Brazing Page 2

  Chapter Two

  Tate

  I thought about stomping on the gas and running him down for just one second. Okay… a second and a half. Fine. Thoughts of gunning the engine and making new highway out of that surly bastard had been flipping through my head on repeat since I spotted the drunken bozo stumbling down the middle of the street.

  I couldn’t believe he didn’t remember me!

  Like, he didn’t even have a momentary flash of recognition.

  This boy had all but forgotten my existence.

  He had made my life hell for six years, made me fall in love with him and then forgotten about me!

  It took me years to get over him! Years.

  And one emotional summer of therapy.

  Although, that hadn’t been entirely about him… I went through this Goth/Emo phase and my parents saw the signs of the devil in everything I did or said. Therapy was their way of proving to the community that their daughter’s issues were not their fault.

  Thank God, therapy actually worked.

  Could you imagine their next option to rehabilitate me? I’d put fifty dollars on an exorcism.

  And I just didn’t have the patience to sit through that.

  Or the dexterity to make my head spin all the way around.

  Or the life expectancy.

  Bridger Wright.

  Bridger Freaking Wright after all these years.

  And have I mentioned that he didn’t even remember me???

  It wasn’t like I had forgettable features.

  Usually people tended to remember the bright red curly hair that I could never seem to tame. And if it wasn’t the hair, it was the freckles that painted every inch of my skin.

  This wasn’t even about vanity.

  This was all fact.

  I had a face that people remembered.

  And if anyone should have remembered me, it should be Bridger f-ing Wright. The boy that tortured me all through my childhood. The boy that used to smash spiders in my Bible on Sunday mornings and lure me out to the woods during potluck so he could push me in puddles of mud and ruin my best, er, only dress. This boy used to call me “Little Orphan Annie” and tell the other kids in town that my freckles were contagious. When we were older, he used to ask when my mom was going to let me dye my hair a “normal” color.

  He set me up on a date once. It was supposed to be with his friend Jake Bristol. Jake was this really shy kid, so while he was always nice to me, we’d never actually held a conversation before. But Bridger convinced me Jake was just too shy to approach me. So Bridger set up this date and I begged my daddy for weeks to let me go. I was only thirteen at the time and my parents were not ready to let me see some boy alone. So Bridger promised that it was a group outing and that Jake just wanted to sit by me in the movie. Only, Jake didn’t get the memo that he liked me because when I got there I found out that Jake didn’t know anything about Bridger’s scheming! The stupid boy had set me up to look like a fool and then I had to endure the whole movie before my parents could come back and get me.

  I didn’t even like the movie and I’d ironed clothes for a full week just so I could earn enough to go.

  Some might wonder how this same amateur-bully had managed to make me, the amazing, independent and fabulous Tate Halloway fall in love with him. But it was all that little boy flirting that pulled me in to begin with. He tugged on my pigtails and I heard him confess his undying love. He tripped me so that I skinned my knees and ripped holes in my tights and I read between the lines and saw him planning how many children we would eventually have together.

  Besides, the boy was a charmer when he wanted to be. It was no coincidence that he’d convinced me Jake liked me. Bridger could talk his way out of or into anything he damn well pleased. He was just good about stuff like that. And people listened to him. They always had.

  Hell, I always had.

  But then, when I turned fourteen, my daddy got a new job in Ohio, so we’d left the sticks of Hillbilly Tennessee and made a new life in real, populated civilization.

  I might have loved that boy with every bit of my aching, beating middle school heart, but not enough to be disappointed about our move. I’d said goodbye to Bridger and traded my childhood infatuation for city life. Even while I still thought about him from time to time. Even while I still wondered what kind of man he’d grown into and what he was up to these days. Still, I’d managed to grow up and move on.

  Although, once, I’d tried to look him up on Facebook, but his profile picture was one of those stupid pictures that didn’t show his face and everything about his page had been private. I wasn’t too disappointed. I couldn’t imagine he put a whole lot of effort into that thing anyway.

  But then here he was.

  I had no trouble recognizing him tonight while he tried to become part of the paint on the wall and watched me dance the night away without making a move to join me. Even through the crowd of people I recognized Bridger Wright easily from a distance. With those sharp cheekbones, and bright green eyes he had turned into exactly the man I always imagined him to be. His mess of dark hair looked as wild as mine tonight as it stuck up in unruly tufts all over his handsome head. His lips were in a perpetual pout the entire time he ignored the party around him, but as full and delicious as they had been when we were children.

  My heartbeat quickened the moment I noticed the man against the wall and all but pounded out of my chest when I realized it was him. I was already on the dance floor so I’d decided to let him come to me.

  Dancing was my thing. I knew I was good at it. I knew I looked hot. And with my hair loose to the middle of my back and in all its “going-out” glory, I practically glowed like a stop sign in the middle of the floor. I fended off plenty of frat-boy-randoms waiting for Bridger to notice me, but he never even lifted his eyebrows.

