Remember When **Under MAJOR Editing**

Chapter 19

Dade's bedroom was the entire basement level of the house.  At a glance I took in the walls of homemade bookshelves, boards stacked on cement blocks and filled with paperbacks, with more books piled on the floor.  The walls that weren't lined with books were wallpapered with foreign movie posters.  Japanese men and women locked in embrace, Japanese men taking on a ring of warriors and kicking ass.

Dade limped toward his bed against the far wall.  "You want to find out where we were headed in the Bug at two thirty in the morning," he said.  "You were just taking me home, in a roundabout way."  He eased down on the bed and patted beside him as a seat for me.

"Oh, well then. That explains everything!" I said in his sarcastic tone. I sat on the bed and poked him in the chest, looking straight into his eyes. "Dade, you were in my car at two thirty AM after you called me a spoiled brat at the game. You told me you loved me, after I told you first. You tell me what happened !"

His green eyes were wide and surprised and serious. He glanced toward the door, visualizing salty dogs listening in. He reached for the stereo beside his bed. Fell off his bed with a thunk and an oof.

"My Lord." I slipped off the bed to sit beside him. "Are you okay?"
He detangled himself from his crutches and sat up. "I've got it." He slid a CD off the teetering stack on the nearest shelf and popped it into the player. Hard rock blasted through the room from speakers in every corner. I felt the bass line in my gut.

He extended his cast in front of him and pulled his good knee up to his chest, then leaned his head toward mine so I could hear him over the music. "You know how Gabriel always says he's not going to get drunk, so he drives to a party, and then he gets drunk? I knew he would do that." He flattened one hand like a notepad and used the opposite finger like a pen to draw a diagram—not so much for me as for himself. "I left my Jeep at school" (tip of pointer finger) "and drove with Connor to the beach party" (heel of his hand). "When the party was over I could drive Gabriel's Honda to his house, drop him off" (thumb tip), "and then walk to school to get my Jeep" (tip of pointer finger). "At the party, you and I hooked up, so Ian and Connor got Gabriel and his Honda home. But you still had to drive me back to my Jeep at school when we were done."

"When we were done hooking up," I said, nodding as if this made perfect sense, as if my skin weren't tingling and the room weren't spinning. "Tell me how we hooked up."

He shrugged. "You wanted to leave the party and go parking with Zack. I talked you out of it."

That was the end of my patience. I leaned forward, grabbed his good thigh with both my hands, and squeezed. "Dade. Do me a favor and do not shrug again like this is all obvious or doesn't matter so much, because when you shrug it makes me very angry."

I'm not sure whether it was his depth less eyes staring at me, or my hands around his thigh, or our heads so close together that I could make out every black hair in the stubble on his upper lip. But the air vibrated with the energy between us. We were still, yet everything moved. The TSU on his T-shirt quivered as he breathed. The tip of his tongue snaked out to lick his lips.

"I wanted to go parking with Zack," I prompted him. "You talked me into going parking with you instead?"  He shook his head no ever so slightly, his eyes never leaving mine. "That just happened. As we were talking."

"But why did you talk me out of parking with Zack?" I asked. "Zack is my boyfriend."

The spell broke. Dade collapsed against the bed. "Zack is your boyfriend, right. You keep saying 'Zack is my boyfriend,'" he moved his fingers in quote marks, "and it makes as much sense as 'I am balancing the planet Pluto on my big toe' or 'Kumquats make the best nuclear physicists.'"  I knew he was growing more upset because his gestures grew bigger. The finger quotes had exclamation points attached. Furious as I was at this boy, I smoothed my hands across his thigh, inching farther up. "Okay, okay. Just tell me what happened."