by Julie Kriss
Doug, the assistant manager who was the only other employee in the store this morning, gave me a frown. He was thirty, a wispy guy with brown hair and a stature shorter and slimmer than mine. I’m not a big girl, but I could have sat on him and squashed him flat. “You’re late,” he said.
“I’m not,” I argued. “I’m almost late. That’s different.”
“Megan,” he said.
“I’m on time,” I insisted, looping the clerk’s apron over my neck. “Almost late counts as on time.”
“Fine. We got a shipment of gum. Go get it from the back.”
As I filled the little boxes of different brands of gum along the front counter, I wondered again why the hell I even cared. Was it this job? No, it wasn’t. Was it the money? I needed to live, of course–I had moved out on my own, even if it was a rental apartment only a block from my dad’s place—but I did freelance work coding websites on the side, which made me more money than this did. If I wanted to make a real go of being a coder, I could quit and build a career.
But I really, really didn’t want to sit at home in my apartment all day, staring at a computer screen. The thought of doing that for the rest of my life made me queasy. So maybe I wanted to keep this job for the social benefits? I glanced at Doug, who was ringing up a lady’s tampons at the counter, and thought again.
Maybe, I thought, I was just sick of being fired.
Most people saw being fired as the ultimate humiliation, a sign of failure. Not me. My dad had taught me that being fired was, in some ways, a badge of honor almost as impressive as quitting. It meant you were going your own path, bucking the system, being yourself. But I was starting to wonder about that, because lately it had begun to feel like failure.
It started raining outside, the water coming down in sheets, and Doug and I changed places, me taking the cash and him wandering the aisles, stocking and neatening the shelves. We were steadily busy, people coming in for their allergy meds or their hangover ibuprofen, their itch creams or their Sunday morning Pepto. I watched the clock. Maybe Holly, my best friend, would be around later for a coffee when I got off. If she wasn’t busy with her boyfriend, Dean. I’d known Dean in high school, and he was ridiculously hot, in a bad-boy way. Because Holly was a smart girl, she was busy with him a lot.
And then I came back to reality and looked up at the next person in line, and my day went right down the toilet.
It was Jason Carsleigh.
That tall, hot body. Those sleek, thick muscles. Those brown eyes, under gorgeous slashes of brows, framed by dark lashes. Those high cheekbones, that soft dark brown hair, that perfect mouth. He was wearing worn jeans and a hoodie with the hood pulled up, rainwater dripping from the edges, and even from over the counter I could smell him, rainwater and last night’s cologne and some kind of dirty boy-musk. My spine went to goo and my knees clenched. Jason always did this to me. Always.
He was my friend Holly’s brother, and her boyfriend Dean’s best friend. He and Dean had been the most talked-about guys at Eden High, where they’d been one year ahead of me. Dean, the bad boy. Jason, the good boy. Unlikely best friends. Everyone had known who they were. Now we were years out of high school, and because I’d struck up a friendship with Holly, I couldn’t quite avoid Jason. Though I did everything in my power to try.
Because I hated him.
Jason fucking Carsleigh.
He looked at me and his eyes went wide for a brief instant. Then they went wary. Jason knew I didn’t like him—he knew it perfectly well, since I’d made it clear. What he didn’t know was why.
Because he didn’t fucking remember.
“Hey, Megan,” he said, his voice a little throaty. He hadn’t shaved this morning, and a perfect shadow of stubble showed on his perfect jaw. I didn’t think he’d showered; in fact, he looked a little rough. As if he’d been up late last night, and now he was hung over. It made me hate him that he could be hung over and hot at the same time. It made me hate him that he’d spent last night having fun, maybe in bed with some girl. I assumed he remembered his night with her.
That thought just made me angrier. I didn’t greet him back, just looked down at what he was here to pay for, and then I paused in surprise.
“Midol?” I said to him, raising an eyebrow.
He didn’t blush or shift uncomfortably, just stared at me. “Megan,” he said again. “Ring it through.”