  When I’d finally found the courage to talk to the butthead, he’d been nothing but rude and condescending.

  And still, he had no idea who I was.

  That was the worst of it. That was why I couldn’t just move on with my life and settle for making this into a hilariously stupid story to share with my roommate, and best friend, Carter. The fact that he didn’t remember me was the reason I was following him now, ready to force a memory into his thick head so I could finally call it a night and take my tired, sore feet home to bed.

  I grudgingly decided against vehicular manslaughter and pulled up next to the drunken version of my childhood crush. One glance at his partner-in-bad-decision-making revealed one of his brothers, although I couldn’t tell which one. They looked too much alike for me to miss the familial similarities, but he had enough brothers that I couldn’t be sure which one was stumbling alongside him.

  “Y’all need a ride?” I called out to the two boys since they had not even acknowledged the bus-sized Buick pulled up alongside them. Sure, this might be the ugliest car in the entire state, but she was my baby and I loved her to pieces!

  “Yes!” the brother screamed at the same time Bridger yelled, “Go away!”

  The brother looked at Bridger and gave him a two-handed shove. Or tried to. He missed connecting his hands to Bridger’s body, but the momentum carried him forward until they smacked heads really hard. I mean… really, really hard. I heard the skulls cracking together from where I sat, behind the wheel with the radio up.

  Now they were both hollering and holding their heads, leaned over at the waist. If they didn’t settle down, the whole neighborhood was bound to wake up and then they’d be arrested for public intoxication.

  I smiled at the idea of Bridger behind bars.

  No, I wasn’t really that cruel.

  I would have been happy if he just got a ticket and had to take a six-hour class.

  When they finally settled down, I threw the car into park and unlocked the car. “Come on, one of you probably has a brain bleed after that. I’ll give you a ride back to your place where you can di
e in peace.”

  The brother looked up at me and grinned stupidly. The boy was like six sheets to the wind and I knew he would not be this happy tomorrow. I just hoped he didn’t have any important papers to write or homework to struggle through. “Thankssss,” he slurred at me. “We ap-eciate the hops-pitality.”

  I couldn’t help but smile back, he was kind of adorable like this. “My pleasure.”

  “We don’t needs a ride,” Bridger declared mutinously, and it should be said, drunkenly. He stood up and crossed his arms, but then his hand went right back to his head as if pressing his fingers to his temple could take away the pain.

  I really tried not to feel justified that his brother had head-butted the same part of his body I’d been fantasizing about driving my Blue Beauty over, but I failed.

  And I was a confident enough person to be content with my failure.

  “Come on, Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dum, before campus police hauls you off to student jail for disrupting the peace.”

  The brother pushed into the backseat where he face-planted on my long, leather bench seat and immediately started snoring.

  I looked at Bridger, and with all seriousness, said, “Now, you have to accept the ride because if you don’t tell me where y’all live, I’m going to take him home with me and take advantage of his inebriated moral compass.”

  Bridger looked like he was going to be sick. “Don’t you dare. He doesn’t need some female like you messing with his head.”

  “Some female like me? You don’t even know me!” Although, to be honest, I was really hoping he would interject right now and say that he did, in fact, know me. With every ounce of over-exaggerated enthusiasm I could muster, I went on, “I could be the best thing that ever happened to him! This could be a night that he remembers, er, kind of remembers for the rest of his life! Obviously he is just waiting for me to rock his unconscious world!”

  “Oh,” he said dryly. “You’re joking.”

  “About every part except that he truly is unconscious and I truly don’t know where you live.”

  “Fine,” he mumbled and then crawled into the front passenger’s seat. Literally, he crawled in. The Blue Beauty was big enough for even his huge frame to spread out in.

  He sat down and slapped at the seatbelt for a minute before successfully latching it in place. He looked around the car, looked at me strangely and then looked around the car again.

  “There’s something really familiar about…”

  “Yes?” This was it! He was going to remember me!

  “This car.” He slapped the dash with drunken precision. “I can’t put my finger on it, but I feel like I know this car.”

  I snorted. He felt like he knew the car. Well, there was the romantic gesture I had waited my whole life for.

  “How about your address? Do you feel like you know your address?”

  “Seriously,” he mused. “A man doesn’t forget this color blue. Like Jeff Daniel’s suit in Dumb and Dumber. Makes you want to get dressed in a top hat and ride a Moped to Colorado.”

  “Oh, good lord.” He knew the car because it belonged to my grandmother for most of his life. And my grandmother was the preacher’s wife in his small town. Of course, he knew this car. Everybody in that town knew this car. She’d given it to me when I’d gone to college and my granddaddy had taken her license away on the grounds that she was ruining his reputation with her road rage. But I wasn’t going to give him hints about my identity. If this boy couldn’t remember me, his loss. I would just chalk this good deed up to my daily “Pay it Forward” campaign and move on with my life.

  I pulled up in front of his dorm, located on the opposite side of campus from mine and turned off the engine.

