Read Online Forget You by Jennifer Echols - Free Book Online Page A

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. "Your sister seems pretty cool. Isn't she staying with you while your dad's gone?"
    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? You are not sarcastic." He detangled his fingers from my hair and put his hand on the knee of my 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. "You and that damn deer. You and Mike both missed it and hit each other."
    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: You're late for swim practice.
Doug: You're not the boss of me.
    And in years past, before we were on the varsity swim team together:
Me: Stop copying off my math test.
Doug: You think awfully highly of your math skills, Miss Commander.
    "I can't drive until I get my cast off," he went on. "You can drive my Jeep. I feel stupid asking you to drive, but I really want to see you. Or we could stay in and watch TV if you're not up to it. Zoey?"
    His tone had