It made no sense. Why was he buying Midol? I knew from Holly that Jason and his fiancée, Charlotte Davenport, had broken up. They’d been together for four years, while Jason was deployed in the Marines, but it had fallen apart after he’d come home. So he wasn’t buying Midol for Charlotte. The idea of Charlotte, the world’s most perfect blonde, needing Midol, or having bodily functions at all, was absurd anyway. She probably eased her menstrual cramps with the feathers of angel wings.
Since the breakup, Jason hadn’t dated anyone else. That I knew of. Then why the hell was he buying Midol?
He was looking impatient and annoyed, and that just made me contrary, so I picked up the Midol box and scanned it. Then I looked at the computer screen. “The price isn’t coming up right,” I said sweetly to Jason.
He figured it out almost immediately—I’d give him that. Even tired and hung over, he figured it out. He closed his eyes, as if he had a pounding headache, as I picked up the intercom phone and pressed the ON button.
“Price check,” I said into the intercom, hearing my voice reverberate through the store. There were shoppers in the aisles and at least four people in line behind Jason. “Price check on Midol. I repeat, Midol. Cash one.”
Jason’s eyes were still closed, as if he was wishing he were somewhere else right now. “Megan,” he said again, his jaw clenched, “is this really necessary?”
“I’m afraid it is,” I said to him. “You have to pay the right price, Jason. It’s important.”
Doug appeared from around the end of the aisle. “Megan, that price check,” he called over the heads of everyone in line. “Is it regular strength Midol or extra strength Midol?”
I made a show of lifting the box and checking it. “Extra strength, Doug,” I called back, my voice carrying. “Extra strength Midol.”
“Sure thing,” Doug said, disappearing back down the aisle.
“Oh, my fucking God,” Jason said softly.
“I know. I’m sorry,” I said insincerely. “This will only take a minute. Then you can take your Midol, and your cramps will go away.”
He lifted a hand—one big, long-fingered, well-formed, pure-sex hand—and scraped it slowly over his face. I could hear the rasp of his stubble, the sound reverberating straight between my legs. Damn him.
“It’s for my mother,” he said.
Oh. Right. He’d moved back in to his mother’s house after the breakup with Charlotte. I hadn’t thought of that. How old was Mrs. Carsleigh? Still young enough to need Midol, obviously. Which meant that Jason, at twenty-four, was still a guy who would get out of bed hung over on a rainy Sunday to buy his mother some Midol.
Fuck.
Doug came back and gave me the price. The computer had it right, of course. So I rang it through and took Jason’s money without another word. It didn’t matter that I’d been a bit of a bitch to him while he was doing something nice. It didn’t matter. He deserved it. I told myself that as I yanked the money out of his hand and dumped out his change. As I snapped the box of Midol into a bag and shoved it at him. Fuck you, Jason Carsleigh. Fuck you.
He took his change and paused, as if considering saying something. “Jesus you’re pissed at me,” he said. “I wish I knew why.”
He turned and walked away, his tall, muscled body moving easily in his sweatshirt and worn jeans.
I watched him walk away, my stomach sinking.
I wish I knew why.
I did a quick calculation of the dates, and I realized with a sudden shock that I had hated him for just under five years. Five years. More than a fifth of my life. The idea fel
t like a slap to the face, and my anger drained out of me like a deflated balloon. Jason was right; this was exhausting. I wasn’t the kind of girl who hated people for five years. In fact, I didn’t hate anyone—Jason was the only one. He was the only person on the planet who made me this certifiably insane.
And suddenly, I wanted him to understand the reason. I didn’t want to keep it to myself anymore, like a closely held secret. I wanted him to know. I wanted it to matter.
Doug was a few feet away, straightening a shelf of breath mints and lip glosses, and I turned to him. “I’m taking a break.”
He looked at me and frowned. The old man waiting to pay for his Eno frowned, too. “It’s not time for your break,” Doug said.
There was an arcane system dictating who took breaks when that I had never bothered to understand, but Doug knew it by heart. “I’m taking it now,” I said, untying my apron and sliding the loop up over my head.
