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

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