in a bubble of escaped air-conditioning in the hot day. His hot finger traced a Z on my back, through my T-shirt. Every one of his touches had been a quirky brush against an unexpected part of my body. But this time I was determined to keep things cold.
I turned to him. As I spun, he kept his finger at the same level so it trailed around my shoulder and across my breast, making me shudder. His fingertip centered over my heart as I faced him.
This had gone too far. I had a new relationship with Brandon that I didn't want to ruin. And if Doug did have some wild blackmail scenario in mind, reminding him I was with Brandon might make him think twice.
I grabbed his hand, pulled it down to waist level, and squeezed it. "Doug, I don't want to hurt your feelings, but Brandon is my boyfriend." Of course, in rejecting Doug, I was giving him yet another reason to hate me, and to get revenge on me by telling the whole town about my mother. I hoped against hope he would be reasonable for once. I looked down, past our clasped hands at the expensive faux-weathered wood floor of the porch.
My mom had told me it was important to look people in the eye, especially men, when you were trying to control a situation.
I was scared to see the expression on Doug's face, but I forced my eyes upward from the rubber tips of his crutches, his one tanned foot in a battered leather flip-flop, and the other splinted leg he held awkwardly a few inches off the ground. Upward to his cargo shorts, loose around his waist. Like me, he must have lost weight since competition started. The heathered gray waistband of his underwear peeked out above his shorts. His FSU SWIMMING T-shirt was so old and loved, the dark red had faded to a doubtful magenta.
Finally my gaze reached his clean-shaven jaw locked in anger, his angry eyes. He glared down at me with exactly the look he'd given me last night at the game.
Hastily I dropped his hand.
And then he took a slow breath. His chest expanded and his broad shoulders rose. He exhaled through his nose. The anger left his eyes. He gave me a small nod. "Y mean you need to break up with Brandon officially? Y want to tell him in person to get closure? I mean, yeah, but, you're not going out
ou ou with him tonight, are you? Y don't need to go out with him to break up with him."
"I'm not breaking up with him." The porch was shady, but even the sunlight beyond us in the courtyard was too bright and fueled the throbbing in my forehead. "Doug, Brandon is my boyfriend. I'm glad you're okay. I'm glad Mike's okay. I'm grateful to you for pulling me out of the car. But I'm with Brandon. "
"I don't understand," Doug said coldly.
"I don't know how to make it more clear." The golf ball in my head grew to billiard ball size. "Last night doesn't change the fact that you've hated me since the ninth grade."
He rocked backward and shifted the pads of the crutches under his arms. "No, I haven't," he said innocently. He might have used his customary honeyed sarcasm. I couldn't tell because the billiard ball had grown to a bowling ball inside my head.
"Y made fun of me to the swim team at the football game," I reminded him.
"When? No, I didn't."
He seemed so adamant, I wondered whether I could have been wrong. I hadn't actually heard the boy half of the swim team make fun of me. But this much I was sure of. "Y told me I'm a spoiled brat!"
He gaped at me. "I already apologized for that, Zoey."
I didn't remember him apologizing. Now brain damage was etched across the bowling ball banging against the inside of my skull. "Look, I have a headache, for real. Thanks for checking on me." I took a step back from him, giving him room to move down the porch steps to his brother's truck.