“Fine,” Doug huffed, not wanting to make a scene in front of the Eno man. “But you can’t take your break at one forty-five.”
I dropped the apron. Jason was getting away with every second wasted here. “Whatever. I’ll be right back.”
I stepped out the front door. Drug-Rite was in a strip mall, and past the concrete overhang I could see that it was still raining hard. Jason was walking along the walkway, heading toward his car, which was parked in front of the pet food store four doors down.
“Jason,” I said, trotting after him.
He went tense; I could see it in the line of his shoulders beneath the sweatshirt. He still had his hood up, and when he turned and looked at me, his eyes were guarded, his mouth set. “Yeah?” he said.
I had to swallow my fear for a second. It wasn’t just that standing face to face like this, without a counter between us, I was aware of how much taller than me he was. It wasn’t just that he was gorgeous, or that he’d been a god in high school. It wasn’t just that he made me aware of the dampness between my legs as I stood there looking at him.
It was that, once upon a time, I had seen Jason Carsleigh naked. All the way naked. And every time I looked at him now I kept seeing it, over and over, like some crazy oversexed version of erotic PTSD. The ridges of his stomach. The dark tufts of hair under his arms. The lines of muscles along his thighs. The easy curve of his lower back. His cock. All of it. All of it.
The blank look on his face told me he wasn’t faking. He didn’t remember.
“The year after high school,” I blurted at him. “Penny Smith threw a party at her dad’s house.”
His dark brown eyes watched me, something ticking behind them. But he didn’t speak.
“You were there,” I said. “With Dean. He was doing shots in the kitchen. You were in the basement rec room, going through Penny’s dad’s movie collection and drinking vodka.”
The lines of Jason’s face changed subtly. His eyes went wider. His jaw went harder. He blinked once, and I watched the memories come up behind his pupils. “Wait,” he said softly.
“You’d had a lot of vodka,” I said. “And you were talking to a girl. The two of you were making jokes about the lame old VHS tapes on the shelves. All those terrible old 1980’s movies. You were laughing with her. She drank some of your vodka, and then some more. And then somehow everyone else left the basement, and you were alone with her. And the two of you started kissing, and making out, and there was a spare unused bedroom down the hall in the basement, and…”
I saw the second it happened. I watched it dawn over Jason’s face, a trickle of memory at first, and then more. And then knowledge, unmistakable, accompanied by something that looked like pure terror.
“Oh, no,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, the words coming hard from my throat, my anger gone. “Yeah. Jason. That girl was me.”
Three
Jason
This wasn’t happening.
No fucking way.
Except it was.
Megan Perry was standing in front of me, her dark hair tousled past her shoulders, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. She was wearing a slim hoodie, a jean skirt, and sneakers. Her gray-green eyes were watching me, waiting. Her lips were pressed together, and one finger tapped impatiently where it was wrapped around the opposite upper arm, making a rhythm of suppressed anger.
I’d had too much tequila during last night’s shift, and I was hung over. The rain beat on the overhang above my pounding head, and I could smell wet concrete and car exhaust from the parking lot. But for a minute I was back at that party five years ago, drunk on vodka, kissing a girl with the same dark curls and gray-green eyes.
I groaned. “Oh, my God,” I said.
Megan swallowed. “Anything coming back now?” she asked.
She knew it was. She knew it was coming back to me, the memories buried beneath a fog of vodka for all those years. There had been making out, and that musty old bedroom with a scratchy blanket. The two of us trying to be quiet so no one at the party upstairs would hear.
I pinched the bridge of my nose between my finger and thumb and closed my eyes, willing the pictures to come. “We didn’t—” Never in my life had I had so much trouble talking about actual fucking. “We didn’t completely, right?”
“No,” she admitted. “But we, um. We almost.”
Oh, Jesus. Should I be thankful for that? Would sex have made it any worse? It didn’t feel like anything could make this any worse. I’d made out with this girl and completely forgotten about it. No wonder she thought I was an asshole.
