How to Date the Guy You Hate by Julie Kriss Page 0,6

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