Page 97 of What You Wish For

Today, that suit might as well have been made of metal.

He didn’t meet my eyes. “Thank you for the ride home the other day.”

“Oh!” I said. “You’re welcome! For a second, I thought you didn’t remember.”

“I don’t remember,” he said, all just-the-facts-ma’am. “But I know you agreed to come. And I woke up at my house. So, I figure you must have gotten me there somehow.”

“Oh,” I said, deflated. “You don’t remember anything?”

He shook his head. “I remember that I asked you to drive me home. And that you agreed to do it. But I don’t remember it happening.”

Oh.

It gave me a tree-falls-in-the-forest feeling.If a guy kisses you on painkillers, and the next day he doesn’t remember, did it really happen?Or, just as important:If a guy confesses having a thing for you but then, the next time you see him, he looks for all the world like he couldn’t care less… how can you possibly know what to believe?

Honestly, based on his expression, I’d have sworn he was utterly indifferent to me.

Indifferent—with maybe a touch of nausea.

What would he remember if he didn’t remember?

Nothing. Nothing at all.

“How are you?” I asked then. “Any trouble with the—?” I touched my palm to my side.

“No. All fine. Just some bruising.” He could have been talking to his doctor.

“You fell over a couple of times,” I said, watching to see if it sparked anything. “Once when you were trying to get undressed.”

Duncan frowned.

“So, no complications? You’re all good?”

“Yep.” He nodded, not meeting my eyes.

“Any pain?”

“Some.”

“And did you remember to text your sister?”

Now he looked over at me. “My sister?”

Two words. An improvement. “Yeah. She called a bunch of times. You told me to tell her you’d text her later.”

He frowned. “How did that happen?”

“When your phone rang, I answered it.”

“You talked to her?”

“Yes, I talked to her. For a while.”

“What did she say?”

Now it was getting fun. She’d said a lot of things, actually. “She told me about that time in high school you and Jake accidentally mooned your math teacher and got suspended.”

Duncan closed his eyes for a second, and I won’t lie: it felt good to get a reaction out of him—any reaction at all.

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