one another like this, when girls often squeal and hug instead. I tried the chin-lift, head-nod thing a few times, and it’s definitely reserved for the boys. I can’t pull it off. “You need something?” Anthony takes a sip from his cup, and it looks like soda.
“You been drinking?”
“Nah, not tonight. Got a big midterm tomorrow. Need a ride?”
“Yeah, but not for me.” Ran holds out a hand and I pull Trav’s key from its storage spot in my skirt pocket. It’s odd that something as skimpy as this would even have pockets. “Make sure Trav gets home okay?”
Anthony nods and takes another swig.
“You can put your bike in the back,” Ran instructs. “But I’ll need to borrow your helmet.” He smirks my direction and my heart crashes wildly within me.
“I don’t ride,” I yell over the noise, but Ran pretends not to hear me, so I say it again. “I don’t ride motorcycles, Ran.”
“Yeah,” he says, his crystal eyes taunting me. “I remember.”
“What else do you remember?” I’m shouting now, and the music in the club is at max volume, making it difficult to hear and think.
“Why don’t you spend a little more time with me and you can find out?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I lower down in my seat and cup my hands around the warm mug. The steam tickles my nose as I draw in a slow sip of the hot chocolate. Ran’s been looking at me for several minutes without speaking. The fire stretching out of the logs in the fireplace behind him flickers and creates an orange backdrop against his frame.
“Thank you for letting me get out of there.” Ran’s lips press to the rim of his coffee cup. “That’s not really my thing.”
I take another hot sip. I don’t know how he can say it isn’t his thing, when everything about the way his body moved clearly indicated that it should totally be his thing.
“Why would they plan that for you then?” I ask, trying not to think about his dancing skills. “Isn’t tonight supposed to be a celebration of you going back to work?”
Ran drags his hand across his brow and my eyes pull to the faint, white scar that creates a one-inch long divot on his forehead. His bruises are gone. His arm is out of its sling. Everything looks healed, restored. The outside shell is near-perfect, never giving away his life-threatening accident. The accident where he fell asleep while transporting my little sister to the med center for fluids. The accident that occurred because he stayed up all night with her, comforting her as her tiny body retched and purged. The accident that happened because Ran, a stranger, took on the duties that belonged to my mother—the mother who was too drunk to be bothered with her sick child. The accident that caused Ran’s blunt head trauma and stole away two months of his life. My sister got her fluids. She healed. Ran got a helicopter ride, a one-month stay in the hospital, and a hole in the plot of his life’s story. It doesn’t seem like a fair trade-off.
Many people say that he got a second chance at life, but I don’t buy it. We get one chance. That’s it. You can’t go back and fill in the gaps. You pick up where things left off. Ran pushed me to do it with my mom—to start over and try things again. Look how well that turned out. Sometimes you just have to move forward and accept the fact that something you once had is gone.
Ran settles his mug on the wooden tabletop. “Why would they plan a night of drinking and clubbing when I’m not interested in either of those things?” He twirls the cup around by the handle in circles on the surface of the table. “I don’t know. Maybe they thought that part of me might have changed due to the accident.” His eyebrows lift. “I’m not sure. But honestly, I did it more for them than for me. They want something to celebrate—a reason to party. Me going back to work seemed like a good enough reason.”
“I guess.”
“What do you mean, you guess?”
I hide behind my mug and take another drink. “I guess it’s okay to let them exploit your amnesia for their benefit.”
He shakes his head and a lock of dark hair slips onto his forehead. “They’re not exploiting me, Maggie. Everyone loves a good second-chance story—this sort of thing is soap opera fodder. Guy gets in car crash,