And then I remembered that the first time I saw her after I came home from the Marines, she’d waited on me in a restaurant. And I hadn’t even recognized her at all.
Right. She didn’t think I was an asshole. She thought I was a complete fucking asshole.
I made myself open my eyes and look at her. Man up, Carsleigh. “Megan,” I said.
She swallowed again. The murderous rage had gone from her eyes, but her defenses were still all the way up. She looked tough and brittle and ready to snap. “Look, it’s no big deal,” she managed. “I just wanted you to know. It was bothering me that you didn’t remember, that’s all.”
There were a million jumbled things I wanted to say to her at once. Don’t call it no big deal. That isn’t really the way I am. Please don’t think I do that all the time. Go back to being furious. But I said the words that came first, the ones that couldn’t be stopped. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Megan, I am really fucking sorry.”
She blinked, and the fact that she hadn’t expected that—that she hadn’t thought I’d do the very least and fucking apologize—just made me feel worse. Her arms hugged herself more tightly, but her shoulders relaxed a little. “Well,” she said, unsure.
I looked at her, and because I’m a guy and apparently a complete fucking pig, I noticed her. I’d done my best not to notice Megan before, because I’d had a girlfriend and Megan hated my guts, but I noticed her now. Her bare legs were slim and nicely toned beneath her jean skirt. She had a rounded curve to her hips, dipping in to her waist at the hem of the hoodie. I couldn’t see her chest because her arms were crossed over it, but I knew she had breasts that were not too big and not too small. She usually covered them with loose, flowing tops, but underneath they were quiet perfection, sloping down with a flawless, sexy curve on the undersides. And with a roar of memory, I realized I knew that because I’d seen them.
We’d made out, sure. But there had been… tits. Definitely tits. My hands on them. Her waist, her bare belly button. Her hips. There had been… Oh, shit. There definitely had been. My hands on her, on all of her, everywhere. And her hands on my—
“Wait a minute,” I said in shock, my voice booming louder than I intended. “We were naked.”
Megan bit her lip and her cheeks flushed deep red.
“You pulled my clothes off,” I said, pointing at her, remembering it now. “You stripped me.”
She winced. “We were drunk.”
“I was.�
� Vodka. Fucking vodka. The devil’s drink. “But you were sober enough to remember.”
“Yes, thanks,” she spat back at me, some of her anger returning. “Thanks very fucking much. Now every time I look at you, you look naked to me.”
I stared at her, speechless, while those words sunk in.
I didn’t have time to think about it. Because someone said, “Hey, asshole.”
I turned and saw Half-Assed Beard, the guy I’d thrown out of the bar last night. He was coming toward me from the parking lot, coming through the rain.
I only had time to blink in surprise before he stepped up and punched me with the full force of his fist, turning my world black for a second. I grabbed the nearest pillar to keep my balance as my head snapped back. I heard Megan shout in surprise.
And then—my reflexes kicking in, the reflexes honed by my nights at Zoot Bar—I lifted a foot and kicked Half-Assed Beard straight in the stomach, my heel pistoning into his soft flesh with all the force from my leg. He made a sickened oof sound and his arms pinwheeled as he staggered backward. His foot slid off the curb of the strip mall’s sidewalk and he fell backward, landing on his back on the concrete of the parking lot in the pouring rain.
“What the fuck, Jason!” I heard Megan shout.
But I barely heard it. I stepped out from beneath the overhang and stood over Half-Assed Beard, who was gasping on the dirty pavement, his body twisted to one side so he could retch up spit. I crouched down over him and grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands. My cheekbone throbbed, hot. I looked straight into his eyes, which were watering with pain.
“Fuckhead,” I growled at him. “Get lost.”
He did. He scrambled up and limped away, moving gingerly, still gasping. He didn’t say a word. I watched him go as the red cleared from my vision, replaced by a Zen, angry calm.
Then I remembered Megan.
I turned and looked behind me, but there was no one there. Megan had already gone.