  “Darlin’ don’t bother. This is not the start of a beautiful friendship. This was a ride home.” He didn’t even wait for me to reply. He just jumped out of the car and went to collect his brother from the backseat. “You should get better at taking hints.”

  “And you should get better at saying ‘Thank you.’” If he was going to be snippy, so was I.

  I ignored his warning and exited the car. I opened the opposite door from Bridger and started pushing on his brother’s shoulders. Bridger wasn’t the only one in a hurry to end this evening.

  The sooner I left the Wright brothers behind, the sooner I could write Dr. Gunthry a letter and let her know that her middle school counseling sessions, while at the time had felt stupid and pointless, had proved her right on one very important thing: He might have made me feel stupid for years of my childhood, but I was definitely the one getting the last laugh.

  Being the least idiotic of the trio, when I pushed on the passed-out Wright brother, he actually moved. Bridger had been tugging on his legs, but he could barely stand on his own. So when the brother slid successfully out of the backseat, he hit Bridger like a bowling ball at the end of the lane and the two of them when down as if I’d released a perfectly-aimed ten-pounder.

  Strike!

  I slammed the door shut and ran around to the other side of Blue Beauty. “Are you alright?”

  The brother that had been knocked-out was wide awake now and the two of them were trying to untangle themselves with limbs that were slow-moving and unresponsive. I watched for several minutes, debating how morally corrupt it would be to take a video of this with my cell phone and post it all over the internet.

  Finally, they were able to stand up and brush themselves off. Leaning on each other, they made their way to the key-carded front door. Bridger pulled out a set of keys and his keycard and let his brother in before turning around to reluctantly acknowledge me.

  “You’re right,” he said simply and leaned against the open glass door for support.

  I took a step toward him. It was that damn natural magnetism again. I couldn’t help but be drawn to him, even when he had previously proven to be a giant pain in the ass.

  “About what?” I asked as sweetly as I could. I wasn’t always the southern belle my mother had hoped to raise. Actually, I was more like Esmerelda from The Hunchback of Notre Dame transplanted into the heart of the South with the kind of red hair that didn’t belong on any living creature. I tried to shove a chunk of it behind my ear in a move that I hoped was both sexy and sophisticated. The hair bounced back as if my ear was some kind of trampoline and fell in front of my face again.

  “I should say thank you,” he told me honestly.

  Our gazes locked at that moment and the sharp emerald color cut straight through me. He was a boy. That color of green shouldn’t be wasted on him and those long, thick lashes should make him look feminine. But both of those features enhanced his rugged good looks and heady masculinity.

  My childhood crush was all man these days and I swallowed from a sudden stirring of nerves.

  He could keep me here with the way he was looking at me. I could stand here forever if he didn’t blink.

  “You should thank me,” I agreed.

  He flinched at my words or maybe at my closeness. I hadn’t realized I’d taken another step toward him. We were only a couple inches apart by now and I could smell his wild night on the autumn breeze; beer, sweat and something underneath… something I wanted to inhale until my eyes rolled into the back of my head.

  He opened his mouth like he was going to respond but then closed it when I took one last step into him. He couldn’t get a word out with my body brushing against his and my total lack of concern for his personal space.

  This boy had messed with me for years, I couldn’t help the sick thrill that came with the success of a little bit of payback.

  Besides, I wanted him to remember me. I put my face right in front of his and dared him not to get it.

  “Th-thank you,” he finally said with eyes narrowed and a tight jaw.

  I lifted my fingers and gently smoothed them over the angry bump on his head from where his brother ran into him. “You should put some ice on that before you go to bed.” He nodded slowly.
My smile grew and my fingers pushed into his bump aggressively, just enough so that he winced a little, but I knew that he would remember this moment tomorrow. “You’ll want to thank me for that, too.”

  “Th-”

  I slid my hands from his bump to his lips, pressing my fingertips against their fullness. “Not yet,” I told him. “You’re not allowed to thank me for that until you remember my name.”

  I gave him one last flirty smile and then turned around and flounced off. I could feel his eyes burning into my back the entire walk, but I refused to turn around and look at him again.

  I did steal one more glance once I’d restarted the engine and clicked my seatbelt into place. He was still glued to that open door, staring at me like a codfish with his mouth open so wide. I waved at his brother you had his loopy face plastered against the glass of the side panel, and he waved back shooting me an even sillier grin.

  I drove away with my own version of happiness spread out across my face, but I could not figure it out.

  Bridger Wright was not someone I wanted to see again. Not ever. Whether he remembered my name or not, I hoped he kept his grumpy attitude and all-grown-up body far away from me.

  My days of panting after him just so he could make me feel like crap were over.

  I was grown up, too. And happy. And smart. And my hair was less orange. And my freckles were less bright.

  I was enjoying the quintessential college experience. Well, mostly. With just that one small hiccup. The point was, I wasn’t going to let him affect it in any way.

  And that would be true, just as soon as I could stop smiling.

  For now, I’d go back to my dorm and tell Carter the hilariously-stupid story Bridger had given me after all.